Category: Cryptocurrency News

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According to a new report, illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of the volume on the Bitcoin blockchain while exchanges and trading desks account for around 80% of volume. Exchanges Dominate Bitcoin Volumes A new study called “Blockchain Analysis of the Bitcoin Market” has found that illegal transactions, scams, and […]

Port Finance, the Solana-based lending protocol with the vision of bringing a whole suite of interest rate products to DeFi users, has raised $5.3M in its latest strategic funding round. The round is led by Alameda Research with participation from Spartan Group, Brevan Howard, and A41. Port Finance’s list of existing investors also includes Jump Capital, Solana Foundation, GSR, and Defi Alliance. Port Finance was the first to launch a variable rate lending product on Solana’s mainnet in July 2021. The platform now supports 13 different assets from the Solana, Ethereum, Terra and Bitcoin network and previously reached a total value of over $300M in assets locked on the platform. With the latest round of funding, Port Finance will extend its current product offering to fixed-rate lending and interest rate swaps. The latest Port Finance product, Sundial, came live last week and was the first to offer fixed-rate lending on the Solana blockchain starting with USDC. “We are excited to see Port Finance build a fixed-rate lending product leveraging the Serum orderbook”, says Alameda Research. ‘’Fixed-rate lending is a huge untapped opportunity in DeFi. In traditional finance, fixed-rate lending is 25 times that of variable rate lending. We expect to see fixed-rate lending grow exponentially in DeFi,’’ says GW, Co-Founder of Port Finance. “Institutional investors have expressed interest in borrowing USD against their token holdings at a fixed interest rate. Port Finance expects to work with them closely as the product matures.” Port Finance has secured over 30 integrations and partnerships since its launch. It will continue to work with developers within the Solana ecosystem and support projects integrating with Port Finance via the newly set up Port Ecosystem Grant. Over the coming months, Port Finance will also be rolling out a governance module with a staking mechanism to further align token holders with the project. About Port Finance Port Finance is a decentralized Money Market protocol on Solana, aiming to provide a full suite of lending products including but not limited to variable-rate lending, fixed-rate lending and interest rate swaps. Port Finance’s team brings engineering experience from tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, and previously contributed to Solana and Serum. The PORT token is currently traded on FTX, Ascendex, Gate.io, Serum, Raydium and Orca.      

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Ahead of its highly anticipated mainnet release, Switzerland-based privacy startup launched the Nym Sandbox testnet to serve as the permanent testnet alongside the recently launched Nova testnet. The Nym Sandbox is open to developers, node runners, and researchers who want to try out the Nym mixnet architecture before joining or deploying on the mainnet. The launch of the Sandbox testnet is a critical milestone in Nym’s development cycle of the three-step mainnet release. As part of the Nym Sandbox launch, the Nym development team has also released a critical “CosmWasm 1.0” upgrade to enhance further the capabilities of its smart contract platform that powers the NYM tokenomics. With each new release bringing the team closer to its mainnet launch, Nym CTO and Co-Founder Dave Hrycyszyn notes, “The permanent testnet is an important step in the development of the entire Nym architecture. It will contain most major components and smart contracts, but in a secure test environment for us to tweak any issues before we begin the launch.” Unlike Nym’s previously launched testnets, the Nym Sandbox won’t be incentivized. Developers can use the Sandbox testnet to build and integrate wallets and other apps, send messages, process transactions, and run nodes and gateways. However, the testnet will include “test” tokens and reputation design that replicates the mainnet tokenomics such as reward sharing, active, standby, and inactive nodes, among others. In addition to this, the Nym development team will also move all of the nodes, delegations, and reputation scores from the current testnet, Milhon, to the Nym Sandbox testnet. The Nym Sandbox release will also greatly benefit the research community. By employing the Sandbox testnet, researchers can run simulations on the privacy and security aspects of Nym’s Mixnet Explorer, wallets, blockchains, and dApps that are running on them. According to Professor Ania Piotrowska, Nym Head of Research, “Early on we concluded that the benefits of our Nym Sandbox testnet Nym Sandbox environment would be a boon for research purposes. We believe it will be instrumental in helping familiarize both the crypto and non-crypto communities with our technologies, all while granting them the chance to engage with our novel privacy services in a riskless environment.” Ensuring End-To-End Privacy From Data Surveillance Nym is a Swiss-based privacy software project that integrates several privacy technologies to build an infrastructure of cooperating networked nodes. It is one of the first privacy-focused projects that simultaneously provides integrated protection against metadata surveillance on both the network and transaction levels. While most existing solutions can only cover one layer at a time, Nym ensures full-fledged end-to-end privacy for personal data. Founded in 2018, Nym serves as an open-source, decentralized, and incentivized system that consists of a decentralized mixnet explorer (a network of mix nodes) alongside an anonymous credential cryptosystem. Protecting communications metadata and privately proving “right-to-use” services are two key aspects of Nym’s privacy-enhancing design. Operational costs are covered using NYM tokens, which are used to pay nodes contributing to the protocol. Nym is backed by some of the leading names from the industry, including Binance, Huobi Capital, Polychain Capital, European Commission, Fenbushi Capital, Digital Currency Group, and several others.  

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is proud that the TON project is “alive and evolving” despite Telegram terminating TON last year.

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2002 and 2021 saw a massive influx of new retail and stay-at-home traders, prompted by a combination of lockdowns and lack of entertainment outdoors, causing many to begin looking for entertainment inside their computers. The keywords “Forex” and “Crypto Trading” on Google saw a huge boost in searches as the trends of consumers rapidly moved online. Bitcoin traders had a remarkable year with the price of Bitcoin climbing over 90% in 2021 and Ethereum soaring over 265%. That all paled into insignificance compared to Solana’s gains of 9683%. This created a FOMO (fear of missing out) situation for those who had never traded before. Meme trading also had its moment on the back of this, as an army of new traders got together on the WallStreetBets board on Reddit, to talk up shorted stocks. Their most successful attempts, with AMC and GameStop, led to mind-blowing success, with members quickly boasting about their new Lamborghinis that they had bought as a result. This taste of success led more and more newbies into the trading arena, however, it quickly became clear that as a trader you need more than beginner’s luck to enjoy success. Investing for GenZ and Millenials A perfect storm created by the pandemic and stimulus checks delivered to people by the US and other governments led to more money available for trading for people who had never traded before, most notably GenZ and millennial traders. For these subsets of people, who grew up in a culture of social networks, online togetherness is at the heart of nearly everything they do. And apparently, this is how they get their investment advice too, with many turning to influencers on TikTok and Instagram for advice. According to a report by Qualtrics on behalf of Credit Karma, the majority of Gen Z seek financial information through Instagram (57%) and TikTok (52%). This worries the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority who believe that the viral trading craze of meme stocks and cryptos has prompted unrealistic expectations for newbie investors. Institutions have picked up on this ripe pool of new investors and have even started accessing it by collaborating with influencers to engage with GenZ. Some influencers though are using their massive follower base to try to move asset prices, by all placing the same trade at the same time. If it worked for the meme stocks, then why not for the main stocks? Copy the trades of real traders But investors be warned, following influencers without track records in investing is not the best idea. Step up, copy trading. Copy trading is not new, in fact, in the online trading markets, it’s been alive and kicking for over a decade with names like the forerunner eToro. Copy-trading platforms allow users to follow and copy the trades or more experienced traders, and unlike the influencers, these traders have real stats showing their success rates and more. Another highly popular example of a copy trading platform is NAGA. NAGA is a publicly-traded company on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. For this reason alone, NAGA must abide by strict rules and be completely transparent in its dealing. It has been offering trading solutions since 2017 to over 1 million traders. Its suite of tools includes the massively popular copy trading service available for web and mobile. Its app allows newbie traders to see the success rates of trade leaders and to see how many traders are copying their trades, plus their success and return rates. From here, traders can simply auto-copy their trades and pause or stop when they want. In this way, new traders and investors can gain exposure to the markets with zero prior knowledge and even learn to trade by watching how the experts do it. Final Word There’s no doubt that to be a successful trader overall, a person needs to have an understanding of the markets and what moves assets. Without this, you can have beginner’s luck but not much more than that. For that reason, GenZ is advised to either learn to trade themselves without blindly following influencers or indeed to copy trades of real traders with a transparent track record.     Image source: DepositPhotos.  

Some of the main concerns the crypto era faces are safety and security. The great innovation of digital assets offers many benefits for its users, such as anonymity, but the same tools can also be used with ill intentions. For this reason, the best crypto-related platforms are the ones that can offer trust and safety, like the exchange Poloniex, which prioritizes the security of its users. Poloniex is a cryptocurrency exchange where users of all experience levels can trade more than 300 digit assets and over 450 markets like Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), TRON (TRX), and other altcoins. It focuses on delivering a safe and secure experience to the users during every transaction. “We prioritize the investment in secure operations and strive to provide industry-leading security and stability.” Poloniex is ranked by CoinMarketCap as the 18th largest cryptocurrency exchange by dollar-value volume with $119 million in the previous 24-hour period. Hackers and fraudsters can unbalance the ecosystem, but Poloniex minimizes risks and exposure to unauthorized access, cyber-attacks, and other vulnerabilities, by storing the majority of deposits in offline wallets through air-gapped cold storage. It is vital for crypto platforms to provide this level of safety. As Market Insider reports, in 2021 the ecosystem has seen 32 hack and frauds events, which amounts to a total value of $2.99 billion. Breaches to exchanges are amongst the most common type of attacks in the industry. Mt. Gox saw the largest one yet, which led them to insolvency in 2014. Poloniex notes that “Compared with traditional financial markets, the anonymity of blockchain greatly increases the difficulty of recovering stolen assets.” However, the cooperation and technological improvements within the industry have enhanced the methods to neutralize attacks and recover assets. A recent joint effort between Poloniex and Bitfinex serves as an example. BTC Recovered From The 2016 Hack To Bitfinex In 2016, the crypto exchange Bitfinex experienced one of the largest cyberattacks yet, which created a huge backlash, and the market dropped over 20%. The security breach saw 119,756 BTC stolen, and 27.66270285 BTC were recovered in collaboration with the U.S. government in 2019. Most of the coins sat idle for a long time until the hacker started to move some in batches during 2020. The movements opened up the possibility for intercepting them. Recently, after detecting a 6,51458211 BTC deposit from “the 2016 thieves”, Poloniex successfully cooperated with Bitfinex and law enforcement authorities to recover the assets. “Recovery Right Token (RRT) holders will have their pro rata tokens redeemed in the coming days, based upon the size of their RRT holdings on 04/12/2021 at 12:31 UTC. As the BTC/USD price at the time of the recovery was $47,337, Bitfinex will redeem US$308,380.77334107 in aggregate RRTs.” Bitfinex commented that they will continue collaborating with third parties and investigations to recover the remaining stolen assets. How Poloniex Increases Safety For Trading Over the years, Poloniex has honored its promise of offering security on the platform. It has improved and maximized the protection of the user’s data privacy and adopted several safety measures. The platform offers an efficient Anti Money Laundering (AML) system with “strict risk control systems” and efficient 24/7 multilingual customer support. Their internal risk control process allows them to block suspicious transactions, carry proper investigations, and return stolen funds. Poloniex cooperation with institutions and other companies serves the growth and image of the crypto market, opening the right paths to reduce crime, improve and protect other industries and the investors’ experience “Although the industry is still in its early stages, Poloniex has and will never relax its self-restraint and is committed to building a healthy, equal, transparent, and safe industry. Security is still the biggest challenge facing the exchange. Poloniex will continue to maintain its technological leadership, insist on safety first, and provide higher security services for global users.” Image: Pixabay