Welcome to the Daily Crypto News: A complete News Review, Coin Calendar and Analysis. Enjoy!
🗞 Market Wrap: Bitcoin Pushes Past $23.7K While Crypto Locked in DeFi at All-Time High
Bitcoin hits a new high at $23,770 on higher-than normal volume; DeFi’s total value locked has also hit a record on the strength of ether.
Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $22,818 as of 21:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Gaining 9% over the previous 24 hours.
Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $20,756-$23,770 (CoinDesk 20)
BTC below its 10-hour moving average but well above the 50-hour on the hourly chart, a bullish-to-sideways signal for market technicians.
Volumes on Thursday were higher than on Wednesday, with the eight major exchanges tracked by the CoinDesk 20 seeing over $3.5 billion in volume so far as of press time versus $2.9 billion the day previous.
Indeed, bitcoin’s 30-day volatility has been picking up and will be something to watch over the balance of December.
Ethereum network locked value at all-time high
The amount of crypto “locked” in decentralized finance, or DeFi, is at $16 billion as of press time, increasing over 2,200% from the $690 million locked at the start of 2020.
“While bitcoin has largely dominated the narrative, I believe investors should look to altcoins that have tremendous amounts of development in both the core technology and usership, yet are still a fair way off their all-time highs,” said Pelecanos. “I am expecting to see the price of these altcoins, such as ETH and XEM, rally hard when the BTC price inevitably slows down.”
🗞 DeFi boom drives 1200% increase in DApp volume in 2020
DApp transaction volume has topped $270 billion so far in 2020, with 95% of this figure belonging to Ethereum’s DeFi ecosystem, according to DappRadar. That’s an astonishing 1178% increase from last year’s total of $21 billion.
The blockchain data provider revealed the figures in its annual DApp Industry Report today, summarizing the highlights and failures of a record-breaking year for DApp-based economics.
The report noted that money has been flowing from BTC to ETH throughout the year, resulting in a rise in the price of ETH, from 0.018 BTC on Jan 1. 2020 to its current price of 0.028 BTC.
Describing 2020 as the “year that DApps tried to grow at all costs,” the report found that just 10 DeFi DApps accounted for 87% of Ethereum’s total transaction volume.
Those 10 DApps totaled over one million active users in November, with the top three — DeFi Swap (Crypto.com), Uniswap, and Compound — dominating the total with 930,000 between them.
The report noted that the limitations of Ethereum became apparent this year as the network “effectively hit a wall in regards to scalability” with average gas prices several times higher than last year.
“It would appear the global pandemic brought increased attention to decentralized solutions as conversations deepened around the distribution of a basic universal income and worldwide database management systems."
🗞 Compound’s New Blockchain Readies DeFi for Central Bank Digital Currencies
Compound Labs released a white paper Thursday detailing its plans to create Compound Chain, an application-specific blockchain that can provide money market services across multiple networks.
“We want to announce the designs for a blockchain that can scale Compound over the next century,” Compound founder Robert Leshner told CoinDesk on a phone call. The decentralized finance (DeFi) firm isn’t committing to a timeline yet but it is at work on a testnet now.
The new white paper, a draft of which was shared with CoinDesk in advance, authored by Leshner and Compound Labs staffers Geoffrey Hayes, Jared Flatow and Max Wolff, cites three limitations of the current version of Compound on Ethereum: gas costs, inability to serve assets on other chains and the fact that all supported assets aggregate the risk of each supported asset.
CASH
While the Compound Chain will be governed by COMP – the token that spurred the yield farming craze over the summer – it also introduces a new cryptocurrency called CASH.
Compound Chain’s native CASH token will be used to pay for transactions on the network. CASH will be minted in much the same way as DAI, as a debt against locked collateral held on the Compound Chain.
A new interoperability play
As soon as an asset is uploaded to Compound Chain, it’s available for lending to others. It’s up to users if they want to borrow against their assets or not.
As on Compound, they will be able to borrow any supported asset but they will also be able to borrow assets, starting with CASH, that are unique to the Compound Chain.
🗞 Bitcoin Transaction Fees Doubled This Week. Here’s Why
Bitcoin fees are on the up.
This happens when there's a lot of activity on the Bitcoin blockchain.
They've been higher than this, too.
Bitcoin fees have almost doubled since Sunday, data from BitInfoCharts shows.
On Sunday, it cost an average of $2.7 to send a Bitcoin transaction across the network. But as of yesterday, the most recent date on record, it cost $5. That is an 85% increase in four days.
Nope! When you process a Bitcoin transaction, you still have to pay the troll under the bridge. Only with Bitcoin, it’s a kind of decentralized toll. To be specific, you must pay a network of decentralized miners, computers who will race to solve a very complicated math puzzle required to process your transaction.
But the miners will only expend so much energy to process your transaction, otherwise their operators won’t be able to keep up with the immense electricity bills that running a Bitcoin miner racks up.
Denis Vinokourov, head of research at digital assets prime broker Bequant, told Decrypt, "Higher network activity leads to higher fees, and network congestion. A steep increase in the number of daily transactions lead to higher average fees per transaction." Vinokourov said, "This is similar to what happened with ETH and DeFi, when the latter was booming because of ongoing ETH-related transactions, gas fees skyrocketed."
🗞 Daily Crypto Calendar, December, 18th💰
Conceal (CCX)
The halvening for Conceal (CCX) will take place on approximately Fri, 18 Dec 2020.
"We would like to announce that $CCX will implement the CN-GPU mining algorithm."
Einsteinium (EMC2)
"We are happy to announce that the MIL main-net will start running on December 18, 2020"
Wabi (WABI)
Wabi masternodes rewards distribution.
Swipe (SXP)
"#Swipe Slate cards will be increasing the requirement of $SXP staked from 30,000 to 100,000 $SXP required to receive the Slate card and..."
Nervos Network (CKB)
"Town Hall w/ @obsidian_labs, @obsidian_llc, & @leapdao | Dec. 18th | 8 AM ET"
Divi (DIVI)
"Tune in Next Friday for updates, a look at some of the amazing initiatives being driven by the Divi community, the launch of..."
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