Daily crypto news alerts for 3rd January, 2021
🗞Altcoins Bittrex Exchange Stops Quoting Anonymous Cryptocurrencies Monero, Zcash And Dash
Bittrex stops listing anonymous cryptocurrencies Monero, Zcash and Dash
US cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex announced the delisting of three popular privacy-focused altcoins - Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC) and Dash (DASH).
According to a post on Bittrex's official Twitter, the cessation of quotation will take effect on January 15th.
The cryptocurrency community responded immediately.
“The delisting of private coins by regulated exchanges has become an inevitable escalation of government efforts to establish totalitarian financial supervision,” Andreas M. Antonopoulos, a cryptocurrency promoter and author of several books on Bitcoin and blockchain technology, wrote in response to the news.
Bittrex did not explain its decision in any way, but the reason for the delisting is clear as day: the move is part of a larger conspiracy of exchanges that remove privacy-oriented coins from the trading list in order to easily introduce and implement KYC and AML procedures.
However, according to Jesse Powell, CEO of another American cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, there is currently no pressure from the US government regarding cryptocurrency regulation of anonymous coins. Powell commented on the news as follows:
“I haven't heard anything about regulation. Apparently, this is some specificity of their business. "
In fact, a closer look at Bittrex's trading volume reveals that the deleted coins are not very popular with the exchange's customers. If the shutdown of privacy-focused coins was indeed due to reasons unique to Bittrex, and other exchanges did not follow suit, then much of the panic caused by this announcement is in vain.
However, as popular DeFi investor Degen Spartan suggests, delisting private coins from simple and straightforward platforms such as popular centralized exchanges can have a significant impact on the value of these tokens.
If XMR, ZEC and DASH are not available on highly liquid markets, their price will be compromised.
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Bitcoin price has set a new high above $30K.
The price of the first cryptocurrency rose sharply to $30.6 thousand. Against this background, traders who were playing for a fall lost more than $130 million per hour.
The bitcoin rate for the first time in history has risen above $30 thousand. According to tradingview.com, over the past 24 hours the price of the first cryptocurrency has grown by 4%, to $30.6 thousand. At the moment, it rose to $30.9 thousand, setting a new historical maximum. Over the past year, BTC has risen in price by 340%.
Against the backdrop of the rise in the price of bitcoin, there was a massive liquidation of traders' short positions. According to bybt.com, over the past hour, users who held short positions on BTC and other cryptocurrencies, that is, expected a fall in their value, lost more than $130 million. The loss of one of the traders exceeded $4 million.
At the end of December, former analyst with investment banks Bear Stearns and JPMorgan Ton Weiss predicted that in 2021 the bitcoin rate will rise to $100 thousand. The expert called this scenario "conservative", noting that under favorable circumstances, BTC may rise to $200-300 thousand.
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🗞What is DeFi? DeFi Potential and Barriers. DeFi Binance Products
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a hot topic in the crypto world in 2020 and will remain so in 2021. If some of you still don't know, DeFi is an ecosystem of decentralized applications (Dapps) that provide financial services that are built on top of distributed networks. without leadership. Currently, most of the DeFi Dapps that are being created now run on the Ethereum blockchain and most of them use ERC-20 Ethereum based tokens.
DeFi potential
More than 1.7 billion people still lack banking services, and at the same time, most of them have a smartphone. This is the main target audience for DeFi, but not only. People with a bank account are also vulnerable as banks go bankrupt from time to time. What's more, DeFi can provide a sense of greater control over your funds and higher annualized returns (typically 5-15% in stablecoins and much higher% for high-risk tokens)
The main elements of DeFi:
I. Payments
Cryptocurrencies have revolutionized the way we pay. Unlike traditional financial institutions, where transfers (especially to other geographic regions) can take days and large fees, cryptocurrency makes almost instant payments possible with low fees. Smart contracts and DeFi projects add more options to payment methods (for example, setting some conditions in smart contracts) without losing speed and efficiency.
II. Stablecoins
As you know, crypto tokens and Ethereum itself are very volatile. Stablecoins are an important part of the ecosystem as they help achieve sustainable value retention. The most popular centralized stablecoin is Tether (USDT), while the decentralized one is DAI.
Decentralized stablecoins are created in a decentralized manner by collateral operations on decentralized ledgers run by DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations).
III. Loans and lending
Unlike traditional banking operations, decentralized lending and borrowing has no barriers. People can get loans against their digital assets. In addition, they can make a profit on their assets and participate in the loan market by contributing to loan pools and receiving interest on those assets. Usually, deposit rates are much higher than in banks, which makes you think of investing in DeFi as a good option to store your funds (but this is not financial advice).
IV. Exchanges
Decentralized exchanges allow users to exchange cryptocurrencies without giving up their coins. Uniswap is an example of the most popular decentralized exchange at the moment.
V. Derivative financial instruments, insurance, lottery, fund management
DeFi projects also include derivatives insurance (Synthetix) (Nexus Mutual, Opyn), lottery (Pool Together), fund management (TokenSets) and other programs.
The obstacles to DeFi today are:
Hacker hacks and errors in the code.
Anonymity of the creators of the DeFi protocols.
Since cryptocurrency transactions are irreversible, some errors cannot be fixed. Crypto enthusiasts know this, but some people still prefer more traditional services when they can contact support.
Bubble? Some people say that we are in a DeFi bubble right now, just like the ICO bubble in 2017. While there is no doubt about all the useful aspects of DeFi, some individual projects resemble ponzu schemes.
Transaction fees. Since most DeFi projects are now based on the Ethereum blockchain, sometimes transaction fees can be as low as a few dollars.
How DeFi is transforming traditional finance. The total value of funds in DeFI is $14.68 billion (as of January 2, 2021), but this amount is still insignificant compared to traditional finance. Banks and other financial institutions are also trying to be as technological as possible and they are not going to give up.
DeFi can help eliminate intermediaries in the financial sector and reduce operating costs. In some countries, DeFi can help overcome high inflation.
If DeFi projects can overcome these obstacles, they can transform or even replace traditional finance. Now more and more crypto projects such as Cardano, Tezos, EOS, Binance are paying great attention to DeFi and are going to release new products. Let's take a closer look at what Binance is doing in this area.
Binance: Combining DeFi and CeFi
Binance is the largest representative of CeFi (centralized finance). By the way, you can register on Binance using this affiliate link. You will receive -20% of trading commissions. This is in addition to 25% if you use BNB to pay commission.
Binance started working on decentralized finance projects even before DeFi went mainstream with the introduction of Binance Chain and Binance DEX in early 2019. Binance is now combining CeFi and DeFi.
For example, with the launch of the Binance Smart Chain (not to be confused with Binance Chain), the Proof of Stake Authority consensus mechanism was introduced, which adds staking functionality to BNB, Binance's own ecosystem token. Staking BNB holders receive BNB rewards from Binance Smart Chain validators and benefit from those same DeFi interest rates on the CeFi platform.
What's more, Binance has products that generate interest and profitability in DeFi Staking and Binance Liquid Swap. Binance Earn has many earning options such as flexible and fixed savings, staking (including Ethereum 2.0 staking), BNB Vault (which gives many benefits to BNB staking - there are now 6 tokens there: ASR, ATM, JUV, OG, PSG, REEF), Launchpool (now there are those 6 tokens mentioned earlier) and high-risk products. An important advantage is the absence of technical barriers to entry and the absence of transaction costs.
In addition, a few months ago, Binance launched a $100 million seed fund for DeFi projects, supporting the DeFi ecosystem, and solutions to connect the DeFi and CeFi ecosystems.
Finally, let's quote Changpeng Zhao from Binance 2021: “Fundamentally, both DeFi and CeFi will help drive the industry forward. Whatever happens, we are ready to support and implement any new innovations and trends in DeFi. ”
