Crypto Guides, Knowledge & Insights

Ukraine Joins European Blockchain Partnership

Ukraine finally became a member of the European Blockchain Partnership (EBP). Alexander Bornyakov, Deputy Minister of Ukrainian Digital Transformation for IT Development took part in the meeting with all other EBP member countries as an observer.　　Ukraine aims to integrate digital economics　　Many lawmakers in Kyiv have been urging the European Union (EU) to do so for a long time. However, this move makes Ukraine the second country outside the EU to be a part of this group. Earlier, Norway was the only non-EU country to take part in the EBP. However, this big development has come amid the ongoing Russian invasion.　　As per the release, the main goal of this project is to build the pan-European blockchain. This will lead to the integration of digital economics between the EU and Ukraine. However, the nation aims to expand its interstate blockchain network in partnership with other countries.　　It added that a letter was sent to the President of the European Commission regarding the formation of a single blockchain infrastructure based on EBP. In response, Ukraine got the confirmation to join European Blockchain Partnership as an observer. For more blockchain news, please download WikiBit - the Global Blockchain Regulatory Inquiry APP.　　 Big relief amid Russian

2022-06-20Deep Dive

The Metaverse Will Be Valued at $5 Trilllion by 2030: Report

Global consultancy firm McKinsey & Company released a new report on the Metaverse, stating that in eight years, the field could be valued at $5 trillion – around the same size as Japans economy. The report “Value Creation in the Metaverse” drew data from two surveys, including 3,104 consumers across 11 countries and 448 companies across 15 industries.　　Metaverse as an Opportunity　　According to the report, as the Metaverse continues infiltrating into everyday life, 50% of live events could be held in a virtual space, and 80% of commerce would be “impacted by something consumers do there” by 2030. At that time, every internet user would spend roughly 6 hours a day on the space.　　In particular, the gaming sector will be the main driver behind the Metaverse, eclipsing the entertainment industries like music and movies. As of now, the sector has around 3 billion gamers worldwide and is valued at $200 billion.　　Its worth noting that besides gaming – the report predicted – e-commerce and virtual advertising are two major sectors that could take advantage of the Metaverse by 2030, with approximately $2 trillion to $2.6 trillion of all spending in the former one and $144 billion to $206 billion in the latter

2022-06-20Deep Dive

Sberbank to Conduct First Digital Asset Transaction on Own Platform

Russias largest bank, Sberbank, is going to carry out the first transfer of digital assets on its own dedicated platform within a month, a top executive revealed this week. The announcement comes after earlier this year, the bank was authorized to issue digital financial assets.　　Sberbank Prepares for Deal With Digital Financial Assets on Proprietary Platform　　Russian majority state-owned bank Sberbank (Sber) will perform the first transaction with digital financial assets (DFAs) on a platform developed by the institution within a month, Tass reported. The news agency quoted Anatoly Popov, deputy chairman of the Management Board of the banking and financial services company.　　Speaking on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, the high-ranking executive reminded that Sberbank, which accounts for about a third of all bank assets in Russia, was added to the Central Bank of Russias register of information system operators permitted to issue DFAs this spring.　　‘Digital financial assets’ is the current term in Russian law describing cryptocurrencies and other digital assets. Additional legislation is on the way, with a bill “On Digital Currency,” proposed by the Ministry of Finance to comprehensively regulate the countrys crypto market, likely to be adopted during the fall session of the State Dima,

2022-06-20Deep Dive

Iran Cuts Power Supply To Crypto Mines

Irans Ministry of Energy has decided to cut down the supply of electricity given to the authorized crypto mines units of the country. As reported by Tehran times, this decision will be implemented on the upcoming Wednesday. The step is taken to stop the access of electricity to unauthorized mines.　　The electricity of authorized cryptocurrency mining units will be cut off from the beginning of the next Iranian calendar month Tir (Wednesday, June 22) until the end of the restriction.　　Saving countries domestic power supply　　The Government of Iran gave 1,000 crypto mines licenses to mint the token in January this year. At present, 118 authorized mines are using the electricity supply of the country. The country recorded consumption of 62,500 megawatts (MW) in the previous week. The power consumption is expected to cross the bar of 63,000 MW, which will limit the supply for the country.　　Last year also the Iranian government had banned the mining of cryptocurrency to save the countrys power supply. It was recorded that the illegal mines had consumed nearly 600 megawatts of the power supply back then. The ban is in action till the start of March this year. It was estimated to free up to 209 megawatts

2022-06-20Deep Dive

Do Kwon and Terraform Labs Slapped With Class-Action Suit

Do Kwon, the “heartbroken” co-creator of Terra, headlines a raft of defendants named in a class-action suit filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Northern California.　　Kwon is joined by a group that includes Terraform Labs, Jump Crypto, and Three Arrows Capital. Plaintiff Nick Patterson is alleging, among other accusations, that Terra tokens were sold as “unregistered securities,” and that the Defendants made a　　series of false and misleading statements regarding the largest Terra ecosystem digital assets by market cap, UST and LUNA, in order to induce investors into purchasing these digital assets at inflated rates.　　Kwon and Daniel Shin launched Terraform Labs in 2018, initially with the goal of upending payment giants like PayPal. Later that year, the pair raised $32 million, and in 2019 an initial coin offering yielded $62 million.　　UST and LUNA imploded last month, erasing tens of billions of dollars in value, for which Kwon was pilloried online. After promising Terras dollar-pegged algorithmic stablecoin couldnt possibly collapse, while also attacking rivals on Twitter, sympathy was scarce.　　But that still didnt stop the Terra community from approving “Terra 2.0” in the wake of the stunning collapse, a project that included creating a new LUNA token and relegating the previous one to

2022-06-19Deep Dive

Dogecoin Pumps 8% After Elon Musk Says He's Still Buying

As the current crypto rout continues, Bitcoin and Ethereum are both down 30% over the past week and the entire crypto market cap fell to $830 billion. But Elon Musk declared he will “keep supporting Dogecoin.”　　That was enough to make DOGE spike 8% to $0.058.　　Of course, 5.8 cents is a far cry (a 91% drop, to be exact) from the 72 cents Dogecoin touched in May of last year, when Musk hosted “Saturday Night Live” and Dogecoin got a mention in his opening monologue and on Weekend Update. (“Its a hustle,” Musk responded to Michael Ches question about DOGE.)　　Musk has been Dogecoins most high-profile cheerleader since April 20190 when he tweeted, “Dogecoin may be my fav cryptocurrency.” Throughout 2020 and 2021, Google searches for Dogecoin spiked every time Musk tweeted about the meme coin. In May 2021, Decrypt reported that Dogecoin developers had even been in close contact with Musk about changes he wanted made to the code.　　More recently, Musk (along with Mark Cuban) has advocated for the use of DOGE for payments, which would make the joke coin a real utility and less of a joke.　　And in his recent bid to buy Twitter, Musk has repeatedly said one of

2022-06-19Deep Dive

What Is Stepn? The ‘Move-to-Earn’ NFT App That Pays You Crypto to Exercise

Stepn is the evolution of two concepts that have been gaining traction for several years now: the augmented reality (AR) game and play-to-earn gaming. 　　AR games typically feature a virtual world overlaid onto the real one. The concept properly took off in 2015 with Pokemon Go, which scattered virtual Pokemon across a real life map of the world and let users track and collect them via GPS. 　　Stepn takes that element—accruing points based on progress made via GPS—and adds onto it the newer play-to-earn model that was pioneered by crypto games like Axie Infinity, which reward players in crypto tokens. The result: A game that tracks users IRL exercise and accrues points to them in the form of crypto.　　Thus play-to-earn becomes a GPS-tracked “move-to-earn”: Think of it like Fitbit meets Pokemon Go meets Axie Infinity.What is Stepn？　　Built on Ethereum competitor Solana and created by app developer FindSatoshi Lab, Stepn is a smartphone app that lets users earn money by walking, jogging, or running for a narrowly delineated time period that refreshes every 24 hours. 　　The rewards come in Stepns native cryptocurrency, the Green Satoshi Token or GST, and are credited to a wallet created in-game or imported externally. Players must

2022-06-17Deep Dive

Elon Musk Reveals Crypto Twitter Plans in Leaked Transcript

Elon Musk shared further details of his plans for how crypto could be used on Twitter in a leaked Qs suggestion that Twitter integrate payments mirrors his earlier argument that the platform should become a WeChat-style “super app”; the Chinese social media platform brings together multiple services including ride hailing, food delivery and payments under one umbrella.Musk takes aim at Twitter crypto scams　　In the Qs code be made open-source, “so that people can critique it, improve it, identify bugs, potentially, or bias.”　　One solution Musk put forward to address the problem of fake accounts on Twitter was verification through payment for its Twitter Blue subscription service By “piggybacking on the payment system,” he suggested, “Twitter would know who you are, at least from a payment standpoint.” Musk has previously suggested—possibly in jest—that Twitter Blue subscriptions could be paid in his favorite cryptocurrency, Dogecoin.Musks $43m Twitter bid　　Bot activity has become a key factor in Musks on-again off-again purchase of Twitter. After making his $43 million bid to buy the social media platform in April, the Tesla CEO said that the purchase “cannot move forward” until Twitter provides information on how many fake accounts exist on the platform.　　Earlier this month, Twitter reportedly gave

2022-06-17Deep Dive

Elon Musk gets hit with ‘ridiculous’ $258B Dogecoin lawsuit

The class-action lawsuit has raised many eyebrows in the crypto community, with many confident the suit will not be successful.　　Billionaire Elon Musk, along with his companies SpaceX and Tesla Inc, are all being sued for an astonishing $258 billion in damages for being “engaged in a crypto pyramid scheme” involving Dogecoin (DOGE).　　The damages sought are more than 34 times Dogecoins current market cap of $7.5 billion and nearly three times its ATH market cap of $88.68 billion in mid-2021.　　Filed in the New York District Court by an attorney at Evan Spencer Law on Thursday, the class-action lawsuit alleges that Musk “used his pedestal as Worlds Richest man to operate and manipulate the Dogecoin Pyramid Scheme for profit, exposure, and amusement.”　　In the filing, plaintiff Keith Johnson, a U.S. citizen, alleges that Musk and his corporations were “unjustly enriched” by $86 billion as a result of wire fraud, gambling enterprise, false advertising, deceptive practices, and other unlawful conduct.　　Johnson claims that he and others in the class-action have lost approximately $86 billion between May 2021 and June 2022 and is demanding that figure in monetary damages along with another $172 billion in damages and fees.　　Defendant Musk is the self-appointed ‘Dogefather,’ ‘former CEO of

2022-06-17Deep Dive

126% return for stock market short-sellers who smelled blood in crypto waters

A report from S3 Partners noted that crypto stocks with the highest short interest include Coinbase, Marathon Digital and MicroStrategy.　　Short-sellers have made a killing on various sectors of the U.S. stock market this year, but no other sector “held a candle” to the blockchain industry, with crypto company short-sellers profits up 126% in 2022, according new data.　　On Thursday, technology and data analytics firm S3 Partners published a video summarizing its recent report, which found that overall, U.S. equity short-sellers are up on average more than 30% for the year.　　Some of these profit gains were attributed to the short-selling of automobiles and components stocks (up 54%), software and services stocks (up 50%), media and entertainment stocks (up 46%) and retail stocks, (up 46%) in the year, though these all paled in comparison to crypto stocks, which saw short-selling profits up 126% in 2022.　　“But none of these industries holds a candle to short sellers in the crypto sector, up 126% on an average short interest of $3 billion dollars.”　　Crypto stocks with the highest short interest include exchange Coinbase Global (COIN), Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA), and MicroStrategy (MSTR), a software company that is also known for being the largest publicly traded

2022-06-17Deep Dive

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