In the 12 hours following the introduction of the Runes protocol, bitcoin miners have collected substantial fees as the rush to mint runes now dominates block space. Presently, numerous runes exist on the Bitcoin blockchain, with several being offered on marketplaces such as Okx and Magic Eden. The Runes Economy Has Been Born Since their […]
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Revolutionizing Real Estate: Bixos Estate Unleashes Tokenization with UBXS Token, Sparking Rapid Sellout
PRESS RELEASE. RWA, which has recently caught a high hype among blockchain projects, seems to be a strong trend in the upcoming bull season. Bixos Estate offers a revolutionary innovation in the real estate industry using blockchain technology. The UBXS token pioneered by the company is a groundbreaking step in the tokenization of real estate […]
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SEC Charges Shapeshift With Regulatory Violations, Sparking Debate on Crypto Regulation
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has leveled charges against Shapeshift AG, accusing the company of operating without proper registration. This case has ignited a broader conversation on the regulatory framework for crypto assets, with SEC Commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda voicing their dissent and concerns about the SEC’s current approach toward crypto […]
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Monero’s Market Plummets 32% as Binance Announces Delisting, Sparking XMR’s Turbulence
The leading privacy-focused cryptocurrency by market valuation, monero, experienced a sharp 32% decline within the last day after news broke that Binance intends to remove the coin from its platform. Citing non-compliance with its listing criteria, Binance announced that monero, along with three other cryptocurrencies, will be taken off its exchange on Feb. 20, 2024.
Monero Faces 32% Value Slash as Binance Cuts Ties With Privacy Coin
Monero (XMR) will soon vanish from the roster of the globe’s leading cryptocurrency exchange by trade volume, as confirmed by a company announcement on Tuesday. Binance’s list for removal also includes ANT, MULTI, and VAI, all scheduled for delisting on the same date, Feb. 20, 2024. Consequently, Binance will cease trading for pairs including XMR/BNB, XMR/BTC, XMR/ETH, and XMR/USDT.
“At Binance, we periodically review each digital asset we list to ensure that it continues to meet the high level of standard we expect,” the delisting announcement notes. “When a coin or token no longer meets this standard, or the industry changes, we conduct a more in-depth review and potentially delist it. We believe this best protects all our users.”
Binance has decided to remove XMR from its listings following Okx’s lead from December. Binance’s decision caused a significant 32% plunge in XMR’s market value, as noted in the 24-hour statistics after the news went live. On Tuesday, Binance’s trading of XMR with its USDT pair accounted for 29% of the total XMR volume, totaling ,332,318. The day saw XMR’s price fall sharply from an opening of 6.45 to a low of 8.
Technical indicators paint a picture of caution for XMR investors. Oscillators, including the relative strength index (RSI) and the Stochastic, hover in bearish territories, suggesting a lack of upward momentum by bullish traders. The commodity channel index (CCI) and the momentum indicator signal stronger selling pressures, with the latter explicitly signaling negative action. Such mixed signals from the oscillators necessitate a vigilant approach from XMR traders, as they could precede either a stabilization or further declines.
XMR’s moving averages (MAs) unequivocally advocate for a bearish outlook, with all monitored timeframes—from the 10-day to the 200-day averages—aligning in bearish regions. This consensus among the MAs reinforces the negative market sentiment observed, indicating that the path of least resistance for XMR’s price is downwards. The combination of monero’s high trading volume accompanying the price drop and the lack of visible historical support levels further complicates the potential for a quick recovery, suggesting that investors and traders alike brace for potentially more turbulence ahead.
What do you think about Binance delisting monero and the 32% plunge the coin recorded following the announcement? Share your thoughts and opinions about this subject in the comments section below.
Bitcoin Transaction Fees Soar to $40, Sparking Debate and Push for L2 Solutions Amid Mempool Backlog
On Saturday, Dec. 16, 2023, Bitcoin’s transaction fees spike to a high of per transaction at 1:48 p.m. Eastern Time. The jump in onchain fees surpassed the high reached on May 8, 2023, when the average transfer cost topped per transfer.
Skyrocketing Bitcoin Fees Surpass
Bitcoin transaction fees are climbing and at the time of writing, a high-priority transaction tapped just before 2 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 16. Miners have been raking in the fees and an example of this is the fact that block height 821,485 came with 7.314 BTC in fees, which is over the size of the 6.25 BTC block subsidy. Presently, the hash price per petahash per second (PH/s) is coasting along at 8 per PH/s per day.
The recent spike in Bitcoin’s transaction fees to each significantly surpasses the previous 2023 record of per transfer set on May 8. Data from mempool space reveals that for high-priority transactions, individuals are spending 674 satoshis per virtual byte (sat/vB), while for lower-priority ones, the cost is around 602 sat/vB or .78, as observed on Saturday afternoon.
Notably, some transactions on Saturday have even exceeded per transfer. Presently, there are eight unmined blocks, each brimming with high-priority transactions. Furthermore, 311 blocks are waiting to be processed to address the backlog of 383,607 unconfirmed bitcoin (BTC) transactions in the mempool.
These pending blocks, amounting to over 531 megabytes (MB) of block space, translate to an estimated clearance time of just over two days and three hours, considering the average ten-minute block interval. The significant rise in onchain BTC fees has ignited a flurry of comments and discussions across social media, with numerous observers weighing in on the situation.
“The average Bitcoin transaction fee is now with 300,000 transactions waiting to be confirmed. This is beyond ridiculous and unusable,” Blockchair’s lead developer Nikita Zhavoronkov said. “Historically, this is the point when people start running away to alternative blockchains en masse.”
Others were quite pleased with the high fees. “Remember all the [Ethereum] maxis who said Bitcoin had a security budget problem? It’s fixed,” Dan Held posted on X. Others talked about layer two (L2) solutions and whether or not they could alleviate the issue.
“Bitcoin fees have crossed 600 sats/vB today. That’s a 600x increase in 1 year,” Muneeb Ali, the co-creator of Stacks said. “And you are still debating if devs want to build on Bitcoin, anon? Bitcoin L2s are becoming more critical every day.”
“Will be great to see the L2s blossom in a higher fee environment,” Held responded to the Stacks executive’s X thread. “I think the bitcoin fees are reaching a tipping point to make this happen,” Ali replied.
What do you think about the soaring Bitcoin network transaction fees? Share your thoughts and opinions about this subject in the comments section below.
Surging Altcoins Eclipse Bitcoin’s Gains, Sparking Buzz of an Imminent ‘Alt Season’
Bitcoin’s value has surged by 23% against the U.S. dollar in the past month, but a vast array of altcoins have seen even more substantial gains, outpacing BTC’s monthly rise. Such trends in smaller market cap coins have sparked proclamations on social media platforms, heralding the arrival of the much-anticipated “Alt Season.” Additionally, an uptick in search terms like “altcoins” and “Alt Season” on Google Trends indicates growing public interest.
Altcoins’ Rapid Growth Sparks ‘Alt Season’ Discussions, Google Trends Shows Rising Interest
On the social media site X (previously known as Twitter), there are thousands of discussions centered around “Alt Season” and “altcoins.” Generally, an altcoin is any cryptocurrency other than bitcoin (BTC), with prominent examples being ethereum (ETH), solana (SOL), and cardano (ADA).
Recently, there’s been a noticeable spike in online chatter about altcoins, with enthusiasts urging their followers to stock up on these digital assets. A user on X, identified as Alex Wacy, commented:
2024 has the potential to have a full-blown altseason. But to get the most out of it, you need to make decisions now.
Similar sentiments are prevalent across various social media platforms like X, Facebook, and the r/cryptocurrency subreddit. During an “Alt Season,” the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies usually witnesses a significant increase, driven by substantial investments in altcoins.
The last notable altcoin season occurred in early 2021, marked by staggering price jumps of 10x – 100x in altcoins such as dogecoin (DOGE) and solana (SOL) within a relatively short span. This growing fascination with altcoins and “Alt Season” is also reflected in Google Trends data.
In the past 90 days, the search query “altcoins” has shown a consistent rise, beginning with a score of 38 on November 5 and reaching 89 by November 15, now hovering around 71. The term “Alt Season” has exhibited volatility since November 4, fluctuating between 17 and 73 over the past 17 days.
The highest interest in “altcoins” originates from Bulgaria, Puerto Rico, St. Helena, Cyprus, and Estonia, while “Alt Season” searches are predominantly from Pakistan, India, Turkey, Bangladesh, and Norway. Despite this increasing trend on Google, Blockchain Center’s Altcoin Season Index presents a contrasting narrative.
Blockchain Center’s criterion states: “If 75% of the Top 50 coins performed better than Bitcoin over the last season (90 days) it is Altcoin Season.” Currently, the index indicates that it’s not yet Altcoin Season, though it approached the range at the end of September and is closer to the threshold with a score of 39.
What do you think about people thinking that “Alt Season” is upon us? Do you agree? Share your thoughts and opinions about this subject in the comments section below.
Rollkit Developers Leverage Bitcoin for Sovereign Rollups, Sparking Criticism from Ethereum Proponents
The Rollkit development team has announced that Bitcoin has been integrated as a means for sovereign rollups to store and retrieve data. The developers have stated that it is now possible to run the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on Bitcoin as a sovereign rollup. However, some Ethereum proponents have expressed dissatisfaction with the technology being referred to as a rollup, and have suggested that the team should avoid using the term.
Rollkit’s Modular Framework for Rollups and Its Potential Impact on the Blockchain Industry
On March 5, 2023, developers announced a new development that claims it is now possible to produce sovereign rollups to store and retrieve data using the Bitcoin blockchain. The team behind the project is Rollkit developers, who detailed that the technology allows for more possibilities for rollups and could help create a better block space fee market on Bitcoin. To make this possible, the Rollkit team used Taproot transactions to read and write data on Bitcoin and created the “bitcoin-da” package to provide the necessary interface. They also implemented the “SubmitBlock” and “RetrieveBlocks” functions for Rollkit to interact with Bitcoin.
“Rollkit is a modular framework for rollups that provides interfaces for plugging in different components, like data availability layers,” explained the Rollkit development team. “The newest addition is an early research implementation of a module that allows a Rollkit rollup to use Bitcoin for data availability.” The software programmers also noted that the Ordinal inscription trend on Bitcoin showed the team the possibilities, and they followed a similar design process. “At its core, all that was needed was two functions: one to submit rollup blocks and another to retrieve them,” the Rollkit developers said.
The Controversy Surrounding Rollkit’s Integration of Bitcoin for Sovereign Rollups
Following the announcement from Rollkit developers, a number of Ethereum proponents criticized the team for describing the process as a rollup. ETH supporter Ryan Berckmans said: “A ‘sovereign rollup on Bitcoin’ is actually an alt L1 that stores its block data on Bitcoin. It’s not a real rollup or a real L2. [In my opinion], the best way for us to fight back against these lies is to build an Ethereum zk L2 that puts its data on Bitcoin.”
Another person insisted, “Just because you have data availability doesn’t make it a rollup.” The founder of Interlay, Alexei Zamyatin, also criticized Rollkit’s announcement. “Pls ser, read this paper,” Zamyatin wrote. “You inherit *nothing* of Bitcoin’s security. Data availability – OK, but honestly, that’s been used since 2012. The entire post describes ‘I write some data to Bitcoin’ with fancy buzzwords,” Zamyatin added.
The Rollkit developers have released a demo video on Youtube of the technology in action. The team has also written a comprehensive blog post detailing how it works. “As we move towards a future where sovereign communities will form around different applications, asking them to incur the high cost and overhead of deploying a layer 1 blockchain to be sovereign is not sustainable,” the Rollkit blog post concludes. “Sovereign rollups fix this by making it possible to deploy a sovereign chain that inherits the data availability and consensus of another layer 1 chain such as Bitcoin.”
What do you think about the use of Bitcoin as a means for sovereign rollups? Do you believe it has the potential to create a better block space fee market on Bitcoin or do you agree with critics that it’s not a real rollup? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Analyst: Bitcoin’s Dominance to Peak in December, Sparking Altcoin Buying Frenzy
Bitcoin has seen a massive upswing over the past couple of days that brought a firm end to its consolidation phase and is now allowing it to confront its key resistance around ,000.
This level has been holding strong as resistance, and throughout the year, any break above this level was met with heavy selling pressure that catalyzed intense selloffs.
Bitcoin has also been guiding the market over the past week, but this trend appears to be shifting – as altcoins sold-off today while BTC saw a strong and sustainable move higher.
This is quite unusual, as typically altcoins move in tandem with the rest of the market.
One explanation for this may be a trend seen while looking towards BTC’s market dominance, which is beginning to rebound and may continue surging for the next couple of months.
While speaking about this possibility, one analyst stated that he is watching for Bitcoin to continue seeing growing dominance over the aggregated market for the coming few weeks and months, before it peaks in December.
At this time, altcoins may be able to recapture their momentum and rally higher.
Bitcoin Approaches ,000 Resistance as Buyers Take Control
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading up nearly 2% at its current price of ,930. This is around the price at which it has been trading throughout the past few hours.
The strong move that helped lead the crypto up to these highs did not create a tailwind for the aggregated market, and BTC’s push higher actually has come about at the expense of altcoins.
There’s a strong possibility that this trend will persist in the near-term, as investors appear to be fleeing altcoins in favor of BTC at the moment.
Analyst: BTC Dominance Likely to Continue Climbing Until December
While mapping out Bitcoin’s dominance over the market, one analyst explained that he expects it to continue rising for the coming couple of months before peaking in December.
At this time, altcoins may begin seeing rallies that allow them to catch up to BTC, but until then, they may continue underperforming.
“BTC: Regarding the dominance; still the same figure here. December is the period to buy altcoins.”
Image Courtesy of Crypto Michael. Source: BTCUSD Dominance on TradingView.
The coming few days may shine a light on this possibility and validate or invalidate if Bitcoin’s dominance will really continue rising for the coming few months.
Featured image from Unsplash. Charts from TradingView.
Bitcoin Dominance Falls, Sparking Hopes For Crypto Market’s “Alt Season”
Bitcoin’s market dominance is trending downwards since September 2019.
The crypto’s top rivals have posted better year-to-date returns after Coronavirus-induced sell-off in March 2020.
Top analysts have called for an altcoin season to begin this Q2.
The Bitcoin Dominance Rate, a ticker that tracks bitcoin’s market share against rivaling crypto tokens, has fallen from 73.02 percent to 64.66 percent in just seven months.
Each of bitcoin price rally since September 2019 saw its dominance heading higher but for a shorter timeframe. Traders lately used their bitcoin profits to purchase rival cryptocurrencies, shifting the capital weight from top to lower-ranking assets. That, as well as direct fiat inflows, helped many crypto tokens to register better gains than bitcoin.
In a research published in February 2020 – before the March crash – crypto exchange Binance wrote that it was seeing a spike in altcoin perpetual contracts following the bitcoin’s gains in January 2020. The firm noted that traders were later buying altcoins to “chase rallies.”
Data on Messari.io shows that Chainlink, the eleventh-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, was up by 111.70 percent on a year-to-date (YTD) timeframe. Likewise, the tenth-largest Tezos surged circa 95 percent, and the fifth-largest Bitcoin SV climbed 99 percent in the same period.
Bitcoin Dominance on a downward slope since Sep 2019 | Source: TradingView.com
The trend was similar across the top-ten altcoin index. Ethereum posted 43.42 percent YTD profits, while Binance and Bitcoin Cash returned 18 and 16 percent gains, respectively. In comparison, bitcoin was able to climb by only 4.33 percent, proving that traders found its rival crypto assets more attractive so far into 2020.
Altcoin Season
An outperforming altcoin market prompted a few top analysts to predict a so-called “Altcoin Season” in 2020. Crypto analysis group Income Sharks noted that all the bitcoin rivals have jointly entered an “altcoin zone,” adding that their market cap together could touch the billion mark in Q2.
Altcoin market cap projected to hit billion | Source: Income Sharks
“Altcoin market cap looking even more bullish,” tweeted Income Sharks. “Pushing up higher into what I like calling the “Altcoin zone”. This is the same zone where we saw the mini altcoin season a few months ago.”
The statement also comes in the wake of investors’ growing appetite for higher risk-reward assets. The fast-spreading Coronavirus pandemic has led unprofitable investors to extract profits from volatile assets. Cryptocurrencies, criticized for their low liquidity and wild price fluctuations, offer just that.
Flawed Crypto Metric
An Altcoin Season does not typically translate into a bearish bitcoin phase. Arcane Research, in a study published last year, found that bitcoin’s dominance is different from what the data aggregators usually report, noting that most of them do not consider the market’s liquidity while measuring dominance.
“One might be able to sell one token for 3 dollars, but what happens if you want to sell 1 million? Without accounting for liquidity, market capitalization becomes a meaningless measure,” the firm wrote.
That leaves altcoin pretty much in the hand of bitcoin. The cryptocurrency, even with limited profits, continues to behave as a predictive indicator. If it rises, then altcoins could rise as well. The same applies vice versa.
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
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Bitcoin Dominance Continues to Plunge, Sparking New Hope For “Altseason”
Bitcoin dominance continues in a downward trend. Currently, Bitcoin dominates the total market cap by 64.2%, having fallen 3 basis points, or 4%, in two weeks.
Which, when taken in conjunction with double-digit gains for many high caps today, raises the question of whether altseason is on the way.
Bitcoin dominance chart for the last six months (Source: tradingview.com)
In crypto, altseason is when non-Bitcoin cryptocurrencies begin to soar in value during rising market momentum.
Indeed, the total crypto market cap has shown a marked increase from the lows of three weeks ago. At that time, panic selling had triggered mass outflows of money from the crypto space.
According to tradingview.com, the total market cap fell as low as 8 billion during that period. However, a tentative returning of confidence has seen a 91% gain in market cap since Black Thursday.
The total crypto market cap over the last six months. (Source: tradingview.com)
The past week saw significant gains for many of the alts, with VeChain posting close to 20% gains in less than 24-hours. Along with Digibyte and Chainlink, which make up the second and third biggest gainers, at 16% and 15% respectively last week.
Shrinking Bitcoin Dominance Defies Prevailing Market Expectations
During the current economic situation, Bitcoin dominance is expected to rise, as crypto investors look to sure up their defenses by using the most trusted cryptocurrency.
As previously reported by NewsBTC, Director of Product at Messari, Qiao Wang agrees with this sentiment. Recently, he predicted that BTC dominance would reach as high as 90% by the end of the economic crisis.
I am no maximalist by any standard, but I fully expect Bitcoin dominance to rise above 90% by the end of this economic crisis.
— Qiao Wang (@QWQiao) March 25, 2020
Expanding on this point, Wang pointed out that alts are driven by speculation demand. But speculation would take a back seat during times of mass destitution, leading to a tailing off of interest in the alts.
“I simply can’t see any real demand for alts during the recession phase of the cycle. In the past, demand came from speculation for future utility. But when everyone loses their job, speculation is dead.“
But the alts are currently defying expectations, by continuing to cycle higher amidst the crisis situation. And while we are only at the start of the economic crisis, meaning Wang’s prediction may well come to pass, there is also a shifting altcoin narrative to consider.
Indeed, since early 2017, the time of the last altseason, many of the alts have carved out their own distinct branding, separate from that of Bitcoin.
The obvious example is Ethereum, which has gone from being a smart contract utility platform to a high-value transaction settlement application, due to the rise of DeFi.
What’s more, tied to this idea is the fact that many alts have found definite use cases. Ones that solve real-world problems. As such, to lump all alts together as speculation driven may not be entirely accurate.
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