And Lido has opened the withdrawal of Ethereum from staking
Tether will allocate up to 15% of profits to the purchase of Bitcoin, Lido enabled the withdrawal of Ethereum from staking with the activation of the second version of the protocol, and the community chastised Ledger following the announcement of the option to restore private keys in Nano X and other events from the previous week.
Bitcoin prices are yet to rise above $27,000.
Bitcoin prices have fluctuated between $27,663 and $26,361 since May 15. By the end of the week, the first cryptocurrency had failed to break beyond the $27,000 barrier. The asset is now trading near $26,870 at the time of writing.
The majority of the top ten digital assets by capitalization ended the week in the red zone. The exception was XRP, which increased about 7% in value following Ripple’s victory in its dispute against the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The total capitalization of the cryptocurrency market is ~$1.17 trillion. The Bitcoin dominance index rose to 44.6%.
Lido Opens Ethereum Withdrawal With Protocol Version 2 Activated
On May 15, the Lido Finance liquid staking platform team rolled out the second version of the protocol following a successful community vote.
The update provided the ability to withdraw from staking Ethereum by burning stETH at a ratio of 1:1. A staking router was also launched, which is designed to diversify the set of validators and promote further decentralization.
Bankruptcy company Celsius Network transferred 428,015 stETH amid the launch of the second version of Lido. Its actions may be part of a strategy aimed at extracting previously inaccessible liquidity.
Tether will allocate up to 15% of profits to buy Bitcoin
The USDT stablecoin issuer, Tether, has announced regular investments in the first cryptocurrency since May 2023. For an initiative aimed at diversifying and strengthening the portfolio of reserves against the backdrop of macroeconomic instability, the company will allocate 15% of profits.
At the same time, the USDC co-issuer sent $8.7 billion in overnight repos as “insurance” against a US default. At the same time, Bloomberg Intelligence senior strategist Mike McGlone believes that the stock and digital markets will collapse if the country does default.
XRP responded to the court decision in the SEC case against Ripple. The company introduced a platform for CBDC and announced the takeover of Metaco
The XRP token reacted positively to a judge’s rejection of the SEC’s motion to seal documents related to a 2018 speech by former regulator William Hinman.
At the time, the ex-director of the department’s corporate finance department said that, for various reasons, bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities.
“Hinman’s unedited emails will soon become public — stay tuned as lawyers work out a mechanism to make this happen,” wrote Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse.
This week, Ripple and Swiss-based crypto custodian Metaco agreed to take over the latter. The deal will amount to $250 million.
On May 18, the firm also announced the launch of the CBDC Platform, a comprehensive solution for central banks, governments, and financial institutions to issue national digital currency and stablecoins.
The hype around BRC-20 tokens has led to a jump in income for Bitcoin miners. The trend was picked up by Bitcoin Cash and Dogecoin, as well as OKX and MicroStrategy.
For the fifth time in history, bitcoin miners’ daily revenue from fees per block exceeded the rewards from its mining (6.25 BTC). Glassnode analysts explained the situation by the increased popularity of BTC-20 standard tokens.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) developers have released the CashTokens update, which allows you to create digital assets within the network – fungible and non-fungible tokens, as well as DeFi applications.
The trend for native tokens was also picked up by Dogecoin. On May 15, the volume of transactions in the meme-cryptocurrency blockchain reached a record 628,209, ahead of Bitcoin and Litecoin. According to the community, this dynamic is related to the activity around the DRC-20 standard tokens, which allows the creation of new digital assets on top of the blockchain.
Another version suggests the activity of large DOGE holders after Elon Musk announced his resignation as CEO of Twitter.
OKX Exchange announced that it will gradually introduce new features over the next two weeks that will allow customers to issue and trade Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens using the Lightning Network-enabled OKX Wallet.
MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor said that the company not only knows about Ordinals, but is also interested in using the protocol to build applications.
Ledger announces private key recovery option in Nano X, angering the community
Hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger has introduced a tool that allows you to back up the seed phrase to resume access to the Nano X device. The decision to use the service is up to the user, but in case of restoration, he will have to go through the verification procedure. In this case, the seed phrase is divided into three fragments and stored by a third party.
The community greeted the news with criticism, accusing the company of betraying the ideas of decentralization. Users started posting videos of their devices being destroyed, and CTO Charles Guillem had to make excuses.
What to discuss with friends?
- Glassnode: The number of Bitcoin addresses with 1 BTC or more has exceeded one million. At the same time, activity fell to the levels of 2021.
- The US Secret Service called blockchain a “great opportunity” to track money.
- Justin Sun accused Huobi’s brother of selling “free” HT.
- Lookonchain: BlackRock has made over $2 million in deals with PEPE.
- The difficulty of mining Bitcoin has again updated the maximum. Miners introduced new devices
As a result of the next recalculation, the difficulty of mining the first cryptocurrency increased by 3.22%. The indicator updated its maximum at 49.55 T, and the average hash rate rose above 350 EH/s.
Miner manufacturer MicroBT has introduced the most powerful Bitcoin mining device on the market – WhatsMiner M53S ++, providing a hash rate of 320 TH / s with an efficiency of 22 J / TH. Together with him, the company presented the M50S++ and M56S++ with air and immersion cooling.
Canaan also showed the Avalon Made A1366I miner model for mining the first cryptocurrency with immersion cooling (165 TH / s with an energy efficiency of 30 J / TH).
Bitmain has begun accepting orders for the Kaspa (KAS) cryptocurrency mining device KS3.
The media learned about the plans of the head of OpenAI to raise $100 million for Worldcoin. The project will strengthen the fight against the black market in biometrics
According to the Financial Times, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in “preliminary talks” about a $100 million investment for his crypto startup Worldcoin.
The main product of the latter is the World ID protocol based on zero-knowledge proofs. With the help of development, it is possible to pass verification using biometric data without sacrificing anonymity.
At the same time, it became known that users from China who do not have access to Worldcoin are buying biometrics from third parties in African countries in order to receive registration bonuses. The project intends to strengthen the tools for verification.
Bankman-Fried sued over $250 million purchase of Embed ahead of FTX collapse
The FTX bankruptcy team is suing ex-CEO Sam Bankman-Freed and other former executives for buying Embed at an inflated price ($250 million).
According to lawyers, at the time the acquisition was completed in September 2022, top management knew that the exchange and Alameda Research, which conducted the transaction, were already insolvent.
SEC Sees Signs of Securities in Filecoin and Reduces LBRY Penalty from $22M to $111,614
SEC officials believe that the Filecoin (FIL) cryptocurrency meets the definition of a security. This was announced by Grayscale Investments with reference to a comment received from the department in response to an application for registration of an investment product.
The Commission also asked the court to reduce the civil penalty for the LBRY crypto startup on a previously won lawsuit. The regulator acknowledged that the project would not be able to pay the originally requested $22 million due to a “lack of funds” and “near out of business status”.
WazirX Claims Binance Control of WRX Token
Binance received all the proceeds (~$2 million) from the sale of the WRX token during the IEO and controls the wallets with the entire issue of the asset, the Indian exchange WazirX said. The platform team assured that they themselves did not receive any tokens during the distribution.
According to WazirX, Binance manages a total of 580.78 million locked and unlocked WRX. Of the latter, the global trading platform transferred 116.8 million tokens in four transactions to its own treasury account. The price sagged after each operation.
In addition, Binance allegedly controls the issuance of WRX and is responsible for quarterly burns, the last of which took place in March 2022.
Unknown people seized control of the Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash
On May 20, unknown persons seized control over the control mechanism of the Tornado Cash Ethereum mixer. According to Paradigm analyst samczsun, attackers have begun to withdraw TORN tokens from the smart contracts of the protocol.
Hackers were able to revoke blocked tokens, transfer assets to the managing smart contract, and stop the router.
The analyst emphasized that attackers cannot withdraw cryptocurrency from separate pools. However, they began to “leak” the blocked votes.
Also on ForkLog:
- Analysts have pointed to a weakening correlation between Bitcoin and Ethereum.
- Users lost over $15 million on the fake HitBTC website.
- Ethereum developers have proposed a mechanism for burning MEV.
- The head of the CFTC announced the mandatory regulation of the DEX.
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