The crypto space never sleeps! From Bitcoin achieving acceptance as legal tender in El Salvador, to Polkadot's first parachain slot auction and a network merger named after Keanu Reeves, we dive into the top headlines over the past 2 weeks.
1. El Salvador records history as the first country to adopt BTC as legal tender
The Central American country is the first in the world to accept Bitcoin (BTC) as legal tender, a historical event for the crypto world. The lawmakers in the country’s Congress voted a supermajority in favor of the Bitcoin Law, proposed by President Nayib Bukele.
There have been claims that the ministry is also analysing the potential use of BTC as salary. This news has since been denied by Rolando Castro, El Salvador’s Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, in a tweet mentioning that it is “too premature to talk about wages.”
Another country, Panama might follow the footsteps of El Salvador as it has been reported that Congressman Gabriel Silva is scheduled to present a Crypto-Related Bill in July.
👉 View BTC prices now
2. Elon Musk on Tesla BTC payment
In May 2021, Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla would begin accepting the BTC as payment for its vehicles. He has since retracted this move after citing concerns over the cryptocurrency’s energy consumption and “increasingly rapid use of fossil fuels.”
Recently, Musk has announced that Tesla will only move forward with the plan once “there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend.“
3. Polkadot’s First Parachain Slot Auction
According to details from the Polkadot governance platform, Polkassembly, 13 of the 19 seats on Kusama council voted in favour of commencing their first slot auction process. Polkadot and Kusama co-founder Gavin Wood published the tentative schedule for the Kusama slot auctions back in June 8.
The slot auctions will determinethe parachains that will be added to the Kusama relay chain. The first slot auction is set to proceed over five days, with the first two days for preliminary bidding.
The news about the slot auction may have driven DOT to rally as it gained around 15% after. Meanwhile, KSM has yet to experience any major price increase.
👉 View DOT prices now
4. CNN Historic News and ‘www.’ Source Code as NFTs.
Following Fox and Time Magazine into the NFT market, CNN has announced the launch of an NFT out of collectible historic moments taken from the news. This will include a series of tokenized iconic moments from its 41 years of history, alongside a vault to purchase, store and display the NFTs.
Apart from CNN’s historic moments, the world wide web source code is also currently being auctioned as an NFT. Tim Berners-Lee, known as the founder of the World Wide Web, is auctioning off the original code of the first website on the internet and the NFT will be called “This Changed Everything”.
5. Bitcoin falls below 40K, but whales are accumulating supply
BTC’s ongoing rollercoaster ride has peaked at 41K USD, setting a 2 week high. However, the pioneer cryptocurrency failed to sustain prices above the $40K psychological threshold and prices retreated to 38k. Many are pointing to the FED shifting the interest rate hikes forward despite the inflation fears and the move seems to have affected not only the crypto market, but also the stock market.
In spite of the recent market conditions, BTC whales have been accumulating more of the supply.
The movement of around 90,000 BTC (worth $367B) was identified to be coming from wallets holding between 100 to 10,000 BTC, which accounts for 48.7% of the BTC supply.
6. 2 Ethereum projects are merging protocols into ‘Keanu’
The 2 projects Keep and NuCypher have agreed to merge their protocols into a DAO, a more capital-efficient version of Keep’s bitcoin-on-Ethereum token, tBTC. The merger is nicknamed Keanu in homage to the star of “The Matrix”.
This was decided after the realisation that their competition would only lead to a waste in energy. To reduce the energy wasted, they plan to combine both their underlying protocols. Matt Luongo, the CEO of Thesis — the company that built Keep — explains “The Keep and NuCypher networks have built similar technology with similar goals. Rather than splitting the market, we think we can achieve more together.”
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7. Institutional Investors have arrived on Polygon
In early June, it was observed that 65% of daily stablecoin transaction volume on Polygon was above $1M which is believed to signal the shift of decentralized finance (DeFi) ‘whales’ from ETH to MATIC.
There has been growing interest in MATIC by institutions after the liquidity in the protocol started growing significantly higher than its initial capital base. In fact, many Ethereum-native DeFi protocols have moved or started to do so, including the popular money market protocol Aave.
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8. Unknown crypto soars 164,842% in hours and crashes
An unknown token, WebDollar, surged from $0.0003711 to $0.6121 which is a little over 164,842% gain in its market valuation. However, the price spike came with declines in volumes
as they dropped from around $345,000 to $318940. This spike has led to WebDollar becoming the 18th largest cryptocurrency project by market capitalisation at one point.
9. The Graph Foundation taps protocol infrastructure developer for $60M grant
In order to further their development of the decentralized internet and expand more of the Web 3.0 use cases, The Graph Foundation teamed up with StreamingFast, the second development team to join the project full-time.
StreamingFast will be providing The Graph its infrastructure platform, core IP and API products, core developers and other human resources. Apart from providing a $60 million grant, it will also be a part of The Graph’s ecosystem and a core component of its long-term infrastructure plans.
👉 View GRT price now
10. 1inch releases composable Limit Order Protocol
The liquidity aggregator adds on to their functionality with the new Limit Order Protocol. While limit orders are already available to the DeFi ecosystem through other protocols, the team claims this is more gas-efficient and secure, thus has the potential to be used beyond DEXes.
1inch co-founder Sergej Kunz mentioned the possibility of the protocol to be used for Lending protocol liquidations.
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