Inflation data for the month of July was published yesterday in the United States. After a 9.1% rise in June, a sharp drop in energy prices suggested we were about to turn the corner and finally see CPI ease. Analysts therefore expected an annual increase of 8.7%.
In the end, a growth of 8.5% was recorded. Not surprisingly, the markets reacted positively to this information. Lower inflation allows markets to hope that several more interest rate hikes will not be needed before returning to desired levels. For bitcoin, this translated to a daily low of $22,600 – at its 30-day moving average, by the way – to a price of $24,000 at the time of writing. It also helps to stay on the right side of the all-important 200-week moving average. In short, the rebound remains shy, but the indicators are favorable for the continuation of the latter.
Coinbase announced its financial results yesterday. The company posted a net loss of $1 billion in the second quarter. The volume of transactions on the stock exchange also fell by 29% in the same period. The total number of users performing transactions on the platform is 9 million, which is 200,000 less in the last three months. Compared to the same quarter a year earlier, Coinbase saw growth, adding 200,000 active users. Hedge fund ARK Cathie Wood was a major shareholder in the company. However, Wood confirmed on Monday that the designation of nine tokens traded on Coinbase as unregistered securities by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) prompted the firm to sell some of the shares it held in the company. July 26 Ark Investments sold over 1.4 million shares of Coinbase for a value of $75 million. According to the fund’s website, firm however, he still owns more than $451 million worth of stock in the company.
The Ethereum chain’s migration from a proof-of-work consensus mode to a proof-of-stake approach and comments from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong were particularly interesting in this regard during the quarterly earnings reveal. The latter indeed claimed that the company was not focused on profit. She focuses on staking. “Any quarter can be up or down,” he said of the cryptocurrency market. “It is important to distinguish between what is within our control and what is beyond our control.” In its letter to shareholders, Coinbase emphasized that it is retaining its users by providing them with the ability to stake they hold crypto. The exchange considers its product staking as an early victory for the company. She also notes that she is staking is one of Coinbase’s priority products, with a long-term goal of becoming a supplier stakingnumber one among cryptocurrency companies. In short, the company is putting a clear emphasis directly in line with the model that will soon borrow Ethereum. “At the beginning of August, we started offering stakingof Ethereum for institutional clients,” according to the letter to shareholders. “We will continue to add more funding for staking for our retail and institutional clients in the future.”
monday, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) The US Treasury Department has taken the unprecedented step of sanctioning a popular cryptocurrency transaction anonymizer Tornado Cash. Americans therefore have no right to interact with this smart contract and could face the kind of sanctions usually reserved for terrorist financiers or mob bosses if they don’t comply. Tornado Cash is a “mixer” on the Ethereum network. In a simplistic way, it allows Ethereum users to send Ether or ERC-20 tokens to the service to be “mixed” with other users’ tokens before being sent back, making it impossible to know who sent what to whom and when. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of ETH, admitted that he himself used the service to send funds to Ukraine, not to hide his identity, but to mask the identity of the recipients so as not to compromise their security.
This decision will be interesting due to the very nature of Tornado Cash which is simple transparent, decentralized and automated open source code. In short, anyone can copy and run it. The question therefore arises as to how far this legal decision will have and how it could be applied when the very nature of the targeted product essentially seeks to portray the anonymity of its users. Members of the Tornado Cash Telegram channel are already sharing tips on how to access the app through identity protection servers, including the Brave and Tor browsers. The US government says the platform has been used to launder more than $7 billion worth of cryptocurrency since its launch in 2019. North Korea is said to be the main beneficiary.
In short, the idea here is not to take a position on a legal decision, but simply to pose a regulatory challenge to all new types of financial products.
Mark Cuban is an involved player in the crypto universe and is never stingy with his comments. This week he tackled buying digital land and on metaverse For the most part. “The worst thing is that people are buying real estate in these places,” Cuban said. “It’s just the dumbest piece of crap ever.” What makes metaversal land valuable, in theory, are the same two principles of physical real estate: scarcity and location. However, it is very questionable whether it can really be applied to metaverse. Indeed, is it possible to artificially introduce the principle of scarcity into a universe that was not physically limited?
Remember that British engineer, James Howell, who threw away a hard drive with 7,500 bitcoins and spent years trying to retrieve it from the massive landfill? After accidentally tossing the wrong disc in the rubbish, a man has applied to Newport City Council for permission to dig it up in a landfill. However, his requests were repeatedly rejected, even when he offered to pay the local government a quarter of the cryptocurrencies contained in this wallet. It is said that he does not give up. He’s hoping to convince local authorities to let him find the precious hard drive thanks to a new proposal backed by a hedge fund. Finding such a small device in more than 100,000 tons of garbage would be a monumental task, but the engineer believes that the use of artificial intelligence and automation can help sort through that garbage faster. Howells offers two versions of this new plan. The first would be to sort 100,000 tons over three years by combining human sorters, robot dogs “Spot” from Boston Dynamics and a special conveyor belt with automated sorting systems. The whole thing would cost no less than $11 million and take nine to twelve months. He is also considering a scaled-down version of the operation that would cost only $6 million and take up to 18 months. After digging up the trash, Howells plans to clean and recycle as much as possible, while reburying the rest. The idea is to have as little impact on the environment as possible, but it remains to be seen whether this will convince the authorities to give the green light to the operation. This hard drive holds $180 million in bitcoins.
Technically, this analysis is shared by a twitter user DaanCryptoseems right to us. It was important for Bitcoin to defend its 30-day moving average, which also corresponded to the diagonal of an upright bullish triangle. However, a move north of $24,700 will be necessary for the price to break out of the current consolidation level and make another bullish push.
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