The live Bitcoin price today is $16 717,74 USD with a 24-hour trading volume of $34 746 503 079 USD. We update our BTC to USD price in real-time. Bitcoin is down 0,67% in the last 24 hours. The current CoinMarketCap ranking is #1, with a live market cap of $321 127 877 260 USD. It has a circulating supply of 19 208 806 BTC coins and a max. supply of 21 000 000 BTC coins.
Author - bitcoinet
NFT
- Reddit is launching the next NFT series through its own marketplace “in the next few weeks.” The social news aggregator announced this in a press release.
- The collection comes from independent artists who, according to Reddit, are paid for each copy sold. The price range for the NFT is between 10 and 100 US dollars.
- With the purchase, the owner receives the licensing rights and may use the artwork both inside and outside of Reddit, for example, as a profile picture. In addition, avatars are tradable.
- No cryptocurrencies are required for the purchase, it continues. The prices for the copies are fixed, and you have to pay with fiat currencies.
- The technical basis is the Polygon blockchain.
- Reddit already experimented with NFT functions in January. At that time, the platform published the “CryptoSnoos” collection via Ethereum.
Cryptocurrencies
Cryptocurrencies are valuable not as an investment tool, but as a means of payment. This was stated by former CIA and NSA employee Edward Snowden at the Consensus 2022 conference. Snowden joined in the criticism of the “anti-cryptocurrency” letter that a group of technology experts sent to the U.S. Congress in early June. In his opinion, the authors deliberately misinterpreted some theses about the industry. Among the authors of the letter, the specialist mentioned cryptographer Bruce Schneier. However, he called most of the other signatories “prolific public trolls. On his Twitter page, Snowden also called gold “a bitcoin that can’t be sent over the Internet. Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino responded to him. He noted that the XAUT Stablecoin, which is tied to the price of the precious metal, can be sent over the net.
U.S. bitcoin exchange Coinbase will cut its staff by about 18% due to the onset of crypto winter. Co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong called it a “difficult decision. Armstrong noted that the company has more than quadrupled its staff in the past 18 months. Too rapid a growth has led to problems coordinating and integrating new team members, making the team less effective. Affected employees will be notified by personal messages. They will immediately be denied access to confidential customer information. Employees who leave Coinbase will be compensated at 14 weeks’ salary with bonuses for more than one year of service. Coinbase will also pay a four-month health insurance policy and provide assistance with future employment, including at portfolio companies in the venture capital division. According to CNBC, Coinbase has about 5,000 full-time employees. The layoffs will affect about 1,100 of them.
CEO and founder of cryptocurrency bank Galaxy Digital Mike Novogratz is convinced that the two largest cryptocurrencies by capitalization are already close to the “bottom”, in contrast to the assets of the traditional U.S. financial market. S&P 500 index – down 22% from its peak in early January. Bitcoin and Ethereum prices are down 67.6% and 74.9% from their all-time highs, respectively. In early May, Novogratz foresaw bitcoin and Ethereum prices falling below the $30,000 and $2,000 levels, respectively.
MicroStrategy, Bitcoin
MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor said that the analytics software provider anticipated market volatility when choosing its bitcoin investment strategy. He assured that the company is ready to store the cryptocurrency further.
MicroStrategy initially allocated its assets in such a way as to continue to hodl in “unfavorable conditions” in the market. The company holds 129,218 BTC. Amid the collapse in the price of the first cryptocurrency, MicroStrategy’s loss from bitcoin holdings exceeded $1 billion. Saylor has consistently stressed that the company will continue to follow its strategy of buying and holding bitcoin. He is convinced that this policy will provide the software vendor with a “bright future” for years to come.
The head of MicroStrategy previously said that the price of bitcoin would have to fall below $3562 for the company to lack the digital assets to secure loans.
Bitcoin plunge
June 13 trading session on stock exchanges in the U.S. opened with a significant drop in shares of cryptocurrency-oriented companies. Over the past 24 hours, bitcoin has lost 13.3%, according to CoinGecko. The price of digital gold dipped below $24,000, with the asset trading near $23,740 as of this writing. At the open, shares of analytics software provider MicroStrategy were down 25.24%, Coinbase down 13.5%, and Silvergate Capital down 14%. According to Bitcoin Treasuries, MicroStrategy’s 129,218 BTC is now worth just over $3 billion. Earlier, the head of the company Michael Saylor reiterated his commitment to the first cryptocurrency.
Marathon Digital shares were down 12.33%;
Riot Blockchain, down 10.46%;
Core Scientific, down 12.45%;
Bitfarms, down 9.43%;
Bit Digital, up 8.8%;
Argo Blockchain, up 16.64%;
Hut 8 Mining and Hive Blockchain lost 10% and 9.6%, respectively.
Futures on the Nasdaq 100 fell 2.54% and the S&P 500 fell 2.5%.
Edge Mastercard
The company that developed the popular cryptocurrency wallet Edge announced today its new Mastercard, which requires no identification (KYC) to use. According to Edge CEO Paul Puey, you won’t need a name, phone number, or email address to use the card, just 15 seconds of free time. According to Puig, there is still a large percentage of people who, for one reason or another, cannot open a bank account. The new card is not just for bitcoins (BTC), users will be able to top up their card with cryptocurrencies such as Dogecoin (DOGE), Dash (DASH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and Litecoin (LTC). The card is already ready to be accepted by some merchants in the U.S. Edge Mastercard users will have a daily spending limit of $1,000 for the first time after launch. To recharge the card, users will need to sell their cryptocurrency in the wallet and send the dollars received to the card account. There will be no charge for recharging. According to Puig, those who want to make purchases online with the card can do so seamlessly with the credentials.
Digital currencies pose a threat to the security of the global payment infrastructure. Anne Elizabeth Boden, founder and CEO of UK neobank Starling Bank.
During the Money 20/20 fintech conference in Amsterdam, the organization’s CEO noted that many cryptocurrency wallets are “directly connected to payment schemes”.
The CEO of Starling Bank also recalled fraud in the industry. According to her, it takes more time to protect customers than it does to promote cryptocurrencies.
Boden doubted that Starling would start offering digital assets in the next couple of years. She stressed that industry-affiliated companies have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to anti-money laundering.
In March 2021, UK-based Starling Bank closed a £272m ($341.6m) Series D funding round led by Fidelity. In April, the organization raised £50m ($62.8m) from Goldman Sachs.
At the end of May of the same year, Starling Bank temporarily banned customers from making deposits on cryptocurrency exchanges. The restrictions were promised to be lifted after testing a new financial crime prevention system.
In November 2021, Mastercard announced the launch of bitcoin-linked debit, credit, and prepaid payment cards in Asia-Pacific.
In January 2022, Mastercard announced a partnership with bitcoin exchange Coinbase. As part of the joint initiative, the companies planned to allow the purchase of NFTs with bank cards.
In June, PayPal opened up the possibility of transferring cryptocurrencies between accounts, as well as withdrawing them to third-party wallets.
Upbit, one of South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, warned users about delisting Litecoin (LTC) on 20 June 2022.
According to the report, Upbit requested more information from Litecoin Foundation about the MimbleWimble protocol and conducted its own analysis.
According to Upbit representatives, this violates local legislation. Users can withdraw funds from the platform until 20 July.
On 20 May, the Litecoin mainnet activated a protocol with extensive scalability and enhanced privacy capabilities. It uses several technologies, including confidential transactions and CoinJoin, which hides the inputs and outputs of senders and receivers and combines multiple transactions into one.
Bithumb has since announced the possibility of delisting LTC. Coinone, Korbit, and Gopax made similar decisions.
When PayPal announced in 2020 that it would expand its offering to include Bitcoin, the sensation was perfect. So far, however, only customers in the USA and Great Britain can trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash and store them in a wallet.
The biggest drawback so far was that no transfers to and from external wallets were possible. However, this is to change in the coming weeks, at least for US customers, as the company announced yesterday.
This means that the wallets will become fully-fledged solutions, apart from the fact that the owners do not control the private keys to their cryptos. Users will have the ability to send and receive bitcoin freely. In addition, they will be able to transfer cryptocurrencies internally to other PayPal accounts free of charge.
The new feature has been available to selected customers and is expected to reach all US customers in the coming weeks, provided they have gone through a KYC process and identified themselves.
While the group’s offering certainly doesn’t match the ethos of many Bitcoiners, it does go a long way towards bringing Bitcoin to the centre of society. PayPal is still limited to the US market and the UK, but it should be clear that sooner or later the group will take it to the global market. At the end of 2020, PayPal counted 377 million people worldwide among its customers.
The fact that PayPal is now opening up its wallets is a thoroughly positive step that should be welcomed. Those who cannot identify with the fact that KYC is now part of the good standard and that all parties are increasingly identifiable will probably have a hard time in the future anyway. After all, the rigorous regulation of the market in the course of anti-money laundering laws has recently been decided.
He divested himself of around 4.4 million Tesla shares, raising about four billion dollars, according to documents filed with the SEC. No further sales are planned after that, he wrote on Twitter on Friday night.
Elon Musk did not give any reasons for the share sale in the documents. Last autumn, he had divested himself of more than $16 billion worth of Tesla shares – largely to pay taxes due on redeemed stock options.
Now, however, he has committed to bringing in his own funds of up to 21 billion dollars for the Twitter purchase. How exactly he intends to raise them is still unclear. Musk still holds a good 168 million Tesla shares after the recent sale. He wants to use some of them to secure a loan of 12.5 billion dollars, which will also be used to finance the Twitter deal.
USDC (USD Coin) provides a fully collateralized US dollar stablecoin, and is based on the open source asset-backed stablecoin framework developed by Centre.
As crypto assets have grown in their importance and adoption, it’s become vital to be able to use fiat currencies for payments and trading. A price-stable currency such as the US dollar (and similar stable currencies such as EUR, GBP, JPY, RMB, etc.) is critical for enabling mainstream adoption of blockchain technology for payments, as well as to support maturation in financial contracts built on smart contract platforms, such as tokenized securities, loans, and property.
Existing approaches have lacked financial and operational transparency, have operated in unregulated offshore jurisdictions with unknown banking and audit partners, and have been built as closed-loop ecosystems and closed source technologies.
USDC solves these problems by offering a solution with detailed financial and operational transparency, operating within the regulated framework of US money transmission laws, with established banking partners and auditors, and is built on an open source framework with an open membership scheme that eligible financial institutions can participate in.
Solana is an open source project implementing a new, high-performance, permissionless blockchain. The Solana Foundation is based in Geneva, Switzerland, and maintains the open source project.
It is possible for a centralized database to process 710,000 transactions per second on a standard gigabit network if the transactions are, on average, no more than 176 bytes. A centralized database can also replicate itself and maintain high availability without significantly compromising that transaction rate using the distributed system technique known as Optimistic Concurrency Control. At Solana, we are demonstrating that these same theoretical limits apply just as well to blockchain on an adversarial network. The key ingredient? Finding a way to share time when nodes cannot rely upon one-another. Once nodes can rely upon time, suddenly ~40 years of distributed systems research becomes applicable to blockchain!
Bitcoin picked up speed once again in the night to Thursday. For a short time, the price even fell to the $42,500 range, its lowest level since the weekend crash at the beginning of December. Two factors are weighing on the price.
On the one hand, the prospect of an even faster end to the Fed’s loose monetary policy is putting pressure on the prices of the top performers of recent years – and thus also on bitcoin. The minutes of the last meeting, published on the eve of the meeting, reaffirm the prospect of an early increase in the key interest rate in the United States. In addition, some of the members were in favor of starting to reduce the size of the central bank’s balance sheet shortly after the first rate hike.
Market participants now fear that the days of cheap money are numbered and are taking profits in asset classes that have particularly benefited from it in recent years. These include (tech) stocks as well as cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.
Furthermore, the unrest in Kazakhstan due to sharply increased energy prices acts as an additional burdening factor for the Bitcoin, which, in addition to the resignation of the government, also results in a nationwide Internet outage. The problem: After the mining ban in China, numerous miners have found refuge in neighboring Kazakhstan.
Kazakh miners now contribute around 18 percent of the total computing power (hash rate) in the Bitcoin network. This makes Kazakhstan currently the second largest Bitcoin mining nation after the USA. Accordingly, the Internet outage is also having a drastic impact on the Bitcoin network: According to data from YCharts.com, the global hash rate has plummeted by around 13 percent as a result.
In a few months, buyers in Europe will be able to take delivery of the first luxury Stromer from Lucid Motors, as the Tesla rival has confirmed. The Lucid Air is said to have a range of up to 840 kilometers and 1,080 hp under the hood – but it also has its price.
The first examples of the Lucid Air are already available in the USA. In the Dream Edition, which is limited to 520 units, the electric sedan can travel just under 840 kilometers on one charge and has 1,080 horsepower – but it also costs $169,000. In the most affordable version, the Lucid Air costs just under $80,000 (before taxes) – but then it also offers less power. In Europe, interested parties have been able to place online orders for almost two years. But they still have to wait for their vehicle. At least not for much longer, as Lucid Motors has now officially confirmed.
Sony is getting serious about entering the car business: The Japanese electronics giant unveiled its second electric car prototype at the CES technology trade show currently taking place in Las Vegas (US state of Nevada) (January 5-7, 2022). In addition, company CEO Kenichiro Yoshida announced that the group will establish a new mobility subsidiary called “Sony Mobility” in spring 2022. The goal: It is to examine a commercial market launch of the vehicles.
At the beginning of 2022, Banca Generali will complete the full integration into its home banking of the Conio platform (fintech in whose capital it entered a year ago as the main investor of a $14 million capital increase).
From 2022 you will be able to buy them in the bank. At least for Banca Generali’s private clients, who will be able to operate in self mode by buying or selling the most famous cryptocurrency through the platform of Conio Inc, with which the bank 50% controlled by Assicurazioni Generali has entered into a partnership that celebrates one year in these days.
“We will complete the integration at the beginning of next year,” Riccardo Renna, Banca Generali’s Chief Operation Officer & Head of Innovation, tells We Wealth. “From that moment, clients will be able to operate safely on an asset class that could otherwise be risky if approached incorrectly. For Banca Generali, this is “a further step towards the completion of our private hub with services and platforms available to our bankers and their clients”.
Bitcoin has made a slow start to the new year as crypto traders rest up for the Christmas break. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has fallen about 8% in the past week as demand from buyers has dropped dramatically.
The current bitcoin price is around $46,000. This places the coin at the lower end of a two-week price range between $45,000 as well as $52,000. The price range previously led to higher bids for bitcoin.
The Relative Strength Index (RSI) on the Bitcoin daily chart is rising from an oversold level reached on December 10. This is an indication that selling pressure is easing, especially since signals of downtrend exhaustion appeared on the daily chart for the first time since July 2021.
Bitcoin needs to rise above the moving average of the last 200 days to reach further upside targets. This average is currently at $47,962. The next resistance level is seen at $52,000, which could limit short-term gains.
The prices of cryptocurrencies collapsed hard across the board. In some cases, the prices slumped by 20 or more percent, so that Bitcoin as the market leader was traded for a short time at less than 40,000 euros – on Friday, BTC was still traded at more than 50,000 euros. In the meantime, the BTC price has recovered somewhat – buyers: inside took advantage of the dip and pushed the price back to more than 42,000 euros.
The rest of the crypto market is also deep in the red. Ethereum, which this week was preparing to break its own all-time high of more than €4,200, has plummeted hard – down to less than €3,500. Many other crypto assets – from SOL (Solana) to XRP and ADA (Cardano) to DOGE (Dogecoin or LTC (Litecoin) – are down 20 percentage points or more.