Today’s Top News
Binance is hopping on the crypto lending bandwagon
If you read yesterday’s issue of Cryptocracy, then you know there was an awesome story on the growth of crypto lending in the past two years. That growth cannot be overstated. It’s either a new fad or the prospect of earning interest on lending cryptocurrencies is the new face of digital money. It’s probably somewhere in between. But it’s eye opening that the largest crypto exchange on the planet is now getting into crypto lending. Would you agree? — MEDIUM
Image from Binance.
Cryptocurrency is the best performing asset class this year
When compared to traditional asset classes, large-cap crypto assets performed better, says Digital Assets Data President Ryan Alfred. The top 10 cryptos by market cap outperformed gold, oil, and equities, he said. This performance is largely due to Bitcoin being up 100 percent since the first of the year. Ether is up 35 percent and XRP is down 25 percent since January 1. — COINDESK
The Bitcoin Price Index. Image from CoinDesk.
China still dominates Bitcoin mining
Bitcoin miners in 2019 have generated $5.4 billion. One report shows that almost 65 percent of the Bitcoin hashrate originates from China. Meanwhile Bitcoin whales are getting larger and adding to the volatility. While 43 percent of Bitcoin investors are women, one analyst is concerned that state-backed crypto from China, Russia, and other large countries will start a global revolution. Some would say that revolution has already started. After all, Chinese Bitcoin miners own two-thirds of the leading cryptocurrency’s processing power. The leading mining company in China, Bitmain, recently announced a set of incentives for people who buy those miners. That could increase China’s dominance in the mining industry. — FORBES
Image from Skew.com.
Kraken joins the Tezos staking trend
Pretty soon, everyone will be staking Tezos. Kraken is offering staking as of today, and the first crypto offered for staking is Tezos. The exchange is offering a 6 percent APR. The price of Tezos jumped 14 percent on the same day and 20 percent the next. — DECRYPT
Image from Decrypt.
Binance adds fiat payment options
Binance has partnered with Paxful to offer fiat payment options for Bitcoin purchases. P2P exchange Paxful is capable of facilitating fiat payments for more than 167 currencies including the Russian ruble, Vietnamese dong, Indonesian rupiah, Nigerian naira, Colombian peso, British pound, Mexican peso, Canadian dollar, euro, and Argentinian peso. — COINDESK
Today’s Bitcoin Chart
5 Interesting Reads From Medium
You can find a lot of crypto-related articles on Medium. Unfortunately, you have to pay $5/month or $50/year to gain access to most of them. I paid that subscription fee so you don’t have to. Now, here are five incredible reads about the crypto world on Medium.
How you can earn passive income in crypto lending
The focus of this article is lending Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stablecoins. That’s pretty much everything. But it starts off contrasting custodial services with decentralized lending. In a custody situation, the lender takes your money, loans it out, charges interest, pays you a dividend, and keeps the difference. It operates like a traditional lender. With decentralized lending, you are the lender. Typically, the borrower puts up 150 percent of the borrowed amount as collateral so they don’t skip with your money. — TOXONAUT
Image from Toxonaut on Medium.
The interesting phenomenon of stablecoin arbitrage
Arbitrage is the practice of buying an asset in one market and immediately selling at another market for a higher price. With USDT, for instance, an arbitrageur may buy the stablecoin from Tether for $1.00 and sell on an exchange for the market price of $1.02 against USD. If the price drops to $0.98 USD, the arbitrageur will buy and redeem it with Tether for $1.00. In the case of Dai, that’s not possible because you have to lock up another digital asset in a collateralized debt position (CDP), but the collateralized ratio is 150 percent, so $1.00 in ETH can generate up to $0.66 Dai. To close the CDP, you have to pay an additional cost, and since you can’t sell the asset immediately and don’t know when the price will go up, Dai arbitrage in unprofitable and won’t scale. — HASU
Image from Hasu on Medium.
Why there is no future for cryptocurrencies
Okay, this one’s a fun read. Ultimately, it leads to the author listing all of his public wallet addresses and begging for a donation. Before that, however, he lists all the reasons cryptocurrency has no future—with links to sources. Here’s a sampling:
The creator of JavaScript and Mozilla started Brave with a built-in ad blocker and Basic Attention Token.
IBM is partnering with Stellar Lumens for cross-border payments.
Crypto basher George Soros bought a stack of Bitcoin.
The Winklevii brothers bought Bitcoin at $120 with $11 million of their Facebook dough.
Coinbase has an $8 billion valuation.
Robinhood offers commission-free crypto trading.
The NFL bought stake in SportsCastr.
Overstock is all in on crypto.
New Zealand passed a law to allow companies to pay employees in crypto.
This is a very, very small list of reasons mentioned in the article. It’s well worth the read if you want to know broadly what’s happening in the world of crypto and why it has no future. Ha ha! — THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX
Why nobody will talk about Bitcoin over the holidays
Bitcoin’s popularity is sinking. The price is dropping (or at least not rising). And no one’s asking if they should buy it, like they were in 2017.
Consensusland author Mark Helfman, in Altcoin Magazine, divides non-crypto lovers into four categories:
Normal people. For them, crypto is not interesting.
2017 enthusiasts. They lost money and would rather not think about it.
Tech pros. They say it’s boring and risky.
Skeptics. This crowd throw their hands in the air like they just don’t care.
He goes on to encourage young pups to go easy on old-timers. His solution to adoption? “Spread love, not education.” — MARK HELFMAN
Image from Google Trends.
One venture capitalist is betting on a decentralized internet
Everyone is talking about decentralizing the internet. I’ve written about it a few times myself.
Chris Dixon is a venture capitalist who has backed a lot of web companies over the years. In 2006, he sold SiteAdvisor to McAfee. Since then, he’s gone on to back Ripple, Coinbase, OpenBazaar, and Mediachain. In this great read, Kevin Maney interviews Dixon and gets some interesting answers.
First, he was a philosophy major in college.
Now that I’ve blown your mind, he said whatever the smartest people today are doing on weekends is what everyone else will be doing in 10 years. Then he talks about being on the losing end of a Bitcoin civil war. He hypes up the value of Ethereum (and why woudn’t he?). But I found this paragraph really interesting:
What are you looking for at this stage? What do you think you’re going to be investing in?
Two very broad categories: infrastructure and applications. Infrastructure is, basically, layer one blockchain. Bitcoin would be in that category. Ethereum. Infinity. Competitors to bitcoin like Zcash, and Monero. It’s very hard to see bitcoin getting displaced just because of the brand momentum and trust level. It’s been around for ten years. The two most viable replacements are probably Zcash and Monero. They’re bitcoin competitors that have privacy features. One of the commonly misunderstood things about bitcoin is people think it’s anonymous. It’s the opposite of anonymous. It’s all public. If you’re a Venezuelan and you’re trying to get around the draconian tyrannical government, bitcoin might actually be a really bad solution.
On decentralization, he says, “It’s better to fight the next war than refight the last war.” In other words, Google and Facebook will still be big companies in a blockchain-based world. They might not even connect to a blockchain. That won’t stop decentralization. He also sees decentralized finance being regulated under commodities laws rather than securities laws. And there’d be nothing wrong with that. — KEVIN MANEY
How am I doing? Email me at allen@tayloredcontent.com and let me know. Also, did you know you can comment on the articles down below? Feel free to start a conversation.
Allen Taylor is a veteran award-winning journalist and former newspaper editor. He is a freelance writer focused on fintech, including blockchain and crypto projects, and manages crypto blogs through CryptoBloggers. Follow me on Twitter and Steemit.