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Is Wright Wrong, Ethereum Block Reward Cut and Big Raises: This Week in Crypto

Last Updated March 4, 2021 3:36 PM

Craig Wright would rather face a judge than the court of public opinion. | Source: Shutterstock

Make sure you check out our previous edition here, now let’s go over what happened in crypto this week. Also, make sure you subscribe for this weeks edition of The CCN.com Podcast on iTunes , TuneIn , Stitcher , Google Play Music , Spotify , Soundcloud , Youtube or wherever you get your podcasts.

Price Watch:

Bitcoin is up 7.15% to $7,200 after fluctuating just below the $7,000 mark last Sunday before finally breaking it on Tuesday. The price soared past $7,000 to $7,100 on Wednesday. The party didn’t last long with the party falling back down below the $7,000 mark the next day. The price found strong support at the $6,800 level and was able to recover to $7,200.
Ethereum is up 7% to $292. The coin is still able to sustain breaking the crucial $300 price level and move with Bitcoin this week. The increase is encouraging after a 5% decline last week preceded by drops of 11% the week before and 24% the week before and single and double-digit drops going back months.
The Coin Market Cap is up 7% this week with most alt coins closely following Bitcoin and Ethereum closely. This is a bullish sign and is refreshing in a bear market.

Mining:

‘Satoshi Vision’ Client, Mining Pool Released – Bitcoin Cash has gotten one step closer to splitting into multiple versions when the network undergoes a planned hard fork in November with the release of the new Satoshi Vision client today. Despite attempts to reconcile differences Wright has moved along with the BCH node launch despite mining pools disavoing them and attacks from Vitalik.
Ethereum Cuts Block Reward by a Third – EIP 1234 , which proposes to delay the difficulty bomb for approximately one and a half years and to reduce the block rewards with the Constantinople fork has been approved.
Largest Bitcoin Mining Pool Launches Ethereum Operation – BTC.com, which produced 21 percent of all newly-mined BTC over the past 12 months and currently accounts for more than 16 percent of the bitcoin hash rate, announced on Thursday that it has opened an Ethereum mining pool.
EOS RAM Exploit Spreads – To reduce spam, EOS requires users to purchase a scarce in-network resource called “RAM” to deploy smart contracts and run decentralized applications (dApps). EOS has addressed the matter on Medium calling it “vandalism” — rather than a bug.

Banks:

BoA VP: Patents Are ‘Meaningless’ – Bank of America, which has filed for approximately 50 patents related to blockchain technology, has been called out for using patents for “press releases and public perception of innovation.”
CBOE Close to Launching Ethereum Futures – Business Insider reports that CBOE wants to become the first U.S. exchange to list an ethereum futures product, which would transform ether into more of a two-sided market by allowing professional traders to go both long and short on the second-largest cryptocurrency. Pricing data would again come from Winklevoss led exchange Gemini .

Exchanges:

Yahoo Launches Crypto Trading – Yahoo.com, the sixth most visited website both globally and with the U.S, announced this week that it has partnered with financial API developer TradeIt to allow users to trade cryptocurrencies from within Yahoo Finance.
Russian Finance Watchdog Building Crypto Tracking Tool – The Federal Financial Monitor Service, or Rosfinmonitoring, has reached a limited liability company to develop an analytical tool for tracking cryptocurrency transactions, BBC Russia reported .
Bithumb Resumes User Registrations – Bithumb, South Korea’s second-biggest crypto exchange by daily trading volume behind UPbit, will officially resume registrations for new investors as early as this week.

Startups:

Dfinity Raises $102 Million – Dfinity token raised a $102 million round, led by A16Z and Polychain Capital to build a “world computer”. Dfinity, which was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Switzerland’s “Crypto Valley,” wants to build a decentralized cloud computing network that can rival centralized platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), which have been accused of censorship , in part for booting apps that help users evade censorship.
Crypto Startup Huboi Gains Majority in Public Firm – Crypto exchange giant Huobi has completed the purchase of majority shares of Hong Kong-based investment holding company, Patronics Holdings Limited (PHL). Data from the Financial Times reveal that the company’s stocks trades at a price of 3.08HKD as at the time of writing. This represents a price increase of 152.46 percent in the last one year.

Featured image from YouTube/BBC.