Welcome to the Crypto Buzz by Kalkine TV I’m Sage. The regulators are impacting the markets
again this time with the Bank of Russia agreeing to legalize cross border payments using crypto.
This could be in line with some BRICS trading block, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South
Africa. They are countries who would prefer to reduce their use of the US dollar. Same
goes for middle east who could be looking to settle payment in digital currency with
time. Oman Investment Authority and Mubadala investments of Abu Dhabi both invested $350M
into Crusoe Energy a bitcoin mining company using wasted natural gas to power crypto mining.
As the Russia Ukraine was continues, Ukraine’s two largest tech retailers Techno Izhak and
Stylus last month announced they would also accept Bitcoin payments.
Coming in from the US, Congressman Brad Sherman is of the opinion that crypto undermines the
value of the US dollar, being a firm critic of digital assets. He asserted that crypto
could threaten America’s financial system and lose the supremacy of the US dollar. However
the congressman who represents California’s San Fernando Valley was quoted saying that
he doesn’t believe US authorities could ban or prohibit the use of crypto in the near
term as there is too much money and power behind it.
In South America where cryptocurrency is offering some reprieve from the impacts of hyperinflation
on their currency. Binance the global leader in trading volume for crypto exchanges has
hired former Brazilian Central Bank President and Economy Minister Henrique Meirelles as
a member of its advisory board. More details about this new initiative from Binance and
their Global Advisory board will be released soon, it was reported by Coindesk.
Australian Federal Police have established a specific unit to tackle money laundering
through cryptocurrency. Although AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw confirmed crypto was used much
less than other means of money laundering, the AFP has been seizing proceeds of crime
exceeding their targets with close to $600M confiscated. The unit Focusing on crypto will
help to provide more information on organised crime groups operating in Australia.
We’ll now take a short break after the break, stay with us as more on the up-coming Ethereum
Merge after the break.
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Welcome back after the break. A lot of the crypto industry are anticipating what might
happen to the price of ETH once the merge occurs.
The Merge is occurring close to midday UTC 6th September, with the Bellatrix hard fork
and is probably one of the most talked about events in crypto history, seeing the Ethereum
blockchain move from proof of work mining consensus to proof of stake. The 2nd part
of the Merge the Paris activation will occur about 10 days later. The 2nd last test occurred
on 31st Aug and developers are confident with the results. There has been a lot if hype
around the merge and sadly many scammers out there trying to exploit money out of people
too. So please stay vigilant and do your research before you start transferring your digital
assets to deals that sound too good to be true or unclear as to their purpose.
The price of ETH is $1637.87 up 4% in the last 24hrs over the last 30 days it is down
3.3% and over the last year it is down 58.5%. According to Coingecko.
Before the merge, the London Hardfork that occurred 2021 was also highly publicized.
It caused the creation of EIP-1559 that in turn saved users of the Ethereum blockchain
$844 million in transaction fees through instating base fee refunds. Ethereum is still the most
expensive blockchain to transact on processing close to $40 million in fees daily, according
to Galaxy Digital’s report being 40 times more expensive than transacting on Bitcoin.
So, although EIP-1550 increased the allowing more transactions to be processed be block,
the costs have continued to increase due to higher demand, of the Ethereum blockchain.
Ethereum developers are still working on sharding to more broadly tackle the issue of scalability.
Although, Ethereum burns miners fees, the increase usage from NFTs and DeFi dApps is
still causing high fees.
Another fork of the Ethereum blockchain worth mentioning is Ethereum Classic. It was created
in 2016 after the DAO was hacked. Ethereum developers decided to restore the stolen user
funds from the decentralized application known as “The DAO.” Ethereum Classic is interoperable
with Ethereum but it won’t be changing it’s consensus to Proof of Stake and will remain
Proof of Work. All time high hash rates have been recorded from 2 major ETH miners this
week, and the price of ETC (Ethereum Classic) has been surging.
ETC price is $39.82 being up 22.8% over the last 30 days it is up 4.5% and over the last
year it is down 45.8%. According to Coingecko.
Antpool, the third largest BTC mining pool has announced a $10M investment into the Ethereum
Classic ecosystem. This investment in the Ethereum Classic ecosystem could indicate
that some ETH miners may continue to direct their hashpower to proof of work blockchains
such as ETC. Due to the smaller market cap of ETC it’s not financially viable for all
ETH mining operations to move to ETC. For perspective, from data obtained 28 July 2022,
Ethereum daily hashrate was 38 times higher than Ethereum Classics.
Antpool is also the 13th largest ETH mining pool by hashrate.
Ethermine, The largest Ethereum mining pool by hashrate, also shared their intentions
to be a staking pool post-Merge.
This could mean major changes to Ethermine where their mining hashrate will need to be
transferred to other mining pools such as Antpool or sell off their Proof of Work ETH
mining machines post merge.
That’s all
for today’s edition of crypto buzz, just to iterate anything shared in this report
is for informational purposes and is not financial advice in anyway. It’s important for you
to do your own homework before attempting to invest in the digital asset market. Kalkine
Media has launched a new ed-tech suite of courses including one in crypto and blockchain
- KalEd Tech Plus check it out from the Kalkine website.
Keep watching for more live expert talks and market insigts. Till the next episode may
the hodling continue.