Cardano has completed a successful hard fork - Crypto weekly update

Published: 16. 09. 2021 · Author: Daniel Mitrovsky

This week, the total market capitalization exceeded 1.86 trillion EUR. Increase at the 7-day interval is 3.33 %. Bitcoin increased by 2.33 % during the week to a current value of over than 40,950 EUR. Bitcoin dominance is 41,4 %.

Source: Coinmarketcap

Cardano enters phase Goguen

Cardano has announced the completion of its Alonzo hard fork, ushering in its long-awaited smart contract functionality.

Hard fork called Alonzo enables smart contracts to be written for Cardano using Plutus scripts that have been optimized for the smart contract development and implementation of smart contracts using the functional programming language Haskell.

Cardano thus officially becomes another competitor of the Ethereum network, as the new functionality will allow an even more massive expansion of the decentralized finance sector. Starting from Monday, decentralized exchanges, lending platforms and platforms focused on synthetic assets may be created on the Cardano network.

Cardano ’s native token, $ADA, has recently become the third largest cryptocurrency in the cryptocurrency market, with a total capitalization of more than $79 billion (€67.3 billion). Source

Ukraine legalizes cryptocurrencies

In a nearly unanimous vote, the Ukrainian Parliament adopted a law that legalizes and regulates cryptocurrencies and all other crypto assets.

The bill was set in motion in 2020 – and heads to the desk of President Volodymyr Zelensky.

According to the draft law, this law will modify legal relations arising in connection with the turnover of virtual assets in Ukraine, define the rights and obligations of virtual asset market participants and state policy principles in the field of virtual assets. If signed by the president, virtual assets, digital wallets and private keys are terms that will be enshrined in Ukrainian law.

Unlike El Salvador’s move to adopt bitcoin as legal tender, Ukraine’s crypto law does not facilitate the rollout of bitcoin as a form of payment and does not put it on an equal footing with the hryvnia, the country’s national currency. Source

Bitcoin as a medium of exchange

An unknown user on Monday night used the bitcoin network to transfer two billion U.S.dollars with an incredibly low fee.

Data from the blockchain.com revealed that one of the largest crypto transactions denominated in U.S. dollars was processed on Monday night. The anonymous user sent $2 billion (€1.69 billion) dollars to another address via Bitcoin network. Despite the enormous financial value, the unknown wallet holder only paid 0.00001713 BTC fees equivalent to $0.78.

Although it is unknown what the purpose of this transfer was, or indeed which individual or entity enacted it, what has clearly been showcased is the enormous potential of financial transactions utilizing cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies.

However, this is not the first instance of a transaction of this magnitude with minimal fees. Back in August 2020, a Bitcoin transaction worth $1 billion was recorded with a nominal fee of just $4.

In comparison, the processing of international fiat transfer often takes one to four working days to process and includes a hefty transaction fee of 1 %–3 %. For a transaction worth $2 billion, this would come at the cost of between $20 million and $60 million. Source

Microstrategy buys more bitcoin

On Monday MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor announced that the firm purchased an additional 5,050 bitcoin for about $242.9 million (€206.25 million) in cash.

Microstrategy purchased additional bitcoins at an average price of 48,099 USD / BTC. Saylor tweeted that as of September 21, the company owns 114,042 bitcoins, for which it spent a total of $3.16 billion at an average price of 27,713 USD / BTC. The firm owns more Bitcoin than any other public company in the world.

During the third quarter of 2021 MicroStrategy purchased a total of 8,957 bitcoin for approximately $419.9 million. The average price per Bitcoin was $46,875.

The current value of all bitcoins held by Microstrategy is more than $5.38 billion. Source

Solana in trouble

The crypto asset Solana experiences problems on its network on Tuesday, after information about the suspension of block production was revealed.

According to the news, Solana encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS (Transactions per Second). These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.

This forking led to excessive memory consumption, causing some nodes to go offline.

Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko tweeted that the enormous increase in transactions was likely linked to DeFi protocol Raydium, which operates on the Solana blockchain.

Production of the blocks on Solana network resumed around 7 a.m. on Wednesday after the community of validators coordinately restarted the network through a network upgrade.Source

Curiosity: 700,000 bitcoin blocks

Bitcoin miners officially produced their 700,000 block on Saturday, marking a major milestone for a network. Although bitcoin has died "428 times" by bitcoin critics since 2009, his popularity and global adoption is growing every day.

It took Bitcoin less than two years to produce 100,000 more blocks after reaching the 600,000 milestone on Oct. 18, 2019. At the time of the last 100,000-block milestone, the BTC price was worth less than $8,000 (€6,790). Today, one Bitcoin is worth over $46,500 (€39,500).

There are currently more than 18,816,000 bitcoins in circulation, representing 89.5% of the total Bitcoin supply. On average, new blocks are generated every ten minutes, though production time is impacted by mining difficulty, adding a new 6.25 BTC into circulation after each block is mined.

At the current pace of block production, the final Bitcoin will be mined around the year 2140. Source

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