With less than two days left to the ninth Ethereum upgrade, Muir Glacier, majority of the node operators are ready for it. As previously reported, Ethereum is forced to have another hard fork less than a month after the Istanbul upgrade, due to a mistake, and in order to delay the feature known as the difficulty bomb which slows down blocks, aka Ice Age, for approximately 611 days. Nodes should’ve been upgraded by December 30 to account for the variable block times, given that even the exact tim...

Tobias Adrian is the Financial Counsellor and Director of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) Monetary and Capital Markets Department. Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli is a Deputy Division Chief in the same Department. _ Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) is a complex and multidisciplinary topic requiring active analysis and debate. It raises questions related to monetary policy, central banking operations, and payment systems—as well as financial stability and legal foundations and regulation. ...

After bitcoin (BTC) forcefully broke through the USD 10,000 mark on Sunday, followed by a flash-crash down to USD 9,700 on Monday morning, analysts now predict that even larger gains may lie ahead for the number one digital asset. While the short-lived sell-off seen in the early hours of trading on Monday may have scared off some short-term speculators, the consensus in the community appears to be that this is normal profit-taking, potentially combined with a so-called “gap fill” on the CME futu...

George McDonaugh is the CEO and Co-Founder of KR1 plc, the London listed cryptocurrency and blockchain investment company. Facebook’s Libra, Twitter, Digital Fiat, and China Let’s look at some macro trends circling the esoteric inner core of this ongoing technological revolution. First up there’s Facebook’s Libra, which currently is a swirling mass of confusion. It’s clearly become a major part of the world’s biggest social media giant’s roadmap and they’re throwing a lot of resources at it. Fo...

New investors are the lifeblood of bitcoin (BTC). New investors rushed to buy BTC in December 2017, and it's new investors that are needed if the most popular cryptocurrency is to enjoy significant gains in 2020 and beyond. Research firm TokenInsight made this point in its annual mining industry report, writing that in "the long run, the main factor supporting the bitcoin price is the inflow of new investors." Also, Su Zhu, CEO of Singaporean hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, recently speaking of...

Disclaimer: The text below is a sponsored article that was not written by Cryptonews.com journalists. Cryptocurrencies have been all over the news lately. This is largely due to their wild price fluctuations. However, what seems to be forgotten amongst all the talk of all-time highs and 60% corrections is that you can actually use them to buy things with. You know, like a currency? Every year the list of retailers prepared to accept payment in some form of cryptocurrency is expanding too. Today...

Here is what happened in the Cryptoworld in the second quarter of this year: Total crypto market capitalization in Q2 April The quarter started with Bitcoin price suddenly jumping by 16% in an hour, reaching USD 4,882 per coin, the level last seen in November 2018, then it went above USD 5,000. This all prompted numerous crypto forecasts to start pouring in. Singapore-headquartered blockchain company Pundi X blamed the bear market and long certification process for missing their expansion targe...

Bitcoin (BTC) has gone up over 4.6% in a day, and nearly double that in a week. Popular crypto analysts and traders are discussing this jump, but not many seem convinced that this particular rally will last, let alone lead to new all-time highs. (Updated at 16:58 UTC: updates in bold). The number one coin by market capitalization has made a sudden jump on January 6, nearing the USD 8,000 mark and at the time of writing (UTC 9:37), it is trading at USD 7,888 - a price it hasn't seen since Novembe...

Crypto Briefs is your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptocurrency and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news. Adoption news Bitcoin sidechain RSK said it has launched a two-way bridge between Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. Developers on either platform can send their tokens to the other ecosystem, leveraging the benefits of faster throughput, lower transaction fees, or variations in consensus mechanisms, as they wish, according to RSK....

Disclaimer: The text below is a sponsored article that was not written by Cryptonews.com journalists. Bitcoin takes over the digital world. From online retail to video gaming, from banking to travel — crypto adoption keeps gathering momentum in a variety of markets. Some of the industries show great potential to expand after bitcoin adoption, but companies often don’t endorse the process due to a lack of favorable conditions. For example, bitcoin and retail seem to belong together, but the per...

Bitcoin (BTC) production is seemingly being shifted to North America from China, which dominates digital coin mining. But if so, what could be the reasons behind it? At the end of 2019, China's Bitcoin miners controlled some 65% of total hash power, according to CoinShares Research. Also, Chinese firms such as Bitmain and Canaan are the biggest manufacturers of bitcoin mining hardware in the world. "What I have seen recently, probably over the past three to six months, is a real growing shift to...

Proof of Stake has become fashionable. Towards the tail end of 2019, a growing number of crypto-exchanges and platforms added support for proof-of-stake (PoS) tokens, as well as for staking services that invest PoS crypto on the behalf of users. At the same time, the number of proof-of-stake digital assets grew, as did the amount of value staked in them. Such growth is set to continue in 2020, with analysts expecting more PoS projects to come online in the new year. Not only that, but they expe...

The popular oft-debated narrative of Bitcoin (BTC) as a safe haven is being tested yet again, following the U.S. strike in Iran. (Updated at 17:00 UTC: updates in bold). Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani, head of the elite Quds Force, and Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis were killed in an air strike on their convoy in Baghdad airport by the U.S. airstrike late on Thursday, reports Reuters. Veteran war-zone correspondent and political analyst Elijah J. Magnier posted a Twitter t...

Disclaimer: The text below is a sponsored article that was not written by Cryptonews.com journalists. Bitcoin continues to make its early adopters rich but how much of a risk is making an investment today? There are all kinds of factors to consider. Will governments try to ban it? Can governments successfully ban it? Will quantum computing or another cryptocurrency render the Bitcoin technology obsolete? Of course, then there’s risks inherent with any investment. Do you look after it yourself, ...

A recent debate in the Cryptoverse has brought forward yet again a number of vital questions concerning the very basis of Bitcoin (BTC) - and crypto in general: how safe is BTC from censorship, control, and surveillance? The participant in this debate are Kevin Sekniqi, Co-founder and Chief Protocol Architect at blockchain startup AVA Labs, former software engineer at Microsoft on the one side, and on the other, Alex Gladstein, Chief Strategy Officer at Human Rights Foundation (HRF), Vice Presid...

There isn’t enough data for us to know for sure or predict with any certainty how Bitcoin (BTC) will behave before or after the mining reward halving, so there’s no room for stress, panic or wild predictions. The next BTC halving is the talk of the town, and it is safe to expect that it’ll continue to be (increasingly) so until the actual event in May 2020. But the new report by crypto market analysis firm Coin Metrics says that we simply do not have enough information to know how the world’s mo...