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Bitstamp announces US expansion after 570% increase in customers

One of the oldest exchanges in the crypto space recently announced that it would be ramping up efforts to reach more users in the United States.

In an announcement from Bitstamp today, the crypto exchange said it would be launching a marketing campaign in the U.S. aimed at educating retail investors about crypto following significant growth in the first quarter of 2021. As part of these efforts, Bitstamp said it planned to triple the number of people in its U.S. team and grow its customer support team by 50% in 2021.

Bitstamp CEO Julian Sawyer told Cointelegraph said the firm began to see increased levels of interest from retail investors and U.S. financial institutions in 2020 while claiming other crypto exchanges were “struggling with uptime and customer support.” He said that the firm’s security, transparent fees, and infrastructure would give the exchange an edge against any local competition.

“Crypto is the fastest growing segment of financial services and we intend to be a leader in the most competitive financial market in the world: the U.S,” said Sawyer. “The potential upside for new retail and institutional investors in the U.S. is astronomical.”

Sawyer cited the significant growth the exchange had experienced during the pandemic as an indication Americans may want greater access to digital assets. Bitstamp reported that the assets under management for U.S. users had risen by 281% in Q1 2021, while the number of customers had surged by 570% in the first four months of this year compared to the same period in 2020. In addition, activity for trades and deposits showed a 348% increase monthly in 2021 when compared to the same period in 2020.

The announcement follows Bitstamp changing key positions in its leadership over the last year. A former Gemini executive, Sawyer joined the firm as CEO in October. Most recently, Amazon veteran and former Barclays finance director Stephen Bearpark came on board as Bitstamp’s chief financial officer while Sameer Dubey joined as its chief operating officer.

Bitstamp announces US expansion after 570% increase in customers

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‘Doge4Amazon’ Petition Gathers Steam As Thousands Call on Amazon To Accept Dogecoin

No less than 130,000 people have signed a petition for Amazon to accept Dogecoin as a payment option. This comes at the back of Dogecoin’s price surge in recent weeks.

Dogecoin Petition for Amazon

The petition called Doge4Amazon now has a total of 130,000 signatures of people from the Dogecoin community.

It was first launched by an anonymous user named Mark E back in September 2018 on Change.org, where it targeted only 25,000 signatures.

However, it surpassed the 100,000-signature mark last month, which may be attributed to the price rally of the cryptocurrency. 

A link to the petition was reportedly posted on Sunday to the active Dogecoin community on Reddit, where it gained 1,100 upvotes.

Mark E disclosed in a recent update that Amazon was contacted by staff at Change.org on behalf of the petition after the petition surpassed 100,000 signatures.

Founded by former IBM software engineer Billy Markus and product manager Jackson Palmer as a joke in 2013, the price of the Shiba Inu dog meme-based coin has soared, before it crashed recently.

Its valuation is around $29 billion now, falling off a high of $50 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. 

Even though small business owners and entrepreneurs are already adopting the cryptocurrency, the petition aims to push Amazon into becoming one of the first major corporations to use it as a payment method.

With Amazon’s massive 47% market share of the e-commerce retail market in the US and net revenues of over $280 billion as reported in 2019, many expect that it would accept Dogecoin. This is however wishful thinking as the retailer is still yet to accept Bitcoin as a mode of payment.

Early this year, Amazon reportedly posted job vacancies that show that it may be planning to launch its own digital currency project and trial it in Mexico soon. 

The yet-to-be-announced project, which the company sketched out across the job posts, appeared to be a digital currency that will be directly converted for cash and will be used to pay for goods and services on the platform.

Dogecoin’s Steady Rise To Popularity

Thanks to celebrities and billionaires like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Dallas Maverick’s Mark Cuban, Dogecoin has been steadily rising to popularity in recent months.

Musk has been very vocal about his love for Dogecoin. He posted several tweets hyping the digital asset and even once called it his favorite cryptocurrency.

Shark Tank investor Cuban also recently announced that his NBA franchise would accept Dogecoin as payment for tickets and merchandise.

After his announcement, Cuban revealed that the inclusion of the digital asset as a payment option had paid off as he said the team sold 122,000 DOGE worth of merchandise in March.

‘Doge4Amazon’ Petition Gathers Steam As Thousands Call on Amazon To Accept Dogecoin

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Bitcoin Could Surge $5 million, ‘Screaming Signal’ To Buy, Says MicroStrategy CEO

According to the latest announcement, CEO of MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor, predicts that Bitcoin price could hit $5 Million and considers BTC as a “screaming buy.” 

Now that Saylor predicts the price of Bitcoin to hit $5 Million, it indicates that his price foretelling surpasses all predictions, including the one made by Kraken. 

Recently, the CEO of popular cryptocurrency trading platform Kraken also believes that BTC will surpass all records and will hit $1 million in the next few years. 

Saylor’s words came during an interview with FamilyOffice, first spotted by Daily Hodl, where he stated that he assumes BTC price would hit a million dollars adding it could reach $5 million. According to him, if it merely substitutes all the indexes with monetary index money, why shouldn’t it hit a market cap of $100 trillion or even more?

According to Saylor, Bitcoin is Screaming Signal

According to Saylor, BTC is showing investors a “screaming signal” that it should be bought, as it has the potential to reach “$200 to $300 trillion addressable markets. He also cites Bitcoin as the most common cryptocurrency, with the buy signal being that it has been growing at a rate of 200 percent per year for the past 12 years. 

He also predicts cryptocurrency with FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) stocks and believes that cryptocurrency will keep on outperforming when compared to FAANG stocks. This assumption comes from the fact that he doesn’t think the tech giants will rise by a factor of ten from where they are today, considering the fact that he thinks they will “maybe” triple in value over time.

Following the economic fallout and rise in money printing that started early last year, Saylor believes Bitcoin’s promise has become much easier to comprehend.

In his words, “Bitcoin got to be a much easier trade in March of 2020. And every month since March of 2020, it’s been de-risked exponentially, and then the need is exploding.”

2021 The Best Year So Far For Bitcoin

Although there are over 4,000 cryptocurrencies, still Bitcoin-the first-ever cryptocurrency is considered to be the most successful cryptocurrency to date.

It all started in 2009 where the Bitcoin network was first introduced, and since the cryptocurrency has seen some significant ups and downs. 

2021 has been the best year for Bitcoin as it experienced an unexpected hike. In January 2021, its price rose to $40K, and on 16 February, the price further surged to $50,000, and finally, on 13 March 2021, it was announced that the price crossed $61,000 to set a new all-time high. 

At the time of writing, BTC is trading at the rate of $52,752.00 with a market capitalization of 983,367,972,775. 

To get instant updates about Blockchain Technology and to learn more about online Blockchain Certifications, check out Blockchain Council.

Bitcoin Could Surge $5 million, ‘Screaming Signal’ To Buy, Says MicroStrategy CEO

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Andreessen Horowitz leads $23M round for NFT marketplace OpenSea

OpenSea, one of the largest digital collectible marketplaces, has secured backing from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, and others in a new funding round.

According to Andreessen Horowitz, the firm is leading a $23 million Series A round for OpenSea alongside a16z’s Cultural Leadership Fund, as well as angel investors Ron Conway, Mark Cuban, Tim Ferriss, Belinda Johnson, Naval Ravikant, Ben Silberman, and others.

“OpenSea makes NFTs searchable, usable, and organized,” said a16z general partner Katie Haun. “But it goes further and provides a marketplace that brings all platforms together and eases transactions among all parties, the way eBay and Amazon do.”

The venture capital firm cited OpenSea’s growth in its decision to back the non-fungible token, or NFT, marketplace, saying it had been “off the charts” in the last six months, with transaction volume having grown 100-fold. In addition, a16z praised the marketplace’s leadership, including CEO Devin Finzer and CTO Alex Atallah.

As one of the first venture capital firms to enter the space, Andreessen Horowitz has invested in a variety of crypto projects so far, including Libra, Maker DAO, and Coinbase. Last month the firm backed Optimism’s L2 scaling solution.

This story is developing and will be updated.

Andreessen Horowitz leads $23M round for NFT marketplace OpenSea

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A Comprehensive Guide on Amazon Managed Blockchain

A Comprehensive Guide on Amazon Managed Blockchain

This article provides a comprehensive guide on what Amazon Managed Blockchain is, explaining its benefits and AWS availability of Ethereum on Amazon Managed Blockchain.

Table of Contents 

  • What is Amazon Managed Blockchain?
  • Benefits of Amazon Managed Blockchain
  • AWS Availability of Ethereum on Amazon Managed Blockchain
  • Concluding Lines 

What is Amazon Managed Blockchain?

For all Blockchain beginners, Blockchain is a peer-to-peer(P2P) decentralized distributed ledger technology that records transactions in an immutable manner. Technology allows developers to build applications where various parties can carry out transactions in parallel without relying on a central authority.

Although this might sound fascinating, it is important to note that Blockchain’s scalability still remains one of the prime issues. In fact, building a scalable blockchain with existing technologies is a complex task.

Managed Blockchain is a completely managed service that empowers users to join public networks and maintain and manage scalable private networks with just a few clicks. Instead of manually installing software, creating and managing certificates for access control, and configuring networking components, continuously monitor the infrastructure, and adapt changes when required, one can rely on Amazon Managed Blockchain as it makes it easy to maintain your Blockchain network. 

The significant benefit of this Blockchain is that it eradicates the overhead that is required to create the network, and, most importantly, it automatically scales in order to meet the requirements of thousands of applications performing millions of transactions. 

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Benefits of Amazon Managed Blockchain

Let’s have a quick look at the advantages of Amazon Managed Blockchain.

Fully managed

Amazon Managed Blockchain assists in the creation of blockchain networks spanning several AWS accounts, allowing a group of people to perform transactions and exchange data without the need for a central authority. It also removes the need for manual provisioning of hardware, device setup, and networking and security configuration.

Offers two Different Blockchain Platforms

Initially, Managed Blockchain supported only Hyperledger Fabric, but now customers can choose either Hyperledger Fabric or Ethereum, depending on their needs.  

Scalable

This particular Blockchain has the potential to scale your blockchain network depending on the usage of applications on the network. This Blockchain has the ability to scale your blockchain network based  It means that if a network user requires additional capacity for making and validating transactions, he can instantly use Managed Blockchain’s APIs to add a new peer node. 

Reliability

Managed Blockchain aims to improve the reliability of the ordering service, which is a component in the Hyperledger Fabric that ensures delivery of transactions, although it’s difficult to keep track and recover the entire transaction history. Managed Blockchain’s ordering service is built using special Amazon QLDB technology and has an immutable change log, which guarantees that the data is durably saved.

AWS Availability of Ethereum on Amazon Managed Blockchain

Initially, in 2019, Amazon announced the general availability of its fully managed blockchain service, and after two years, recently in March 2021, Amazon announced its extended services, mentioning its general availability of Ethereum on Amazon Managed Blockchain. Thus, with this announcement, Amazon Managed Blockchain presents the selection of two different blockchain platforms including, Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. 

Let’s talk a little bit about Etherum and Hyperledger Fabric here. 

Hyperledger Fabric is an open-source enterprise-grade permissioned DLT platform that is known to provide modularity and versatility for a broad set of industry use cases, including banking, insurance, healthcare, supply chain, human resources, etc. It is well suited for applications with rigorous privacy and access control. 

Talking about Ethereum, it is an open-source platform for decentralized applications and is better suited for highly distributed networks where data transparency is critical. It enables a successful use case, and that is decentralized finance (DeFi) that is gaining a lot of momentum and showing no sign of slowing down. 

But when it comes to operating and managing Ethereum infrastructure, its not easy as there are various concerns, including data reliability, data storage scaling problems, and time-sensitive Ethereum software upgrades.

Now that Amazon has made Ethereum on Managed Blockchain generally available, consumers of AWS can easily provision Ethereum nodes and link to the public Ethereum main network and test networks such as Rinkeby and Ropsten.

Amazon Managed Blockchain helps customers in a number of ways. For instance, they can get:

  • secure and reliable networking 
  • reliable access to the network via standard open-source Ethereum APIs
  • reliable synchronizations to the Ethereum 
  • durable and flexible storage for data. 

Developers building smart contract monitoring tools and fraud detection apps can now reap the benefits from fully managed Ethereum service on Amazon Managed Blockchain. According to Amazon, Ethereum nodes are fully integrated with the AWS management console, which permits the creation or deletion of a node and regains information about running nodes. 

It was explained by Amazon that,

“Ethereum on Managed Blockchain only supports the eth_sendRawTransaction method, which demands that you create and sign the transaction before sending it to the node. Managed Blockchain does not have any way to sign transactions similar to an Ethereum wallet application.”

Concluding Lines 

This has led us to the end of our discussion. Hope you have gained a clear understanding of Amazon Managed Blockchain. 

If the Blockchain domain interests you, you can get enrolled in Blockchain Council and become a Certified Blockchain Expert. 

To get instant updates about Blockchain Technology and to learn more about online Blockchain Certifications, check out Blockchain Council.

A Comprehensive Guide on Amazon Managed Blockchain

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