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XRP price surges 55% to a 3-year high amid push for financial inclusivity

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XRP price saw a 55% breakout over the past two days as the sixth-ranked cryptocurrency by market cap has renewed its focus on the creation of a cross-border payment network that is inclusive and sustainable. 

Data from Cointelegraph Markets and TradingView shows that XRP dropped to a low of $0.566 in the early hours on April 4 before a wave of trading volume helped lift its price to a high of $0.877 within the last few hours.

XRP/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView

The uptick in trading volume was sparked after Ripple posted a blog entitled “Creating a More Financially Inclusive and Sustainable Future” which discussed how the project has partnered with “mission-driven financial technology companie, leading universities, NGOs, foundations and social entrepreneurs to create greater economic fairness and opportunity for all.”

A second wave of buying took place on April 5 after Ripple posted the following announcement detailing its most recent acquisition designed to enhance its cross-border payment capabilities:

Combined, these recent announcements have led to a 257% increase in XRP trading volume over the past two days from an average 24-hour volume of $5 billion on April 4 to $18.4 billion traded on April 5.

While this rally caught many traders by surprise, VORTECS™ data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro began to detect a bullish outlook for XRP on March 31, prior to the recent price rise.

The VORTECS™ Score, exclusive to Cointelegraph, is an algorithmic comparison of historic and current market conditions derived from a combination of data points including market sentiment, trading volume, recent price movements and Twitter activity.

VORTECS™ Score (green) vs. XRP price. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

As seen in the chart above, the VORTECS™ Score for XRP climbed into the green and registered a high of 67 on March 31, roughly four days before the price began to spike.

The VORTECS™ Score has also risen significantly alongside the price increase on April 5, reaching a high of 84 at the time of writing. Previous backtesting of the VORTECS™ system indicates that based on its rising score, that the price of XRP may still have further upside to go as trading and Twitter volumes continue to show significant increases.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.

XRP price surges 55% to a 3-year high amid push for financial inclusivity

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DeFi platforms Zapper and Aave announce Polygon sidechain integrations

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As cripplingly high gas fees put scalability in the spotlight and multiple platforms rush to become the preferred home of Ethereum’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, layer-two sidechain Polygon may be emerging as a frontrunner after scoring two big wins today. 

Both lending protocol Aave and portfolio management and batched transaction platform Zapper have announced that they will be offering implementations on Polygon. Aave will be launching a trimmed-down a fork of its money market with 7 assets available for borrowing and lending at launch, and Zapper will enable Ethereum-to-Polygon transfers in the first step towards enabling cross-chain “zaps,” their term for multi-transaction, single-click deposits and withdrawals.

Polygon, a recent sidechain rebrand of one-time Ethereum competitor Matic, enables significant increases in throughput as well as fee reductions compared to Ethereum. Multiple NFT projects have previously announced migrations to the chain, and native DeFi platforms are beginning to attract significant sums of total value locked.

In a statement to Cointelegraph, Aave founder Stani Kulechov said that the fee reductions will bring more “inclusivity” to the platform, and Aave’s announcement blog said that the platform is turning its focus on scalability in an effort to bring services to users with as little as a few hundred dollars. This is also what will be the first of several implementations of Aave on various layer-two platforms, per the blog.

Zapper, meanwhile, wrote in their announcement that this integration will be the first of many sidechain, rollup, and Ethereum alternative integrations, with coverage coming for xDai, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Binance Smart Chain, among others.

The goal of cross-chain yield farming has been on the radar for many projects over the past year, but the implementation is notoriously tricky. A dashboard to track yield on multiple chains and “seamlessly changing networks on Zapper” will offer significant increases in capital efficiency.

Per Zapper’s “DeFi Dad,” it will soon be possible to use the platform to gain access to Polygon’s Aave market:

Aside from Polygon, scaling projects across the ecosystem have been catching a hot bid as of late, headlined by StarkWare raising $75 million last week. 

DeFi platforms Zapper and Aave announce Polygon sidechain integrations

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Bitcoin is outshining gold in the battle of the safe havens

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As the Bitcoin (BTC) price edges closer to $59,000, its value relative to gold is approaching new all-time highs, possibly hinting at the emergence of a new preferred store of value.

Measured against gold, Bitcoin’s price reached 34.94 ounces on Tuesday. The BTC-gold comparative peaked at 35.35 ounces on March 13 as Bitcoin surged past $61,000.

Bitcoin continues to outperform gold by a significant margin. | Chart via BuyBitcoinWorldwide

Bitcoin’s value relative to gold has more than doubled over the past three months and has grown nearly sevenfold since October 2020.

Gold futures, meanwhile, plunged below $1,700 a troy ounce Tuesday on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. The price bottomed at $1,676.50, marking a new three-week low. Since peaking above $2,050 a troy ounce in August 2020, bullion has corrected nearly 18%.

2020 was a big year for gold, as the yellow metal set new all-time highs in every major currency before toppling $2,000 per U.S. dollar for the first time. Bullion ended the year with a gain of around 22%. Still, that paled in comparison with Bitcoin’s 265% yearly return.

With the recent $1.9 stimulus package fueling inflation fears, assets like gold and Bitcoin should, in theory, perform well as investors hedge their bets against the declining dollar. However, the recent rise in bond yields may have taken some of the shine away from gold.

Others, even some prominent analysts like Bloomberg’s Mke McGlone, believe gold is losing ground to Bitcoin in the battle of the safe-havens. Earlier this month, McGlone tweeted:

“Gold will always have a place in jewelry and coin collections, but most indicators point to an accelerating pace of Bitcoin replacing the metal as a store of value in investor portfolios.”

Even JPMorgan, an organization long critical of Bitcoin, has claimed that the digital currency will consume a portion of gold’s market share. “The adoption of bitcoin by institutional investors has only begun, while for gold, its adoption by institutional investors is very advanced,” JPMorgan strategists led by Nikolas Panigirtzoglou said in a December 2020 report. “If this medium to longer-term thesis proves right, the price of gold would suffer from a structural headwind over the coming years.”

Bitcoin’s digital gold narrative continues to strengthen post-halving. The quadrennial deflationary event, which last occurred in May 2020, reduces the amount of new Bitcoin that enters circulation after each block is mined.

Bitcoin is outshining gold in the battle of the safe havens

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Crypto user modifies old school Game Boy for Bitcoin mining

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An IT security researcher has been able to adapt Nintendo’s first major handheld game console to mine cryptocurrency.

According to a recent YouTube video, user Stacksmashing used the hardware from a Nintendo Game Boy first released in 1989 as a starting point to mine Bitcoin (BTC). Because the gaming console has no built-in wireless capabilities — and largely predates the internet — the YouTuber said he used a Raspberry Pi microcontroller board attached to the Game Boy’s link port and a USB flash card to establish a connection to a BTC node run from his computer.

Screenshot from YouTube

“My goal was to use an original, unmodified Game Boy,” said Stacksmashing. “I want to plug in a cartridge, and start mining.”

Stacksmashing wrote his own mining code for the Game Boy’s read-only memory, integrated mining software — modified for the gaming console — and ran a BTC node on his computer. The result was nonces getting incremented on the console’s green screen, showing the rig was attempting to mine crypto.

“The hash rate is pretty impressive, roughly 0.8 hashes per second,” said Stacksmashing, explaining: 

“If you compare that to a modern ASIC miner, which comes in at around 100 Terahashes per second, you can see that we are almost as fast, only off by a factor of roughly 125 trillion. At this rate, it should only take us a couple of quadrillion years to mine a Bitcoin.”

Screenshot from YouTube

Many crypto enthusiasts have been looking to gaming consoles as a way to mine BTC or other cryptocurrencies for some time, but in general the systems are neither designed nor marketed towards miners. Earlier this month, a Chinese software developer seemed to have pranked the crypto space by claiming to have mined Ether (ETH) using a PlayStation 5. Last year, developers from 1st Playable denied rumors one of its games could be used to hijack Nintendo’s Switch console to mine BTC.

Stacksmashing’s attempts to use an 8-bit gaming console to mine crypto may have been just for the experience, but he has said on Twitter he’s not finished yet. Already the IT security researcher claims to have used Nintendo’s Super Game Boy — an adapter released in 1994 that allows original Game Boy games to be played on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System — to mine BTC in much the same way.

“Obviously, mining Bitcoin on a Game Boy is everything but profitable, but I learned a lot of things while building this, and definitely had a ton of fun.”

Crypto user modifies old school Game Boy for Bitcoin mining

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WINk (WIN) soars as retail DeFi investors flee high Etheruem gas costs

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Decentralized finance has exploded in popularity over the past year and many analysts have pointed to the 2020 ‘summer of DeFi’ as the primary catalyst for the rallies seen in Ether (ETH)  and Bitcoin (BTC). 

In the beginning, investors were able to easily secure 4-digit annual percentage yield (APY) on an almost endless number of attractively priced assets on Uniswap but the increased activity on the Etheruem network eventually led to unsustainable spikes in gas fees and serious network congestion.

These skyrocketing gas fees have priced out the average retail investor from participating in even the simplest protocol interactions like token approval or staking. The current Etheruem proposals do not provide an immediate solution to these issues and this has motivated investors to look for non-Ethereum-based networks that offer yield farming and other DeFi opportunities.

Average Ethereum gas price. Source: Etherscan

With no simple network-wide solution to high ETH fees planned in the near future, it is worthwhile to explore some of the other options available on competing blockchain networks.

One such option is WINk (WIN), a Tron-based (TRX) gambling platform that allows users to play, socialize and stake assets across multiple blockchain ecosystems through the utilization of the native WIN token.

Low-fee, multi-asset staking

Interacting with the WINk protocol requires a Tron wallet with about 8 TRX which is roughly $0.48 at the current price. 

When compared to $40 (or more) in fees per transaction on Ethereum, the ability to make multiple transactions over several days for less than a dollar becomes quite appealing to the average investor.

Similar to many DeFi platforms, WINk’s platform has many staking opportunities for tokens within the ecosystem, including TRONbetDice (DICE) and TRONbetLIVE (LIVE), which allow token stakers to earn a portion of the proceeds from the activity which takes place within those games.

According to the most recent monthly report from the project, the APRs for staking WIN, DICE and LIVE on the protocol for the month of January were 64%, 123% and 137% respectively.

With WIN currently trading at $0.000394 and DICE and LIVE priced less than $0.05, the low entry cost and price of staking and unstaking might be more appealing for the average retail investor when compared to the sky-high valuations of tokens like Yearn.Finance (YFI) and Aave.

Evidence that traders have begun to notice this opportunity can be found in the recent price performance of WIN which has rallied 700% from a low of $0.000058 on Jan. 1 to a high of $0.000477 on March 20 thanks to a record $344 million in trading volume.

WIN/USDT daily chart. Source: TradingView

VORTECS™ data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro began to detect a bullish outlook for WIN on March 18, prior to the recent price rise.

The VORTECS™ Score, exclusive to Cointelegraph, is an algorithmic comparison of historic and current market conditions derived from a combination of data points including market sentiment, trading volume, recent price movements and Twitter activity.

VORTECS™ Score (green) vs. WIN price. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro

As seen in the chart above, the VORTECS™ Score registered a high of 65 multiple times on March 18 and the most recent pop to 65 occurred roughly six hours before WIN rallied 90%.

Increased activity for the cryptocurrency sector due to mainstream exposure from institutional investors and big-name influencers like Elon Musk and Mark Cuban has the ecosystem poised to see a continued influx of new users looking to earn a high return on smaller-sized investments.

Projects like WIN are well-positioned to capture some of this growth as smaller investors look for options outside the Ethereum network.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.

WINk (WIN) soars as retail DeFi investors flee high Etheruem gas costs

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Latest Binance Coin Burn Scheduled For Around A Month From Now

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Changpeng “CZ” Zhao stands as the CEO of Binance, and announced to the crypto space at large that the exchange will enact its 15th burn of BNB coins, declaring it will happen in around a month or so.

Ongoing Investigations

CZ revealed this answer when a query was made about the matter on Twitter as to when the next BNB burn will be, and CZ saw it fit to respond.

Now, here’s where things get interesting. It’s common knowledge that burning a cryptocurrency’s supply, lessening the total possible cryptocurrencies in order to try and drive up demand, is a move people do to ensure price power. It just so happened that Binance’s BNB tokens had found itself taking a dive by the factor of 14%, going down from $288 to $247.

The reason for this is the fact that Binance has gone under investigation by the CFTC. In short, the government watchdog is trying to determine whether or not they intentionally allowed US citizens to take part in the global crypto exchange.

Some Facts May Have Been Exaggerated

Now, it should be noted that the CFTC has yet to file an official claim of wrongdoing against Binance. Major news outlets, as they always did, took that snippet of news, that the CFTC is investigating Binance, and ran with it full steam ahead.

Now, that doesn’t mean Binance is in the clear altogether, it’s still got an investigation going on by the CFTC, but it’s not been accused of anything.

At the time of writing, the Binance Coin is trading hands at around $279, showing that the price crash has recovered, for the most part.

BNB TOken Seeing Massive Growth

Back in March of last year, when the COVID-19 pandemic really started to hit the world and was officially declared a pandemic, the coin’s price dropped as low as $6.40 on the 12th of March, 2020. Crunching the numbers of that and today’s price, it’s clear that Binance has been doing very good for itself, trading at over 41 times the price of that crushing low.

The fact that Binance is being investigated by the CFTC isn’t all that surprising. It’s been an ongoing issue with the exchange to keep the US investors out of the main exchange and within Binance.US, its US-based arm. However, there’s just so much more to work with within Binance’s global platform, and US-based investors are quite keen on it.

Binance would, hypothetically speaking, gain a lot by having the US investors sneak on to its global platform. The motivation is there, and you could, hypothetically speaking, of course, make the ability to bypass the cordon too easy by intent. However, nothing has been proven. It’s the CFTC’s job to find any misconduct, assuming there was, to begin with.

Latest Binance Coin Burn Scheduled For Around A Month From Now

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