Results of the week: bitcoin is close to a new record and the launch of Ethereum 2.0 will take place on time

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Summarizing last week, we remember the new bitcoin price record, the upcoming launch of Ethereum 2.0, new mysteries about Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity and other key events.

The market rallied as bitcoin rose to $ 19,000

On Monday, November 23, Ethereum broke the $ 600 level. The last time the coin traded at these levels was in June 2018. The next day, bitcoin set a new annual high: its prices rose above $ 19,000 and its capitalization exceeded $ 350 billion.

Some other altcoins have shown equally impressive growth, most notably XRP and Stellar. The XRP price updated a two-year high above $ 0.70, while the XLM rate topped $ 0.22.

Market activity led to a resurgence of the derivatives market: open interest in options for bitcoin and Ethereum updated the all-time high to $ 4.5 billion and surpassed $ 5 billion the next day. The record trading volume in 2020 was also recorded on spot platforms: the indicator was ahead of the values ​​of the March bitcoin collapse.

Against the backdrop of activity, the number of large investors with more than 1000 BTC focused on their addresses has updated an all-time high, approaching 2000.

A few days later, the first cryptocurrency met with resistance. As a result, on November 26, the price plunged $ 3,000, currently reaching $ 16,200. The total volume of futures settlements reached $ 1.3 billion. After the fall of bitcoin, the price of Ethereum has now dropped below $ 500.

However, market growth resumed on Saturday: bitcoin is back above $ 18,000, Ethereum is trading above $ 550.

The requested amount was deposited into the Ethereum 2.0 deposit agreement.

On Tuesday, November 24, the balance of the deposit agreement, which allows ETH to be transferred from the existing network to ETH2, confirming the authority of the post office, exceeded the required threshold of 524,288 ETH and 16,384 validators. This means that Ethereum 2.0’s zero phase launch will take place as planned on December 1st.

Over the weekend, the deposit agreement balance exceeded 50% of the required amount, after which the volume of deposits began to grow at an accelerating pace. The Celsius Network Cryptocurrency Lending Service has contributed the last 25,000 ETH.

On Sunday 29 November, the contract balance exceeded 800,000 ETH and the number of validators exceeded 26,000.

Note that on the eve of Eth2’s zero phase launch, the complexity of mining the second largest cryptocurrency by capitalization and its total computing power have updated all-time highs.

The Ethereum Classic network hosted Thanos’ hard fork.

On Saturday November 28, Thanos’ hard fork took place on the Ethereum Classic network. Its goal is to increase the security of this cryptocurrency after a series of recent attacks by 51%.

Thanos update (EKIP-1099) will double the duration of the Et hash (Etc host) epoch from 30,000 to 60,000 blocks, effectively reducing the size of the direct acyclic graph [DAG]. This will allow miners with 3GB and 4Gb GPUs to resume mining Ethereum Classic.

In October, the Ethereum Classic Core and Ethereum Classic Labs teams implemented the Exponential Subjective Scoring (MESS) solution in the Mordor testnet. The new finalization algorithm has increased the cost of rearranging blocks by nearly 31 times, removing what is said to be a 51% reason for attacks.

Investment firm Guggenheim Partners, which manages assets worth over $ 200 billion, has announced its intention to send part of the portfolio to Grayscale bitcoin-trust.

The Wall Street Company plans to invest 10% of its Macro Opportunities Fund division in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC). According to various estimates, the assets of the Macro Opportunities Fund amount to approximately $ 5 billion. Investments in GBTC will therefore amount to approximately $ 500 million.

A part from that:

– The Swiss branch of the Russian Gazprombank Gazprombank (Switzerland) Ltd has launched a bitcoin trading test.

– Management company VanEck announced physically supported bitcoin exchange notes (ETNs) in the list of traded instruments. Trading was initiated on the German stock exchange Xetra, which is part of Deutsche Boerse.

– MicroStrategy earned nine times more on bitcoin investments than in 2019: The value of the cryptocurrency purchased increased from $ 425 million to $ 735.2 million.

– Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital bitcoin funds raised $ 58.7 million from institutions over the year.

– Coinbase reported that the volume of institutional assets held in its custody service has grown to $ 20 billion.

OKEx exchange has resumed the withdrawal of funds

On Thursday, November 26, the OKEx exchange resumed the withdrawal of funds. The service has been unavailable since October 16, when the exchange reported a loss of communication with one of the private key holders.

An hour after the withdrawal resumed, 5681.79 BTC was withdrawn by OKEx. Some of the coins went to Binance, Huobi, and other exchanges.

Cryptoquant CEO Ki Yong-Ju said the resumption of withdrawals from OKEx could hardly affect bitcoin’s drop below $ 17,000 as 83% of assets withdrawn in the first phase went to non-exchange wallets.

The Trump administration was suspected of preparing a “farewell gift” for the cryptocurrency industry

This week, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong shared his concerns about the plans of US President Donald Trump’s administration to tighten control over cryptocurrency users.

According to him, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin allegedly intends to speed up the introduction of some new rules for local cryptocurrency wallets before his term ends.

He believes the initiative will force Coinbase and other financial firms to verify holders of non-custodial wallets before withdrawing funds. The initiative will force Coinbase and other financial firms to verify the owners of non-custodian wallets before withdrawing funds.

As a result, users will refuse to withdraw funds to their wallets and will start turning to unregulated platforms, Armstrong suggests.

“If such cryptocurrency regulatory measures are passed, it will be a terrible legacy and have a lasting negative impact on the United States,” he stressed.

Presumably, the head of the US Treasury in Joe Biden’s new administration will be hired by the US Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen. Morgan Creek Digital co-founder Anthony Pompliano called it “great news for bitcoin.”

The media have defined the timing of the launch of the Libra stablecoin

The Libra project team is preparing to issue a digital currency in January 2021 in a “limited format,” the Financial Times reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the situation.

The stablecoin will not be linked in a basket made up of several Fiat currencies, as suggested by the original concept. Instead, Libra will launch a coin backed by the US dollar in a 1: 1 ratio.

The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) is expected to issue the appropriate authorization to work as a payment service at the earliest in January.

But the European Central Bank reacted almost immediately to the news. Fabio Panetta, a member of the Governing Council of the ECB, warned that users of Libra should face greater credit, market and liquidity risks. The issuance of stablecoins itself risks “potential systemic consequences” and could put the fate of Fiat currencies at stake.

ForkLog exclusives

Why is bitcoin growing? ForkLog shed light on the most likely reasons for the current growth.

We published the article “Bitcoin: an unprecedented experiment with fair distribution”. Its authors – Digital Asset Research co-founder Lucas Nuzzi and the Coin Metrics team – found that the first cryptocurrency is evenly distributed among many users.

In the story of Satoshi Nakamoto, there is a new version and riddles

Details of a previously unknown correspondence between bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto and the first recipient of the transaction, Hal Finney, were released this week. Three letters date from late 2008 and early 2009.

A study was also published, according to which Satoshi Nakamoto was developing bitcoin while in London.

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