2024-11-13 07:00

DOGE's price has surged 78% since Trump's election win a week ago. DOGE trades at premium on Upbit and Bithumb relative to Binance. The price differential is still noticeably lower than the previous bull market peaks. When it comes to trading alternative cryptocurrencies such as dogecoin (DOGE), South Korea, known as the "Land of the Morning Calm," is often in stark contrast to its tranquil image. Today is just that day as Koreans seem to be jumping into the DOGE market, driving prices higher and creating a noticeable premium on local exchanges Upbit and Bithumb relative to global giant Binance. At press time, Upbit and Bithumb's DOGE/KRW pairs, adjusted for the USD/KRW exchange trade, traded 1.5% higher than Binance's DOGE/USDT, drawing the largest premium in three months, according to data source TradingView. Premiums reflect renewed Korean appetite for DOGE, which has surged 78% since pro-crypto Donald Trump won the U.S. Presidential election a week ago. Trading volume data suggests the same. According to 10x Research, DOGE has topped the charts as the cryptocurrency with the highest trading volume on Upbit and Bithumb since Trump's victory. The latest 24-hour trading volume for DOGE pairs tallies a remarkable $8 billion, equivalent to 57% of the total market capitalization of all stocks in Korea, Markus Thielen, founder of 10x Research said in a note to clients Wednesday. DOGE has gained 227% in 30 days amid long-time crypto fan and billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk's plans to start the "Department of Government Efficiency, a new wing in the Trump administration, abbreviated as D.O.G.E in a homage to the meme cryptocurrency. On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the D.O.G.E department. A spike in Korean demand is typically associated with speculative fervor, often seen at market peaks. However, current premiums on local exchanges are noticeably lower than the highs recorded in March and are significantly less than the double-digit price differentials observed in early 2021. So, there is excitement, but without the speculative frenzy observed at the bull market peaks and other things being equal, prices may continue to rise. Options traders bet on the $1 breakout Options activity on PowerTrade, a crypto exchange focused on derivatives tied to alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins), points to expectations of DOGE's price topping the $1 mark by the end of January. "A client has bought 10K DOGE call options at the $1 strike expiring on Jan. 25 for $0.058 per contract," PowerTrade told CoinDesk Tuesday, explaining a similar outsized bet in the December expiry options. A $1 call option is essentially a bet that prices will surpass that level by the settlement date. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/11/13/dogecoin-craze-grips-korea-fuels-price-premium-on-local-giants-upbit-and-bithumb/

2024-11-13 06:32

In an X post, Musk said that all Department of Government Efficiency actions will be posted online for maximum transparency. President-elect Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk mentioned creating a leaderboard for the most inefficient government spending, blending transparency with public engagement. The announcement and the use of "DOGE" have significantly boosted dogecoin’s memetic fundamentals, with traders setting a long-term target of $1. A frenzied narrative that boosted dogecoin (DOGE) prices over 500% turned to reality on Tuesday — showcasing how memetic bets could be a strong trading thesis. President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that it had picked Vivek Ramaswamy and technology entrepreneur Elon Musk to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that seeks to make government spending and administration more efficient. The duo will work from outside the government to offer advice and guidance to drive large-scale structural reform and create an “entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before.” "Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies -- essential to the 'save America' movement,” Trump said in the announcement posted on his Truth Social account. Musk and Ramaswamy will work until July 4, 2026, on the project, Trump said. In an X post, Musk said that all Department of Government Efficiency actions will be posted online for maximum transparency. “Anytime the public thinks we are cutting something important or not cutting something wasteful, just let us know,” Musk said. “We will also have a leaderboard for most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars. This will be both extremely tragic and extremely entertaining.” A CoinDesk analysis flagged in mid-October about DOGE trade gaining interest among investors for its memetic nature, and that there could be more chatter of “DOGE” in mainstream media and retail trading circles that fuels attention and interest in the token. DOGE prices are up nearly 250% in the past 30 days, reaching 2021 levels on Tuesday with traders now eyeing the $1 mark as a long-term price target. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/11/13/dogecoin-trade-goes-from-meme-to-reality-as-donald-trump-confirms-doge/

2024-11-13 05:01

The new platform, called the “Ethereum time machine,” extends Ethereum’s programming capabilities by allowing smart contracts to execute transactions based on uncertain or not-guaranteed future events. Ethereum, a paramount blockchain due to its programmability and sprawling ecosystem of layer-2 networks, is getting a new dimension: time. Smart Transactions (STXN), a new project from Vlad Zamfir, who pioneered Ethereum's proof-of-stake blockchain system, released on Wednesday a platform that will enable applications to execute transactions based on future events. The new platform, called the “Ethereum time machine,” extends the blockchain's programming capabilities by allowing smart contracts to execute transactions based on uncertain or not-guaranteed future events. “For example, a user could stipulate that a trade execute at a specified day and time conditional on a set of prerequisites,” the STXN team wrote in a press release shared with CoinDesk. “These prerequisites could be absolute, such as the dollar value of a particular asset, or relative – for instance, whether one asset is worth more than another. The potential permutations are almost unlimited, greatly increasing the dynamism of the largest blockchain for developers.” The release comes after STXN announced in July that it would collaborate with Consensys, a major Ethereum development firm, on research that complements Smart Transactions — a feature enabled by Consensys’ Metamask wallets. “STXN is like a time machine because it allows us to guarantee the future when it comes to smart contracts,” STXN co-founder Anuj Das Gupta said in the press release. “It allows us to travel backward in time as well, in the sense that Ethereum smart contracts are no longer limited by what was known at the time they were written. We believe this is an important solution to the tension between flexibility and immutability when it comes to blockchains.” https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/11/13/ethereum-pioneers-new-time-machine-makes-transactions-conditional-on-future-events/

2024-11-12 22:36

The bitcoiners gathered at OP_Next were decidedly in favor of progress – but not too much progress, and certainly not too fast. BOSTON –– Most of the world focuses on bitcoin (BTC)’s zipping price. Not so for the 100-odd bitcoiners who gathered at Fidelity Investments’ headquarters over the weekend. They were preoccupied with helping the original cryptocurrency conquer the world – and meantime avoid getting wrecked. “This is about getting bitcoin to the next billion people,” said Will Foxley, emcee of OP_NEXT, what he claimed was the first bitcoin scaling conference in five years. OP_NEXT is the newest anomaly on crypto’s overstuffed conference circuit. It's got none of the retail-friendly bravado of Bitcoin Nashville. It lacks the corporate booths that dot ETH Denver. Few of its speakers shilled their crypto-business ventures, as nearly everyone did at Solana’s rebooted Breakpoint. Instead, dozens of hoodie-wearing coder boys (and a handful of women) debated improvements that might make bitcoin more useful, usable, and even resilient against faraway problems that could one day upend the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency. “Either we aggressively pursue innovation and progress as quickly as possible or we will eventually be replaced,” said Paul Sztorc of bitcoin developer company Layer2 Labs. Bitcoin famously lacks a singular decision-making authority. Proposed upgrades need to find consensus among the community's many stakeholders, and eventually adoption by the miners who run the computers that run the blockchain. No one quite knows how to know when consensus is reached. “I know it when I see it,” quipped Colin Harper, the conference host as Blockspace Media’s editor-in-chief (he and Foxley are former CoinDesk reporters). Soft forks The two most recent soft forks, or backward-compatible upgrades, helped bitcoin move beyond simply shifting “digital gold” between wallets. Nowadays, network transactions are filled with primitive versions of the wacky crypto-financial wizardry pioneered on Ethereum and other smart contract-centric blockchains. Future soft forks could give this kind of innovation a boost. While many developers regularly propose upgrades, none have succeeded since Taproot was activated in 2021, and Segwit in 2017 before it. Ossification is starting to set in to Bitcoin Core (the basic open-source software for wallets and nodes), some attendees said. Can bitcoin continue to evolve? Technically, of course. But should it? ”People got scared about soft forks unnecessarily because the last two soft forks were large,” said Brandon Black, engineering manager at Swan Bitcoin, a brokerage and custodian. “We should get in the habit” of improving bitcoin. OP_Next attendees were decidedly in favor of progress – but not too much progress, and certainly not too fast. When one audience member shouted support for pushing regular software upgrades to Bitcoin Core, an entire panel of bitcoin developers scoffed. One jokingly retorted, “soft forks every day!” Proposed soft forks percolate up from the bitcoiner community. They undergo study and debate, and if they find sufficient interest, get a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) number. From there, they face more debates, security reviews, debates, and also debates. BIPs that win community consensus (whatever that means) must then be activated as a soft fork – a mechanism that itself is up for debate. Covenants and OP_CAT One unresolved debate is over covenants, a feature that would allow bitcoin holders to hard-code restrictions into how their BTC is spent. Bitcoin developer Jeremy Rubin has long advocated for covenants, winning some fans and many doubters. In 2021 his proposal called CheckTemplateVerify received a BIP number. Then, amid the louder debate over implementing Taproot, momentum for Rubin’s covenants proposal stalled out. “‘Bitcoin review is kind of like the eye of Sauron,'” Rubin said he heard from one detractor at the time. “‘It can see everything but only one thing at a time.'” By his telling, Rubin then declared himself “champion of Taproot activation” in the battle to get the last successful soft fork over the finish line. People simply couldn’t “agree on consensus,” he said. Taproot came online in November 2021. Rubin “reevaluated my life choices,” and quit the Bitcoin Core developer team one year later. A more recent idea actually pulls from bitcoin’s deep past. BIP-347, the OP_CAT proposal, would resurrect a function Satoshi Nakomoto, bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, killed off in 2010 due to security concerns. Nowadays, the function could allow people to essentially write smart contracts on the network. Such a step forward would put bitcoin closer to par with Ethereum, its largest competitor. “When I talk to people about CAT, often people will express that they’re worried that other people are opposed to CAT, but I’ve met very few people who themselves are opposed to CAT,” said the proposal’s author, Ethan Heilman. 'Just don't break it' Most bitcoin investors "stack sats" (slang for accumulating) unbothered by debates over bitcoin’s technical future, if they even know those debates exist. Surely that’s because the vast majority only care about its flashiest feature: price. One of Bitcoin Core’s current contributors, who goes by Portland HODL, posed a question to the auditorium: What’s the one thing every bitcoin investor asks its developers do for bitcoin. Someone yelled: “Number go up!” “Yeah!” shouted Portland HODL, “Just please don’t break bitcoin for me!” Still, Portland HODL said he wanted bitcoin future-proofed against looming threats, like quantum computing, and the year 2106 bug, the blockchain's own version of Y2K. He advocated for a janitorial soft fork he calls “the great consensus cleanup.” Portland HODL was less enthusiastic about soft forks meant to increase bitcoin’s core functionality, such as OP_CAT. These things threaten bitcoin with “unknown unknowns,” he said. And by the way, even as the price soars, block space isn’t filling up to a degree that would indicate the network is hitting its limits. Even if developers could find consensus over what upgrades they’d like to see, there’s no agreement on how to actually do it. Bitcoin has multiple “activation mechanisms” for soft forks and the only thing people seem to agree about is they didn’t like the way that Taproot and SegWit did it. Toward the end of the conference, one attendee asked panelists: “Who is the decision maker?” Everyone laughed. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/11/12/just-dont-break-bitcoin-devs-debate-upgrading-tech-behind-top-crypto/

2024-11-12 20:58

Crypto prices continue melting upwards since Donald Trump's election victory as investors reprice digital assets in anticipation of a friendlier government. Bitcoin briefly hit $90,100 on Coinbase before quickly succumbing to sell pressure. The wild swing in crypto prices liquidated over $900 million of leveraged derivatives trading positions across all digital assets, CoinGlass shows. Ripple's XRP, XLM and HBAR advanced 15%-18% outperforming the CoinDesk 20 Index. The crypto bull market shows no signs of stopping, with bitcoin (BTC) reaching another milestone by hitting the $90,000 level on crypto exchange Coinbase. The largest crypto retraced around 5% to the low-$85,000 level earlier Tuesday, shaking out some late leveraged buyers. The pullback didn't last long, though, with prices quickly rebounding and clinching a new all-time high of $90,100 on Coinbase's BTC-USD pair towards the later hours of the U.S. session before giving back some of the gains. The CoinDesk Bitcoin Index (XBX), which tracks pricing data from multiple exchanges, hit $89,971 as the price on Coinbase topped $90,000. The $90,000 level could pose a significant barrier for bitcoin's rise, at least for the short term. On popular crypto exchange Binance, order book data of the most liquid trading pair BTC-USDT showed mounting sell orders at the $90,000 level. Positioning on the options market also suggest that BTC's rise may stall out in the $90,000-$100,000 range. Indeed, within minutes of reaching the $90,000 level, prices reversed with bitcoin sinking to $88,500, still up 0.9% over the past 24 hours and outperforming the broader CoinDesk 20 Index, which was flat over the same time period. Ethereum's ether (ETH) and solana (SOL) slipped 2%-3%, while Ripple's XRP (XRP), stellar lumens (XLM) and hedera (HBAR) outperformed, advancing 15%-18%. The wild price swings liquidated $940 million of leveraged derivatives trading positions across all digital assets over the past 24 hours, CoinGlass data shows, the largest amount since the August 5 market crash as unwinding Japanese yen carry trades that day brought BTC briefly below $50,000. Crypto prices are melting upwards since Donald Trump's decisive U.S. election victory last week as investors are piling into the asset class in anticipation of more crypto-friendly regulations, with cooling inflation, solid economic growth and global monetary easing providing additional tailwind for risk assets. "More than retail investors, institutions are driven by government signals," Nathan McCauley, CEO and co-founder of digital asset custody provider Anchorage Digital, said in an emailed note. "The anticipation of a pro-crypto government next year is proving to be an institutional catalyst—the likes of which we have never seen." https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/11/12/bitcoin-blasts-to-90k-as-crypto-rally-shakes-out-leverage-traders/

2024-11-12 18:39

Monday’s bitcoin rally propelled El Salvador and Bhutan’s crypto stashes to $500 million and $1.1 billion respectively. The value of El Salvador's bitcoin holdings have risen above $500 million and Bhutan's above $1 billion. Bhutan's BTC holdings now account for more than one-third of its GDP versus El Salvador's stack at just 1.5% of its GDP. The fiscal situation of El Salvador's government continues to improve. Bitcoin’s face-ripping rally on Monday pushed the value of El Salvador's BTC above $500 million and the tiny Kingdom of Bhutan's holdings above $1 billion. Data from El Salvador’s Bitcoin Office shows the country's bitcoin stack at just less than 5,932 tokens. With the price at $87,000 at press time, that's worth roughly $516 million. Impressive as El Salvador President Nayib Bukele's Bitcoin bet might be, the Kingdom of Bhutan's story might be even better. The tiny South Asian state, with a population of just 800,000 (vs. El Salvador at 6.4 million), is sitting on a bitcoin stash of 12,574 tokens, per Arkham Intelligence, worth $1.1 billion at the current price. Put another way, the value of Bhutan's bitcoin holdings amounts to more than one-third of the country's GDP of just under $3 billion. El Salvador's $500 million in bitcoin amounts to just 1.5% of its GDP. Bhutan’s holdings have reportedly been accumulated through bitcoin mining, as the Himalayan nation has an abundance of hydroelectric power. The country, in September, was reported by Arkham to likely to be the fourth biggest nation-state bitcoin holder. After purchasing bitcoin on a few occasions during the 2021 bull run, El Salvador began dollar-cost-averaging into the top cryptocurrency in November 2022, and was in the black on its holdings by December 2023, according to Bukele. El Salvador's bitcoin strategy has been a constant sticking point with the International Monetary Fund, which has raised concerns about the nation's fiscal situation. But that situation apparently continues to improve. The country today said that it intends to buy back $2.5 billion of its dollar-denominated debt. According to Bloomberg, El Salvador's debt has returned 4.7% since the election of Donald Trump last week. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/11/12/el-salvadors-bitcoin-stash-rises-above-500m-but-bhutan-story-might-be-even-bigger/