Bitcoin continues dominance ₿, China's payment via SIM 🇨🇳, Luxury watch as collateral⌚
Daily Crypto, Blockchain & Web3 Update 2023-07-12
CRYPTOCURRENCY
Bitcoin continues dominance as 3rd week of fund inflows correct previous months’ outflows (3 min read)
Nine weeks of outflows were corrected by three weeks of positive inflows, according to the CoinShares report.
The inflows for this week reached a staggering $136 million. Bitcoin funds continued their trend of holding the anchor position, with 98% of the inflows coming into BTC. The other 2% mostly came from Ether, multi-asset holdings, and a handful of altcoins.
Bank of China trials offline payments for digital yuan via SIM cards (2 min read)
The Bank of China is testing a new offline payment system that uses SIM cards. This payment method is designed specifically for the digital yuan, China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC).
Algorand decentralized lending protocol Algofi to shut down by end of year (2 min read)
Algofi, the borrowing and lending protocol built on the decentralized finance blockchain Algorand, will soon shut down.
Developers say building the borrowing and lending protocol is "no longer a viable path" for Algorand. The Algofi protocol had $25 million in total value locked at the time of publication, down from its $135 million peak in February.
NFTs
DeFi borrower uses luxury watch-backed NFT as collateral for a loan (2 min read)
While some praised the move, others believed it was centralized and added NFTs where they were unnecessary.
A nonfungible token (NFT) collector shared the story of how a decentralized finance (DeFi) loan was collateralized through a luxury watch and was facilitated with an NFT representing the asset.
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Google hit with lawsuit over new AI data scraping privacy policy (2 min read)
Google is being sued for misusing data, including copyrighted material, in AI training after updating its privacy policy.
Cathie Wood’s ARK sells 135K Coinbase shares as price hits $90 (3 min read)
Investment veteran Cathie Wood is taking some profits from ARK Invest’s large Coinbase holdings by selling a small portion of its stash.
On July 11, Wood’s investment firm ARK offloaded 135,152 Coinbase shares ($12 million) from one of its major exchange-traded funds (ETF), the ARK Innovation ETF.
Grayscale CEO: BlackRock ETF filing a ‘moment of validation’ for Bitcoin (3 min read)
Grayscale Investments CEO Michael Sonnenshein sees the recent surge in spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) filings as a confirmation of Bitcoin's worth.
ConsenSys launches Linea zkEVM to further scale Ethereum (3 min read)
The Ethereum ecosystem welcomes another layer-2 scaling solution as ConsenSys begins onboarding partners to its Linea network, which has produced significant scaling milestones in testing.
ConsenSys rolls out the scaling network Linea, which delivers faster throughput and 15 times lower transaction costs than Et’s layer 1.
Bad news for Ripple? LBRY judge passes ruling on if secondary crypto sales are securities (3 min read)
A US district court judge refused to decide if the secondary sale of LBRY Credits (LBC) is considered a security.
On July 11, Judge Paul Barbadoro of the U.S. The District Court of New Hampshire ruled in favor of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the case against the decentralized content platform LBRY.
US GAO explores blockchain for SBA’s small business programs oversight (2 min read)
The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that blockchain technology can help facilitate oversight of various programs run by the Small Business Administration (SBA).
Near Foundation treasury drops to $900M as token price plunges (2 min read)
The $200 million decline was mostly due to a drop in the price of Near tokens, in line with the crypto bear market.
At the end of Q2 2023, layer-one blockchain Near Protocol's (NEAR) treasury had declined to $900 million, led by a fall in the price of NEAR tokens from $1.99 to $1.38 apiece.
ConsenSys launches Linea zkEVM to further scale Ethereum (3 min read)
The Ethereum ecosystem welcomes another layer-2 scaling solution as ConsenSys begins onboarding partners to its Linea network, which has produced significant scaling milestones in testing.