2024-01-27 23:06

A bug in the upgraded software, identified Jan. 25, was deemed to pose "little risk," but after "robust feedback" from the blockchain's developer community, the Stellar Development Foundation is now recommending a delay beyond the Jan. 30 target date. The Stellar blockchain is likely to delay its much anticipated upgrade to add Ethereum-style smart contracts, after a bug was found that prompted developers and validators behind the project to reconsider the Jan. 30 target date. The Stellar Development Foundation, which supports the blockchain's ecosystem, found a bug on Jan. 25 in the Stellar Core v20.1.0 software, according to a draft blog post shared with CoinDesk on Saturday. The bug could theoretically affect applications and services on the new "Soroban" smart-contracts transactions once the upgrade goes through. SDF officials "decided that the bug posed little risk given the phased rollout plan," but after "robust feedback" from the developer community, the foundation is now planning to "disarm" its own validators to prevent them from voting to upgrade the network on Jan. 30, according to the post. Other validators could still choose to push ahead with the "Protocol 20" upgrade, according to the post. But in an email on Sunday, an SDF representative told CoinDesk that six of seven tier-1 validators had now communicated plans to disarm, including SDF, Satoshipay, Blockdaemon, Public Node, Lobstr and Whalestack. "Given current configurations, if less than five organizations vote for the upgrade, it won’t have sufficient quorum to be accepted," according to the representative. "In other words, it appears that the upgrade will be postponed." A fix for the bug should be available within the next two weeks, and if the upgrade ends up getting postponed, the foundation would then "coordinate to determine a future vote date." Stellar is one of the oldest blockchains, created as a fork of the Ripple protocol in 2014, and the project is upgrading to add the programmability that Ethereum and its "smart contracts" are known for. Traders may be speculating whether the facelift could put fresh energy into the project's native XLM tokens. https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/01/27/stellars-foundation-supports-delay-of-smart-contracts-upgrade-after-bug-found/

2024-01-27 18:32

CoinDesk reviewed on-chain data to estimate how much WEN token will be left at the end of the airdrop. After months of asking Jupiter's team when the trading protocol's token airdrop would be, barely half of eligible wallets have claimed the valuable joke token WEN that resulted. Two days are left in the claims window for WEN token, the latest meme coin on Solana that's doing double duty as a test-run for Jupiter's own highly anticipated airdrop. The token's price continues to swing wildly as eligible wallets nab up their allocations. According to data reviewed by CoinDesk just under half of the wallets who made WEN's whitelist had claimed their tokens by press time. Each eligible wallet gets the same amount of WEN: 643,652 tokens worth around $70, but the price of the brand new meme coin is highly volatile. At current prices that means airdrop hunters are leaving $39 million in value on the table, assuming of course that the WEN claims stop right now. That's unlikely to happen. But a good chunk of WEN will likely go unclaimed at the end of the three-day airdrop. On-chain data suggests this figure could be at least 17% of WEN's 1 trillion token supply. Final claim figures could influence WEN's price by restricting the meme coin's total supply. WEN's creators minted 1 trillion WEN tokens and earmarked 700 billion of it for this three-day airdrop. They've pledged to burn any airdrop-earmarked tokens that aren't claimed by early on Jan. 29. The WEN airdrop is the latest spread-the-wealth event on the Solana blockchain. Over 1 million wallets became eligible for it by holding a variety of NFTs, owning the Solana-themed Saga smartphone or trading small amounts of crypto on the Jupiter DEX aggregator. Jupiter's own airdrop of the JUP token is slated for next week, making the WEN release a proving ground for a whole slate of airdrop tech. It debuted on Jupiter's new "LFG Launchpad," an airdrop claims portal with a suite of services to support markets for trading new tokens. Claims data Around 175 billion WEN tokens could be burned if the current rate of airdrop claims holds. But the figure is likely to be far larger, especially if the claims rate continues to slow. CoinDesk estimated these figures using transaction data from the on-chain program in charge of the WEN airdrop. At press time it had processed around 7,000 successful claims in the previous hour. That rate is gradually slowing and will likely continue to tail off as the airdrop continues. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the busiest time for WEN claims was right at the start of the airdrop. Airdrop hunters blasted the distribution program with 225,000 claims transactions in the first hour alone and then caused massive spikes and swoons in its market on the Jupiter-built liquidity pool protocol Meteora. Jupiter's team was expecting the action. WEN trading largely happened in a pool on Meteora, a piece of market-making infrastructure for swapping tokens on the Solana blockchain. The pool had been allocated 200 billion WEN tokens to support liquidity. Jupiter co-founder Ben Chow said the early hours of trading were "overall pretty seamless" because they tested things out beforehand. What is WEN token? WEN token is a joke about airdrop hunters and a debut for a new kind of token on Solana. First, the joke: WEN. That was the unending cry of many an airdrop trader. These "wen bros" (as one Jupiter co-founder calls them) pelted Jupiter with questions about its airdrop timing for months, causing the founder, who goes by the pseudonym Weremeow, to write a poem. https://x.com/weremeow/status/1738590330805719289 A screenshot of that poem was turned into a fractionalized NFT by Ovols, a project with its own tokenization standard for the Solana blockchain. Ovols created the 1 trillion WEN tokens as fractionalized shares of the WEN poem and then worked with Jupiter to launch the token. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/01/27/around-17-of-wen-token-supply-could-be-burned-after-airdrop-data-suggests/

2024-01-26 19:54

The cryptocurrency has dipped following the most bullish event in recent crypto history, the launch of spot bitcoin ETFs, apparently causing a crisis in faith. By nearly all metrics, spot bitcoin ETFs have been off to a great start. And yet, the launch of these much anticipated products is tanking the price of the industry’s leading asset. Since Jan. 10, the day the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved the roster of exchange-traded funds, bitcoin (BTC) is down about 15%. What was widely regarded to be the most bullish event in recent crypto history, with the possibility of drawing in millions of new bitcoin investors and potentially billions in capital, may actually — at least temporarily — be cooling bitcoin’s jets. This is largely due to the billions of dollars exiting GBTC, which transitioned to an ETF from a closed-ended trust, meaning investors are finally able to pull their capital out. Grayscale has seen more than $3 billion in redemptions, only some of which is flowing into other bitcoin ETFs that charge much lower fees than GBTC’s 1.5%. On social media, noted VC Chris Burniske said bitcoin has yet to bottom out, giving a price prediction as low as $20,000, in an echo of a recent Deutsche Bank survey that found one-in-three respondents saying the largest cryptocurrency could dip below $20,000 by year’s end. Just 15% of Deutsche’s 2,000 survey takers across the U.S., U.K. and E.U. said they expect bitcoin’s price to stabilize between $40,000 and $75,000 by year-end. Is this negative sentiment around bitcoin warranted? Burniske apparently doesn’t see many positive advancements in the near term, not even mentioning the upcoming bitcoin halving (expected in April) that many other market onlookers are hoping will buoy bitcoin. “New product innovations are close, but not quite there yet ... things still feel insular,” Burniske wrote, adding that “precarious” macroeconomic factors will likely continue to press on bitcoin. It’s hard to say exactly what will happen, but it’s also difficult to see many long-term headwinds working against bitcoin. In terms of regulation, it seems like the worst of it is behind the industry now that Binance settled charges with the Department of Justice and the FTX saga is wrapped up. And if it’s true that continuing outflows from GBTC are primarily the cause of the recent market dip, that’s likely to wrap up eventually, too. FTX, for instance, has already sold off all of its GBTC. Many others participated in the so-called “widowmaker trade,” which involved trading BTC for GBTC and profiting when GBTC was at a premium and losing big when it fell to a discount, but JPMorgan said “GBTC profit taking” is likely over. But to put recent downward price movements in context, bitcoin fell nearly 30% the day the SEC rejected the first bitcoin ETF application submitted by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in 2013. Then, there’s the bull market beginning in 2017, a year which began with the People's Bank of China deciding to ban crypto and restricting what were then the "Big Three" exchanges, Huobi, OKCoin and BTCC. All of this is to say that bitcoin has always had its ups and downs. Bitcoin ETFs have been a disappointment in terms of immediately fomenting another rally, but are still a symbol for the long-term viability of the asset class. The first few weeks of trading have seen record-busting volumes, and as Deutsche's survey found the majority of ETF flows have come from retail investors, indicating it is a tool that could further adoption. As Burniske said, "As always, patience is your friend.” https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2024/01/26/why-is-everyone-suddenly-bearish-about-bitcoin/

2024-01-26 17:43

The fund now holds nearly 50,000 bitcoin after adding almost another 4,300 tokens on Thursday. The BlackRock iShares Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) on Friday became the first of the recently launched spot bitcoin products to reach $2 billion in assets under management (AUM). This doesn't include Grayscale's GBTC, which had nearly $30 billion in AUM at the time of its conversion from a closed-end fund to a spot ETF. Investors added about $170 million to IBIT on Thursday, with the fund purchasing nearly another 4,300 bitcoin (BTC), pushing total tokens held to 49,952. With the price of bitcoin rising well above the $40,000 level early Friday, that brought AUM to above $2 billion. Now with over $2 billion in AUM, the fund ranks third in asset gathering among all of the more than 600 ETFs that launched in the past year, noted ETF Store president Nate Geraci, who believes IBIT could soon take over the crown as number one. The next fund to cross the $2 billion mark is likely to be Fidelity's Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC), which held just shy of 44,000 bitcoin as of Jan. 25. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/01/26/blackrocks-bitcoin-etf-first-to-reach-2b-in-aum/

2024-01-26 17:27

Miners such as Core Scientific (CORZ), Hut 8 (HUT) and TeraWulf (WULF) were among the outperformers. Miners lead the outperformance on Friday, including Cipher Mining (CIFR), Mawson (MIGI), and Core Scientific (CORZ). Coinbase stock goes through the Wall Street roller coaster after upgrades and downgrades in the same week. U.S. election could provide a potential positive macro catalyst for the bitcoin price, an analyst wrote. After a week of selling, some bulls seem to be back in the crypto market. Crypto-linked stocks rallied Friday after bitcoin (BTC) price rose more than 3% in the last 24 hours, ending the week in the green. Bitcoin mining companies, which generally are more exposed to the price fluctuations, were the biggest gainers, with many of the stocks rising from 5% to 15%, including Cipher Mining (CIFR), Mawson (MIGI), Core Scientific (CORZ), Sphere 3D (ANY), TeraWulf (WULF), Bitfarms (BITF), Marathon Digital (MARA), and Hut 8 (HUT), which had been particularly hit hard earlier in the week after it became a target of a short seller. Other crypto-linked stocks, such as crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN) and enterprise software company that holds bitcoin in its balance sheet, MicroStrategy (MSTR), were also up between 3% and 5% on Friday. MicroStrategy, long considered as a proxy for bitcoin price, holds about 189,000 in its balance sheet after the latest purchase in December. Coinbase, which acts as custodian for many of the spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), saw roller coast of Wall Street analysts actions this week, adding to the price fluctuations. The shares of the crypto stock came under added pressure earlier this week after JPMorgan downgraded the stock to an underweight rating, citing a disappointing bitcoin ETF catalyst. Subsequently, the stock was upgraded to outperform Thursday by Oppenheimer, which cited strong company fundamentals and a tough management team. The main catalyst for the week's selloff was traders treating the bitcoin ETF approval as the "sell the news" event, pulling money out of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC). The slow inflow of funds intro the newly approved ETFs might have also added to the pressure as it likely have dampened the hype that was built up heading into the ETF approval. Meanwhile, the selloff was accentuated even more by FTX’s bankruptcy estate dumping 22 million GBTC shares, as CoinDesk reported. The post-ETF-approval drop might be a short-term phenomenon, according to Markus Thielen, head of research at 10x Research. "Even if Bitcoin ETF inflows disappoint, this is not the time to turn bearish as the macro environment will remain a tailwind in 2024, and the US election cycle will see a constructive fiscal response that will lift asset prices higher," he wrote in a note. "The time to turn bearish was in early January when we called for a correction back to 36,000/38,000 when Bitcoin traded at 44,000. We would use any further dip to start buying again," Thielen added. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/01/26/crypto-linked-stocks-rise-with-bitcoin-as-analyst-says-not-the-time-to-turn-bearish/

2024-01-26 16:46

The former crypto lead at Cathie Wood's Ark Invest remains bullish over the longer term. The local bottom for bitcoin (BTC) has yet to be hit, said Chris Burniske, partner at venture capital firm Placeholder and former crypto lead at Ark Invest. He sees the price dropping to at least the $30,000-$36,000 range and wouldn't be surprised if the mid-high $20,000 area were tested prior to an eventual move towards a new all-time high. "As always, patience is your friend," said Burniske. "The path to get there will be volatile – expect fakeouts – and will take months to play out." While the long-term trend "remains robust," he added, "we also just saw many of our first parabolas of the cycle, and they're now breaking. Macro looks precarious on a number of levels. New product innovations are close, but not quite there yet ... things still feel insular." Prior to a 5% rally on Friday, bitcoin had tumbled nearly 20% to under $40,000 following the Jan. 11 opening for trade of the spot bitcoin ETFs. The price stood at $41,700 at press time. "Never said I'm majorly de-risking, more just counting my bullets and sharpening my blade," concluded Burniske. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/01/26/bitcoin-could-fall-back-to-mid-20k-area-chris-burniske/