August 2021 - ECFS 2017

The trend reversal in the cryptocurrency market continues for the time being and almost all prices are turning green again today. Total market capitalization is up 4% from $1.68 trillion to $1.75 trillion, but trading volumes remain relatively low.

Bitcoin (BTC)

Bitcoin (BTC) peaked at around $42,200 late yesterday afternoon, but was beaten hard there and the price fell back to $39,500 in one fell swoop. There was a big bounce and bitcoin shot up again to $40,900, but there was still too much resistance. Stellar price is high.

Bitcoin has fluctuated between $40,250 and $40,650 in recent hours, but with low volume, the question is how quickly the price can climb out of this range. Nevertheless, bitcoin is now 20% in the green compared to a week ago, but still 38% below the all-time high (ATH) from mid-April. Bitcoin’s dominance is waning slightly today, now that some altcoins are catching up.

altcoins

Ethereum (ETH) initially lagged somewhat compared to the recovery of bitcoin, but has also been in an upward trend since Sunday and is gradually gaining momentum. Ether price has risen nearly 7% in the past 24 hours from $2,480 to $2,650.

In the top 10 largest crypto we see Polkadot (DOT) rising much faster than the rest, more about that later on Crypto Insiders. Today there are hardly any crypto prices that turn red, except for the LEO Token. This exchange token from Bitfinex plunged nearly 15% from $2.80 to $2.39 last night. The crypto prices are high.

Ethereum Support

The fastest climbers out of the top 100 in the past 24 hours include the decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens, which took quite a beating last week. Sushi (SUSHI) is up 10%, Chainlink (LINK) 12% and Synthetix (SNX) 16%. Polygon (MATIC) is also up 15% again, which may be because this layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum is being supported by more and more DeFi products.

The biggest gainers today are Klaytn (KLAY) which is up 19% and the biggest is again Amp (AMP) which even increases by 20%. Amp is now more than 90% in the plus compared to a week ago.

Kusama is ready to roll out parachains on Polkadot’s network. This means that auctions can finally take place where companies and projects compete for one of the scarce parachains. The two chains have a special relationship: Kusama is actually a copy of Polkadot, and is considered a kind of test network where apps and parachains are tested before they go to the mainnet of Polkadot.

Polka dot version 0.9

Kusama and Polkadot creator Gavin Wood wrote in a blog post today that Polkadot is entering the fourth and final phase of its mainnet launch, deploying parachains from the Kusama network. According to Wood, the development arm behind Polkadot, Parity Technologies, released an upgrade. This is Polkadot version 0.9 and intended to integrate Kusama apps. This upgrade is ‘now finally ready to host parachains.’ XLM stellar is well known in crypto.

Yesterday, the Kusama board voted to deploy the first shell parachain (an empty parachain that produces blocks but has no other functionality) on the network. Today or tomorrow, this shell chain is expected to be upgraded to Statemine, a general-purpose parachain for deploying generic assets from fungible tokens to stablecoins, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and non-replaceable tokens (NFTs). If approved by the board and successfully deployed, Statemine will be the first parachain to be launched in the wider Polkadot ecosystem.

Parachains and sharding

The Relay chain is the central blockchain of the Polkadot network where all nodes are located and on which users can stake. Then you have parachains, these are parallel blockchain shards that connect to the Relay chain. The parachains are maintained by their own unique nodes, called collators and bridges. These bridges are special blockchains that allow parachains to connect to, for example, Ethereum and Bitcoin.

public loan

Wood said the launch of the parachains would come after a full external audit of the new version of Polkadot and Kusama. At least one successful public loan auction and hosting at least one functional parachain must be conducted in real life. He did not provide a specific timeline for this roadmap, but added that he expected the audit to be completed in the near future. On the Kusama website you can read that the first of five auctions will be announced a week in advance. “After Kusama’s first auctions have been successfully completed, you can expect Polkadot’s auctions to take place shortly thereafter,” Wood said. LINK chainlink is well known in crypto.

The Polkadot protocol rollout has been underway since August 2020, when the project launched its Rococo testnet to evaluate its planned sharding implementation of parachains. Kusama is ready a bit later than expected, many analysts had hoped for the first quarter of 2021. But there were reportedly problems with the stability of the Rococo testnet, for example one of the parachains was apparently stuck for more than a day.

At the time of writing, the Polkadot rate is approximately 33.50 euros. This is an increase of 2.6% compared to 24 hours ago.

Month: August 2021

Bitcoin Holds Above $40,000, Ethereum Picks Up Something, And These Altcoins Are Catching Up