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Cardano’s IOHK to Collaborate with Company Behind Humanoid Robot Sophia

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Artificial Intelligence firm, Singularity announced a collaboration with IOHK, the blockchain research, and development company. According to the official blog post, the two platform teams were in talks of what it would migrate a significant portion of the SingularityNET decentralized protocol and platform from Ethereum to Cardano.

This initiative would involve providing mechanisms for swapping some of the current ERC-20 AGI tokens to Cardano blockchain-based AGI tokens, and also creating analogues of the Solidity smart contracts underlying aspects of the SingularityNET platform using Cardano’s new Plutus smart contract language.

The post further mentioned,

“Final decisions and details regarding porting of a portion of the SingularityNET network to Cardano have not yet been made and will be discussed in-depth with the SingularityNET community when the time is right. At the moment joint planning and exploration are proceeding very positively.”

Ethereum Network Woes

The DeFi explosion has triggered speed and cost issues in the Ethereum network. Citing the same, Singularity revealed that these shortcomings have increased the urgency of exploring alternatives for its blockchain. Despite the fact that the ambitious Ethereum 2.0 design holds promise, however, the fact that the timing of the rollout of different aspects of this next-generation Ethereum remains unclear still poses significant concerns to Singularity.

The platform further added,

“Cardano’s consensus mechanisms and associated algorithms and structures comprise a unique mix of rigorous theoretical grounding and practical scalability and have now reached a level of maturity that makes it possible to port a complex blockchain application like SingularityNET to Cardano.”

Singularity further believes that while deploying it on Cardano would not prevent exchanges from being hacked but it would give a much greater variety of responses and remedies to the kind of security breaches that has been happening such as the recent KuCoin hack.

SingularityNET in brief:

Singularity is a full-stack AI solution, with a major focus on decentralization. It is the company behind the world’s most expressive robot, which happens to be one of its first use cases.

Tether Dips by 80% Despite Stablecoins Supply Hitting $20B as USDC Bolsters

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While the cryptocurrency market was on a rollercoaster ride this year, it was the stablecoins that witnessed exponential growth. The market has recently touched the coveted $20 billion mark with respect to the total volume of stablecoins in circulation. Tether [USDT] continued to dominate the charts despite a minor slip and still had a large fraction of supply share, while other stablecoins were starting to make up the ground.CM

This was revealed by the latest edition of Coin Metrics’ State of Network report which further noted that it was the growth of the second-largest stablecoin USDC growth that has been outpacing Tether causing its fall below 80%, a level unseen in the modern era of stablecoins.

Despite the fact that the values of all other stablecoins combined pales in comparison to the supply of USDT, which currently stood at $15.46  the growth of the contenders market cannot be ignored.

skew stable coins market cap bln e1601452550277

USDC Sets out to Eclipse USDT

The Coinbase-backed stablecoin has recorded massive gains this year. The total supply has topped $2.53 billion and is showing no signs of slowing down. USDC is essentially a centralized dollar-pegged stablecoin which is issued by the Centre Consortium, a collaboration between crypto exchange Coinbase and payment service firm Circle.

The growth was potentially triggered due to the recent explosion in DeFi’s yield farming popularity, in which the liquidity providers are incentivized for staking stablecoins and other digital assets in decentralized protocols for the use of financial activities such as loan issuance, etc.

USDC always had an edge over other stableccoins since it was the first Ethereum-based stablecoin that was launched after Tether in 2018. Furthermore, USDC already issued a supply of over $400 million before its rivals such as Huobi’s HUSD and Binance’s BUSD which were released a year later.

What further spurred the growth was the release of USDC version 2.0 in August this year which added additional security infrastructure to the USDC smart contract. With the association of industry giant such Coinbase, the stablecoin has become increasingly popular among the newcomers as well as experienced traders of the platform. And hence, USDC has managed to establish itself as a go-to asset in the DeFi sector, a major onramp within the ecosystem.

Bitcoin’s Key Metrics Shows Fresh Buying Opportunity From Traders

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Bitcoin sustained a minor pullback yet again as its dominance continued to hover in 57.6%. As reported earlier by TWJ, short-term concerns for the coin still appeared to be impending. This was evidenced by Bitcoin’s latest price action which registered a minor decline of 1.94% over the past 24-hours. It was currently trading at $10,692.

However, the big picture exhibited a bullish outlook. According to the crypto-analytic firm, Glassnode the Difficulty Ribbon Compression metric appeared to be trending up and recently broke out of the green buy zone for the first time since March. Historically, these have been periods characterized by a positive momentum indicating a significant rise in Bitcoin’s price.

Glassnode scaled
Source: Glassnode

Originally Difficulty Ribbon Compression is a Bitcoin metric derived from Statistician Willy Woo’s Difficulty Ribbon that uses a standard deviation to quantify periods of high ribbon compression. As depicted by the above chart, zones of high compression [or low values] could indicate good buying opportunities for traders and investors.

Bitcoin was currently consolidating close to its $11,044-level, a breakout from which has yet materialized. If the bulls manage to break this level, the coin could further benefit the aforementioned bullish sign to target $12,334.

Some of the main price drivers of Bitcoin were the forays and developments by institutional investors in the space. For instance, financial giant Fidelity Investment’s first institutional Bitcoin fund, which was launched in August this year, has continued to attract other financial heavyweights to date.

Additionally, Bitcoin’s price taking a plunge in tandem with the value of stocks, gold and crypto was not a coincidence nor a technical anomaly. During phases of high uncertainty, simultaneous dips across different markets are normal. But currently, the global market appeared weary, the same cannot be said for Bitcoin. Hence, there is potential for Bitcoin’s price to surge amid the economic tension.

Furthermore, the bulls were prepping up for an upward break in the coming days and this was evidenced by a drop in the figures for Bitcoin balances on exchanges. This was another indication of bullishness among the traders as they balance major exchanges hit its lowest levels since November 2018. This could essentially be signal towards a that a new wave of investors was putting in the capital on Bitcoin as a long-term investment.

Glassnode Twitter

Another explanation could potentially be that the traders are taking their Bitcoin off exchanges to deploy them in the burgeoning DeFi. Tokenized Bitcoin such as Wrapped Bitcoin [WBTC] has become one of the largest assets on DeFi and with the ongoing craze in the space, Ethereum has become a Bitcoin’s top off-chain destination.

Bitcoin.com’s Roger Ver Attacks Lightning Network While Community Comes to its Defense

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Bitcoin has had its fair share of detractors with several present even within the cryptocurrency industry. Since inception, the world’s largest cryptocurrency has witnessed several camps attack its credentials with some claiming that there were other ways to better use blockchain technology.

One of Bitcoin’s biggest critics was Roger Ver, who led the charge to create a new token called Bitcoin Cash by forking off Bitcoin. Since Bitcoin Cash was founded in 2017, Ver has not missed an opportunity to point out Bitcoin’s shortcomings. 

In his latest tweet, the founder of Bitcoin. com set his scope on the Bitcoin Lightning Network [LN]. Ver stated that the LN was an utter failure because it had not achieved any of the scaling milestones it had promised its user base. His tweet read:

Currently, there was Bitcoin worth $927.6 million locked in terms of dollars, a holding that had increased by 1 percent over the previous 24-hours. At the same time, the total Bitcoin-Ethereum pair was worth 2.6 million ETH while locked native BTC tokens amounted to 85.6K BTC. Ver’s comments received a lot of flak with the user base attacking Bitcoin Cash and its faults.

The LN community stated that Bitcoin Cash fell short of achieving the lofty milestones it had set itself with the cryptocurrency failing to make any significant impact on the charts. At press time, BCH was trading for $213 with a total market cap of $3.95 billion. A 2.16 percent price hike over the past day helped increase the daily trading volume to $1.28 billion. Despite his naysayers, Ver also had a staunch following who believed that the LN was nothing more than a diversion from actual developments in the space. This was put in words by Nanosapian, who tweeted:

“LN was never meant to work. It was meant to distract and redirect attention when scaling questions are asked.The reason is simple – BTC cannot scale and is now intended to be another custody solution. $NANO actually scaled while maxis lied.”

The Lightning Network was also in the news recently when the Lightning Network Daemon added accounting features to its network while upgrading c-lightning at the same time.

Kucoin’s Hack Reignites Centralized-Decentralized Debates

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Bitcoin was the world’s first-ever decentralized digital currency without a central authority or an overlord. “Truly Decentralized.” But since then, the industry grew and now we have a whole set of “decentralized” finance in response to the rise of centralized financial systems.

The endless centralization and decentralization tussle have once again gained prominence. This time, it was the popular AMM platform Ocean Protocol which got dragged into the mud in the recent Kucoin Hack. But It wasn’t until two days later that Ocean Protocol Foundation realized that out of the total $150 million stolen funds, over $8.6 million accounted for OCEAN tokens.

Abandoning decentralized principles to save a decentralized system

The foundation then revealed halting the OCEAN contract. It was this step than garnered significant criticism from the community. Many popular analysts questioned as to how decentralized are these DeFi projects.

TokenSoft’s Mason Borda took to Twitter to express his views regarding the whole episode and tweeted,

“If you can pause your token contract, it is a security. if you can pause your token contract, it is not decentralized. If an exchange with your projects’ tokens gets hacked, and there is nothing you can do to help token holders. It is decentralized.”

List goes on..

It’s not just Ocean Protocol that has come under the scanner. To minimize the risk and loss in this incident, the team behind several DeFi platforms made serious changes in response to the security breach on the centralized exchange. DeFi platform Orion Protocol, for instance, revealed taking an “executive decision to reissue all ORN tokens 1:1 via a token swap”.

Another decentralized notary service provider, SilentNotary decided to re-issue its SNTR tokens.

https://twitter.com/zhusu/status/1310149866366988288

Interestingly, a popular decentralized exchange, Uniswap was reportedly leveraged to swap from altcoins to Ethereum. However, as yet there has been no notification from their end. The problem that could arise out of this is if the swapping continues, is that it could set off an alarm for the regulators.

https://twitter.com/UnderTheBreach/status/1310125971664666624

Since the community remained entangled in the continuum of centralization and decentralization, it is important to note that 100% decentralization is probably not viable in the real world. Both factors can play a very important role in decision-making. While decentralization needs a powerful champion at the center to be successful, the world has yet to see such a system in place.

 

Yearn.Finance’s YFI Rushes Towards ATH After Founder Hints at Major Update

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Yearn.Finance has taken the world of DeFi by storm. Officially introduced in July 2020, the DeFi protocol has $813.25 million in total value locked. Over the past four-days, its native token, YFI underwent a significant of nearly 70% despite a price stagnation in the overall cryptocurrency market. At the time of writing, YFI was priced at $29,016.

YFI e1601194256643

The decentralized finance space had a rather slow week. As depicted by the above chart, YFI had hit an all-time high on the 12th of September. However, it was one of the worst-hit DeFi tokens, along with Uniswap’s UNI token, during the recent sell-off that hit Ethereum and the rest of the altcoin that ultimately drove YFI’s price to decline by nearly 50%.

But the latest uptrend could be directed towards its previous high could be directed to a major update that involves the incorporation of other popular DeFi protocols such as Synthetix, Aave, Chainlink, and running on layer 1 and 2 solutions of the Ethereum network. This was hinted by Yearn.Finance’s Developer and Founder Andre Cronje who tweeted,

https://twitter.com/AndreCronjeTech/status/1308812154527780865

Yearn.Finance happens to be the first-ever project on the Ethereum network whose governance is entirely in the hands of token holders. The latest development is likely to provide users with solutions that allow them to reduce transaction fees. This coupled with an active community as well as governance forums has fostered further gains for the native token YFI.

Cronje had earlier held an online poll in which he proposed a measure to the community seeking to cap the total supply of YFI tokens at its current 30,000. This essentially meant that if the minting function is removed, no member in the Yearn.Finance ecosystem or any of its multi-sig holders will be able to print more tokens in the future which in turn could further curb the rise of potential inflation due to increased token supply at the same time preventing a possible manipulation in the protocol’s governance system.

More recently, Lou Kerner, Partner at CryptoOracle had recently published a blog post in which he lauded the project and revealed,

“Yearn is so impressive because it takes the massive opportunity and remarkable complexity of DeFi, makes it simple to use, while deeply integrating with leading DeFi protocols [e.g. Uniswap & Curve], and leveraging community as a powerful moat.”

Chainlink [LINK] Finds Shelter At Travala As Its Price Heads For Recovery

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The crypto industry along with blockchain technology has spread its wings across several industries. With the surge in both popularity and value of several cryptocurrencies, a wide range of platforms have incorporated crypto into their systems. Even though traveling with crypto sounds like a task due to the variation in regulations in different parts of the globe, Travala seems to be promoting the same. Further expanding its services, Travala recently welcomed its latest addition.

Travala On-boards Chainlink

Travala, known for its crypto-friendly travel booking services has been home to several cryptocurrencies and the platform just opened up a space for prominent altcoin, Chainlink [LINK]. Chainlink paved its way to the crypto spotlight with a noteworthy surge in its price followed by its place in the top ten cryptocurrencies.

The CEO of the travel company, Juan Otero pointed out that the platform decided to onboard this digital asset following increased demand from the community. He added,

“With cryptocurrency adoption on the rise, we want to ensure our users at Travala.com have access to the most popular payment choices. LINK has always been a token requested by members of our community, so we have responded to this request.”

Travala.com has had a strong inclination towards the crypto-sphere. The fairly new platform even rolled out its native cryptocurrency, the AVA token. Currently, users of the platform can book accommodation via prominent cryptocurrencies including, Bitcoin [BTC], Ethereum [ETH], Binance Coin [BNB], Dash [DASH], Tron [TRX], Bitcoin Cash [BCH], VeChain Token [VET], Stellar [XLM], Swipe [SXP] as well as its native token, AVA.

The travel platform, backed by Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange, Binance will reportedly allow LINK holders to choose from over 2.2 million accommodation options in about 230 countries.

Additionally, Chainlink was seen headed towards recovery. After witnessing an array of slumps in the past few days, Chainlink’s LINK token was finally seen in the green zone. During the time of writing, the altcoin was trading for $8.38 with a 3.40% daily increase in its price. The market cap of the coin seemed to have depreciated below the Crypto.com Coin [CRO] as LINK stood at $2.93 billion.

ARPA-Assisted China National Series of Standards for Privacy-Preserving Computation Released

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In the recent Big Data Industry Conference 2020, which was hosted by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology [CAICT] and China Communications Standards Association [CCSA] in Beijing, saw the release of a new set of standards to guide data circulation.

The blockchain-based platform, ARPA happens to be one of the several industry giants such as Ant Financial Services, WeBank, Tencent Cloud, Baidu, Intel among others which developed a series of privacy-preserving computation standards devised by CAICT that was released in the conference.

As the big data industry’s market share continued to grow at a rapid pace, the open sharing, exchange, and circulation of big data have become a trend. Stating the same, the official blog post of Arpa further added,

“However, data circulation is also accompanied by many issues like ownership, quality, compliance, and security. These have become bottlenecks restricting data circulation. In order to solve these problems, big data practitioners have been looking at them from different perspectives.”

Experts from CAICT unveiled the Big Data Technology and Standard Committee of the China Communications Standards Association [CCSA] where they demonstrated their progress in formulating and revising the standards of privacy-preserving multi-party computation [MPC], trusted execution environment, federal learning, and other series of standards.

And ARPA is one of the leading platforms with respect to secure multi-party computing [MPC] technology. This technology enables operations to be performed on encrypted data, thus making the data accessible for the purpose of analysis while remaining invisible and secure. On this note, ARPA further stated

“ARPA helps different organizations conduct data sharing, model training and prediction while meeting the requirements of user privacy protection, data security policies and regulations. Shared learning technology has been applied to various business scenarios such as credit, risk control, insurance, and government affairs.”

It is important to note that ARPA is a blockchain-agnostic layer-2 solution built on Ethereum that is widely used in which proxy smart-contracts are leveraged as a bridge to link the blockchain and secure communication network.

Besides, Bella Protocol, which was the first project to be hosted on Binance’s Launchpool platform, was incubated by ARPA. Additionally, in December 2019, ARPA was awarded as “China’s Top 10 Innovative Blockchain Company”, along with Tencent Blockchain, Baidu Xuperchain, Wanxiang Blockchain, JD Blockchain, and others.

Bitcoin Correlation With S&P 500, Gold Rises as Crypto Market Takes a Plunge

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Bitcoin is often heralded as a non-correlated asset. This narrative gained traction primarily due to the fact that Bitcoin’s price has moved independently of the U.S. S&P 500 for much of its history. While by and large, this has been widely true, there have been instances when it defied this popular narrative.

Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market sustained a major price slump. This was followed by a massive drop in the U.S. stock market. Other indices such as the German DAX and the U.K.’s FTSE also noted a significant decline.

skew bitcoinsp500 realized correlation 3

The crypto-analytic platform, Skew noted that the one-year realized correlation between Bitcoin and Wall Street’s equity index and benchmark for global stock markets – S&P500 currently stood at 52.93% quite close to its ATH. In addition, a similar case was noted with respect to Bitcoin’s one-year realized correlation with Gold which recently touched an ATH of 74% on the 20th of September before a minor dip to 63.4% two days later. This has further solidified Bitcoin’s appeal as digital gold.

skew bitcoingold realized correlation 1

Uncorrelated assets are those assets that move independently of major stock market indices. This essentially gives an opportunity for investors to “beat the market.” This is not the first time the world’s largest cryptocurrency has behaved similarly to mainstream markets. However, it was not until 2020 when this trend saw a significant upsurge.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected markets across all sectors and crypto has not been spared as well. As the economy suffered a hit, Bitcoin and the crypto market crashed massively on Black Thursday which happened in the second week of March. It was then that the Bitcoin’s correlation with mainstream markets saw a significant spike. This was driven by fear and panic that led to investors cash in or to turn to stablecoins to hedge against the falling markets.

Despite the recent surges in correlation, the one-month metric for S&P500 as well as Gold oscillated largely within a significantly wide range and was somewhat inconsistent. It is volatile in nature and this was evidenced by its sharp fall from $10,000 to $3,800 that was witnessed during the mid-March crash. Bitcoin is still a little over 11 years old and is yet to be a sufficient hedge or a flight to safety in times of risk-off sentiment.

China: Blockchain-Based Companies Soar; Guangdong Dominates Chart

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The socialist state of China is poised to take the lead. The extensive blockchain roadmap of the world’s second-largest economy seeks to control the development of the nascent technology as evidenced by the strong backing of the country’s leader President Xi Jinping which has further bolstered the growth of blockchain capabilities in China.

Jinping’s speech stating that China “needs to seize the opportunity” could potentially be heralded as one of the first instances of a major world leader backing the technology. This was followed by several provinces in the country setting up blockchain pilot zones which translated into an increase in the number of blockchain-based companies shortly thereafter.

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This was evidenced by the latest data from LongHash’s live charts, which revealed that the number of blockchain firms in China has been steadily rising. There are now 30,719 legally registered and operating blockchain companies in the country. A rise of a little over 10% was noted in the last five months when these figures stood at 27,694. Additionally, there were nearly 91,906 legally registered blockchain companies.

Guangdong, the coastal province of southeast China recorded the highest numbers of blockchain companies with 26,244. A rise of 10% was noted since April of this year when the figures stood at 23,786. Provinces such as Yunan, Guangxi, Guizhou also noted a significant uptick in the number of blockchain firms.

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2020 saw the third-largest growth in blockchain firms. But with the fast pace at which the companies are being formed, thanks to various state-sanctioned initiatives, this year could overtake the previous figures.

The country’s roadmaps were significantly pushed by the state-backed Blockchain-based Service Network [BSN] a critical factor to the country’s blockchain ecosystem.  The nation-wide blockchain project had previously integrated with six public chains – Tezos, NEO, Nervos, EOS, IRISnet, and Ethereum. It recently entered into a partnership with another blockchain-powered platform called ‘ShareRing’ which is crucial primarily because it encouraged global players into the otherwise exclusive ecosystem.

Additionally, BSN was also planning to make 24 public chains available in its network for the Chinese users starting from mid-November this year.