Harsh Conditions For Bitcoin And Ether Continue

Image Source: Pixabay

Recent harsh conditions for bitcoin and ether continued last week as both cryptoassets saw significant sell-offs continue.

Bitcoin’s recent woes deepened as the cryptoasset slumped across the week, starting trading above $34,000 before losing ground. It is now trading around $31,791.

Likewise, ether has come down heavily from recent highs. ETH began the week above $2,000 but saw a quick sell-off to trade below $1,900 at times. At the time of writing, the cryptoasset’s value is hovering very slightly above $1,900. 

With yet another poor-performing week, speculation on the short-term price direction of major cryptoassets is rife, with mixed opinions on price depending on what metric/indicators analysts are looking at. 

Long-term confidence remains high, however, with a recent survey of FinTech experts revealing more than half believe bitcoin is capable of becoming the global reserve currency by 2050. 

In the survey from Finder, some 29% believed this so-called ‘hyperbitcoinization’ could happen as early as 2035 though. Two-thirds of respondents believed the current price levels of the cryptoasset were undervaluing the digital currency.

Square to launch DeFi division

Payments firm Square is to launch its own decentralized finance (DeFi) division, chief executive Jack Dorsey has announced. 

The chief exec said on Twitter the payments firm will be opening a new business wing to focus on Bitcoin-focused services and DeFi.

Dorsey said it would focus on an open developer platform with non-custodial decentralized financial services dedicated to bitcoin and completely permissionless. Dorsey said the name was still “TBD”.  

He added: “Like our new #Bitcoin hardware wallet, we’re going to do this completely in the open. Open roadmap, open development, and open source. @brockm is leading and building this team, and we have some ideas around the initial platform primitives we want to build.”

It comes not long after the CEO also announced the firm’s intention to launch a bitcoin hardware wallet.

Football NFT closing in on record funding round

Paris-based digital playing cards startup Sorare is reportedly close to a record funding round of some $532 million. 

Multiple sources [1] [2] [3] indicate SoftBank is set to lead the round of investment, but the chief executive Nicolas Julia has denied it is even taking place. 

The firm which was established in 2018 sells digital playing cards of football players which match their real-world performances and rankings via NFT. Its sales reached above $2.1 billion in the first quarter of 2021. 

Bitcoin network nodes hit an all-time high

Despite tribulations in the value of bitcoin in recent weeks, the number of nodes on the network has reached an all-time high, according to Bitnodes.io and Coin.Dance.

The milestone was reached around 5 July with some 13,374 on the network. 99% of the network is running Bitcoin’s core software, with the other 1% managing other less popular versions. 

The expansion of nodes on the network is a positive indicator of its decentralized nature, increasing by over 2,000 in the past year according to Bitnodes. 

A Bitcoin node is a computer on the network which follows rules and shares information on the cryptoasset’s blockchain. A ‘full’ node is a device that hosts an entire copy of the Bitcoin blockchain in the peer-to-peer network.