CEO Nevin Freeman of stablecoin startup Reserve predicts that central banks will tokenize their currency at some point, but stablecoins will likely still have an advantage in offering privacy. Freeman delivered his remarks at the Consensus 2019 panel “The End of Volatility? Stablecoins on the Rise” on May 15. During the panel, moderator Joel Telpner, a partner at Sullivan & Worcester LLP, asked the speakers why banks could not simply tokenize their national currency and drive fiat-backed stablecoin services out of business. Freeman replied that he thinks banks will do this, but will not offer the same privacy of current …
The Taproot upgrade has achieved the first significant milestone on the road to activation as 90% of the Bitcoin (BTC) mining hash rate signaled for the protocol improvement within the current difficulty epoch. Data from Taproot.watch, a webpage created by Bitcoin developer Hampus Sjöberg, shows the lock-in stage is now completed. All recognized mining pools signaled for the upgrade with Slush Pool being the first to do so. It is perhaps fitting that Slush Pool also mined block 687285 that sealed the Taproot lock-in. TAPROOT LOCKED IN AT BLOCK 687285 BY SLUSHPOOL pic.twitter.com/FFDdibtmGt — pourteaux (@pourteaux) June 12, 2021 AntPool …
On June 12, Bitcoin (BTC) mining pool Slush Pool mined block 687,285 with the transaction including a Taproot upgrade activation signal. That particular block was the 1,816th to include a signal for Taproot activation by a BTC miner within the difficulty epoch that lasted from May 30 to June 13. With 2,016 blocks created every difficulty period, crossing 1,816 blocks with a Taproot activation signal satisfied the 90% signaling threshold required to lock in the upgrade. This event meant that Taproot, Bitcoin’s first protocol upgrade in over four years, was set for its activation phase to be expected in mid-November. …
Real-world use cases are one of the main adoption drivers for every crypto ecosystem, which also holds true for the Bitcoin (BTC) network. In the next seven days, the Bitcoin protocol will undergo a soft fork in the name of Taproot upgrade, which aims to improve the network’s privacy, efficiency and smart contracts capability. Taproot is Bitcoin’s first major upgrade since August 2017, which saw the introduction of Segregated Witness (SegWit) and resulted in the launch of Lightning Network. While the previous fork primarily sought to fix transaction malleability and improve Bitcoin’s network scalability, the Taproot upgrade aims to revamp …
Selecting a timeframe for technical analysis is always a tricky topic, but usually, the longer the trend, the higher the odds it shall prevail. For example, those analyzing the 3-day Bitcoin (BTC) chart will unarguably identify an ascending channel pattern that initiated in late June. Bears will also always find ways to justify their views despite the fact that Bitcoin has hit new all-time highs following the United States consumer price surge to 6.2%, which is the biggest inflation surge in 30 years. However, data from on-chain analytics firm Glassnode shows that long-term investors have stopped net accumulating and are …