The price action of Optimism (OP) and Fantom (FTM) tokens have been quite identical since the last quarter of 2022. The difference is, volatility is slightly higher for OP, which surged 240% year-to-date, compared to the 180% gains seen in FTM. The Fantom Foundation has made several improvements since Q4 2022, which have catalyzed an uptrend in the token’s price. However, Fantom’s ecosystem remains primitive while its competitors expanded to support new use cases. On the other hand, Optimism has shown robust community and decentralized application (dApp) development thanks to the loyalty of Ethereum developers and the Optimism Foundation’s effective …

USD Coin (USDC) issuer Circle plans to increase its workforce by 15-25% in 2023 amid a sea of layoffs across the industry, reported the Wall Street Journal. At a time when a significant chunk of industry-wide firms is laying off staff to mitigate their financial woes, Circle has gone against the tide to hire more people. 41% of all layoffs in 2023 came from the cryptocurrency industry. Major cryptocurrency firms that made significant employee cuts include Polygon, Chainalysis, Bittrex, Huobi, Crypto.com, Coinbase, Gemini, Genesis, and Wyre. A major factor behind crypto companies reducing manpower was attributed to the prolonged crypto …

Blockchain Association’s chief legal officer says “it would be absurd” for a United States court to rule that digital assets on private blockchains are securities, following a federal judge's decision to allow a lawsuit against Dapper Labs's NBA Top Shots NFTs to play out. U.S. attorney Jake Chervinsky made the comment after federal judge Victor Marreo denied a motion to dismiss a 2021 lawsuit that accused Dapper Labs of selling nonfungible tokens (NFTs) as unregistered securities. Chervinsky was among a host of lawyers on Twitter to reiterate that the judge’s denial of the motion does not mean a ruling has …

The United States equities markets saw their worst performance of 2023 as concerned investors dumped stocks on Feb. 21, fearing continued rate hikes by the U.S. Federal Reserve. Although the cryptocurrency markets also gave back some of the gains, the fall was comparatively muted. UTXO Management senior analyst Dylan LeClair said that Bitcoin’s (BTC) correlation to the S&P 500 index has fallen to the lowest since late 2021. After the sharp recovery from the lows, Glassnode data showed that only 21% of the coins sent by Long-Term Holders to exchanges at the start of this week moved at a loss. …

The decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)-operated golf startup, LinksDAO, may soon put in an offer to purchase the newly marketed Spey Bay Golf Club in Scotland worth about $900,000. LinksDAO — self-described as a “global group of golf enthusiasts” that is on a mission to build the “world’s greatest golf community” — officially opened the proposal vote on Feb. 20, which came after a few weeks of informal deliberation. It would be the DAO’s first ever golf course purchase. few things in life are more fun than doing what you said you were going to do, regardless of adversity i will …

Solana Spaces will close down its two Solana (SOL)-themed, community-oriented retail stores in New York City and Miami at the end of the month, as the physical stores didn't onboard as many users as it initially anticipated. Solana Spaces tweeted the news on Feb. 21 sharing a note from its founder, Vibhu Norby, explaining the reasons behind the store shutdowns. The following is a note from our founder, @vibhu. Dear @solanaspaces community, We’ve made the difficult decision to sunset our stores in NYC and Miami by the end of February, and to pivot our Solana onboarding efforts into digital products …

The price of Ether (ETH) rallied 18% between Feb. 13 and Feb. 16 but has since been range trading near the $1,700 level. Despite the recent price improvement, Ether derivatives metrics remain neutral-to-bullish ponder the investors the tighter regulatory environment and the potential impact of Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade. Investors' biggest concern right now is regulation, especially after the United Kingdom’s Financial Stability Board (FSB) recently stated that most stablecoins fail to meet international standards. The entity was created by the G20 and is affiliated with the Bank of International Settlements (BIS). FSB chair Klaas Knot stated that the appropriate regulation …

Blur (BLUR) could rise by up to 30% by March 2023 owing to a mix of technical and fundamental factors. Blur airdrop hype Blur is a nonfungible token (NFT) aggregator that indexes digital art listings across various base marketplaces like LooksRare and OpenSea. In doing so, the aggregator allows users to trade across all NFTs marketplaces via a single interface. Since its launch in October 2022, Blur has become the leading NFT aggregator, accounting for 40%-60% of the daily NFT trading volume, according to data tracked by Messari. The period has also witnessed the Blur team "airdropping" free BLUR tokens …

Feb. 21 lifts the curtains on numbers 4–10 of the most impactful crypto and blockchain sector players, according to Cointelegraph’s 2023 Top 100 list. The controversial player at No. 10 was not on Cointelegraph’s Top 100 list for 2022, nor were the players occupying No. 9, 8 and 4. The person who takes the ninth spot on the list shares the same first name as the cotton gin inventor, while No. 8 relates to a country frequently in the news in 2022. No. 4 is a concept that prefers to be kept confidential. The seventh, sixth and fifth positions are …

Grid trading is a quantitative trading strategy that involves placing automated buy and sell orders in an attempt to profit from the volatility of cryptocurrencies. Grid trading is a style of algorithmic trading that automates order execution by utilizing grid trading bots. To create a grid of orders that covers a range of potential market movements, this method entails placing numerous orders at incremental price levels above and below the present market price. Generally, the trading bot places buy/sell orders between a predetermined price range, constructing an automated trading grid. This automation allows crypto traders to benefit and make profits …

‘Less interest than anticipated’ — PROOF cancels NFT event Kevin Rose, the co-founder of the nonfungible token (NFT) collection Moonbirds has confirmed that their flagship conference “Proof of Conference” scheduled for May has been canceled, citing “less interest than anticipated.” We made a tough decision today, I want to apologize to everyone that planned on making the trip out. Full ETH refunds have been processed, hotels are refundable, and contact us about flights. (details below) https://t.co/tV4ba85648 — KΞVIN R◎SE (,) (@kevinrose) February 20, 2023 The conference was first announced in early November. It was scheduled to run on May. 11 …

A small monetary bounty and an aptitude for coding were all it took to fork the Ordinals protocol to the world’s second-ever cryptocurrency network, Litecoin (LTC) earlier this week, its creator told Cointelegraph. On Feb. 18, an Australian software engineer by the name of Anthony Guerrera posted a repository to GitHub that forked the Bitcoin (BTC) Ordinals protocol to Litecoin. This allowed for nonfungible token (NFT)-like assets on the Litecoin network in much the same way it had made it to Bitcoin earlier in the year. In an interview with Cointelegraph, Guerrera said he was spurred to make a Litecoin …