The U.S. Federal Reserve’s inflation “sledgehammer” is about to batter the prices of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) down even further, before reaching back to new all-time highs in 2025, according to Bloomberg analyst Mike McGlone. Ahead of the latest Fed interest rate hike to be announced this week, the market is expecting a minimum of a 75-basis-point increase, however some fear it could be as high as 100 basis points — which would represent the biggest rate hike in 40 years. Speaking with financial news outlet Kitco News on Sept. 17, McGlone, the Senior Commodity Strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, …

The Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) has made an unprecedented claim that Ethereum transactions take place in the United States as ETH nodes are “clustered more densely” in the United States than any other country. The SEC argument is found within a Sept. 19 lawsuit against crypto researcher and YouTuber Ian Balina, which alleged, among many other complaints, that Balina conducted an unregistered offering of Sparkster (SPRK) tokens when he formed an investing pool on Telegram in 2018. The SEC claims that at the time that U.S.-based investors participated in Balina’s investing pool, the ETH contributions were validated by a network …

The United States equities markets and the crypto markets are likely to remain volatile in the near term because traders remain nervous about the size of the next Federal Reserve rate hike on Sept. 20 and Sept. 21. While the majority favors a 75 basis point rate hike, according to the CME FedWatch Tool, some analysts expect the Fed to hike rates by 100 basis points, the first such instance since the early 1980s. Many expect Bitcoin (BTC) to continue its slide and drop below the June low in the future. Although anything is possible in the markets, many times, …

Last week’s Merge was the “most significant development in the history of the Ethereum network,” according to Fidelity Digital. And from a purely technical standpoint, the blockchain network’s transition from a proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism was a marvel. Widely compared to changing a jet engine mid-flight, the software upgrade proceeded with nary a glitch on Sept. 15. Overnight, too, Ethereum, the world’s second-largest blockchain platform, reduced its energy usage by 99.95% from a rate as high as 94 TWh per year in May — roughly equivalent to the nation-state Chile — to an almost negligible 0.01 …

Hype does not always equate to greater adoption, as the on-chain data from the second quarter of 2022 shows Solana (SOL) surpassing Ethereum (ETH) in users’ daily transactions despite various drawbacks from both macroeconomic conditions and network outages. Throughout the second quarter, Solana’s daily transactions consistently increased, ending with more than 40 million daily transactions compared to Ethereum’s 1 million daily transactions between April and June, confirmed Nansen’s State of the Quarter Report. Solana’s significant increase in daily transactions was observed on daily non-vote transactions when compared to Ethereum — despite sporting higher volatility. On-chain data revealed that decentralized exchanges …

Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum's native token, Ether (ETH), started the week on a depressive note as investors braced themselves for a flurry of rate hike decisions from central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve and Bank of England. Bitcoin price fails to hold $20,000 On Sep. 19, BTC's price has failed to regain the $20,000 psychological support zone. The BTC/USD pair slipped by 6.5% to around $18,250, while ETH dropped 4% to approximately $1,280. Their gloomy performance came as a part of a broader decline that started in mid-August, wherein BTC and ETH wiped a total of 28% and 37% …

Post-Ethereum Merge proof-of-work (PoW) chain ETHW has moved to quell claims that it had suffered an on-chain replay attack over the weekend. Smart contract auditing firm BlockSec flagged what it described as a replay attack that took place on Sept. 16, in which attackers harvested ETHW tokens by replaying the call data of Ethereum’s proof-of-stake (PoS) chain on the forked Ethereum PoW chain. According to BlockSec, the root cause of the exploit was due to the fact that the Omni cross-chain bridge on the ETHW chain used old chainID and was not correctly verifying the correct chainId of the cross-chain …

Decentralized exchange (DEX) GMX has reportedly suffered a price manipulation exploit from an exploiter who managed to make off with around $565,000 from the AVAX/USD market. The unidentified exploiter is understood to have capitalized on GMX’s “minimal spread” and “zero price impact” features to pull off the exploit, which impacted GLP token holders who provided liquidity in the form of AVAX (the Avalanche token) to GMX. GMX confirmed the price manipulation exploit in a Sept. 18 post on Twitter, but stated that the AVAX/USD market would remain open despite imposing a $2 million cap on long positions and $1 million …

Bitcoin (BTC) faces another week of “huge” macro announcements after the lowest weekly close since July. After days of losses following the latest inflation data from the United States, BTC/USD, like altcoins and risk assets more broadly, has failed to recover. The largest cryptocurrency has yet to flip $20,000 to convincing support, and as the third full week of September begins, the danger is once again that that level could function as resistance. Bulls have plenty to worry about — the coming days will see the Federal Reserve decide on the next key rate hike, something that will affect the …

Decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch Network issued a warning to crypto investors after identifying a vulnerability in Profanity, an Ethereum (ETH) vanity address generating tool. Despite the proactive warning, apparently, hackers were able to make away with $3.3 million worth of cryptocurrencies. On Sept. 15, 1Inch revealed the lack of safety in using Profanity as it used a random 32-bit vector to seed 256-bit private keys. Further investigations pointed out the ambiguity in the creation of vanity addresses, suggesting that Profanity wallets were secretly hacked. The warning came in the form of a tweet, as shown below. RUN, YOU FOOLS ⚠️ …

Following the completion of The Merge upgrade, Ethereum (ETH) transitioned into a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, helping the blockchain become energy efficient and secure. However, mining data reveals Ethereum’s heavy reliance on Flashbots — a single server — for building blocks, raising concerns over a single point of failure for the ecosystem. Flashbots is a centralized entity dedicated to transparent and efficient Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) extraction, which acts as a relay for delivering Ethereum blocks. Data from mevboost.org show that there are six active relays currently delivering at least one block in Ethereum, namely Flashbots, BloXroute Max Profit, BloXroute …

A quick flick through Twitter, any social media investing club, or investing-themed Reddit will quickly allow one to find handfuls of traders who have vastly excelled throughout a month, semester, or even a year. Believe it or not, most successful traders cherry-pick periods or use different accounts simultaneously to ensure there’s always a winning position to display. On the other hand, millions of traders blow up their portfolios and turn out empty-handed, especially when using leverage. Take, for example, the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) which requires that brokers disclose the percentage of their accounts in the region that …