South Korea’s "Kimchi premium" has flipped to a discount again, meaning cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are now cheaper to buy on South Korean exchanges. The phenomenon is named after the Korean dish kimchi. The Kimchi premium refers to when the price of Bitcoin (BTC) trades higher on South Korean exchanges than in other markets. According to data from blockchain analytics provider CryptoQuant, the Korea Premium index has been shifting between the -0.24 and 0.01 range between Feb 17 and 19. As of writing, data on CoinMarketCap shows BTC is trading at roughly $24,464 on Coinbase and $24,487 on Binance. In …

Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) offer a new way to sell and distribute digital art, and they have the potential to unlock new revenue streams for artists in the digital age. Here are five ways to monetize your digital art with NFTs. Fractionalized ownership This involves splitting the ownership of an artwork into smaller parts and selling them as tokens, allowing multiple investors to own a stake in the artwork. For example, an artist can create 100 tokens for a piece of art and sell them to 100 different buyers, each of whom owns a share of the artwork. Related: How do …

The upcoming Ethereum (ETH) Shanghai hardfork is slated to occur in March 2023 and the upgrade will cap off the network's move to proof-of-stake (PoS) which started during the “Merge” on Sept. 15, 2022. Once Shanghai is implemented, previously locked Ether will gradually become liquid for the first time since December 2020. According to on-chain Etherscan data, over 16.6 million Ether are currently locked in the PoS staking protocol which was valued at $28 billion on Feb. 16, 2023. Ethereum’s move from proof-of-work (PoW) to PoS has started to achieve the original goal which was to make Ether’s supply deflationary. …

What is the next upgrade for Ethereum? The Shanghai upgrade is a stepping stone toward making the Ethereum blockchain more scalable. Features like sharding, zero-knowledge (ZK)-SNARKs and more, decorate the Ethereum roadmap. The EIPs included in the Shanghai upgrade will be a good step toward achieving sharding later in 2023. Sharding is extremely important to improve higher transaction throughputs as the chain will be able to perform “parallel processing.” Sharding is expected to be achieved in two stages in 2023 and 2024. The first stage brings better data availability to the Ethereum blockchain. Combining that with the rollup feature that …

On this week’s episode of NFT Steez, co-hosts Alyssa Expósito and Ray Salmond continue their chat with Justin and J.P. Alanis, the co-founders of StoryCo — an open media platform — on the prospect of a community of creators franchising intellectual property (IP) through collaboration and soulbound tokens. Speaking on his experience with musician Tyler the Creator, J.P. Alanis said that content creation is not limited to one particular creator, but should be open to all types, including fans. However, despite the symbiotic nature between fans and creators, there are still barriers to incentivizing the creators and navigating the bureaucratic …

Cryptocurrency investors funneled as much as $4.6 billion into crypto tokens suspected to be part of “pump and dump” schemes in 2022. A Feb. 16 report from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis “analyzed all tokens launched” in 2022 on the BNB and Ethereum blockchains and found just over 9,900 bore characteristics of a "pump and dump" scheme. A pump-and-dump scheme typically involves the creators orchestrating a campaign of misleading statements, hype, and Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) to persuade investors into purchasing tokens while secretly selling their stake in the scheme at inflated prices. Chainalysis estimated investors spent $4.6 billion worth …

In this week’s episode of Market Talks, Cointelegraph welcomes Michaël van de Poppe, a full-time day/swing trader in cryptocurrencies based at the Amsterdam Stock Exchange who’s interested in everything related to blockchain in combination with the current financial system. He is also the CEO and founder of Eight Global, a cryptocurrency education and consultancy platform. We kick things off by getting van de Poppe’s take on the current market and how he’s feeling about things at the moment. Generally, everyone’s views on external macro factors that impact crypto prices are mostly United States-centric. Since van de Poppe is based in …

Ethereum's native token, Ether (ETH), has printed a death cross technical pattern versus Bitcoin (BTC) for the first time since May 2022, suggesting more pain ahead for ETH/BTC in the coming weeks. Previous ETH price death cross preceded 27.5% drop A death cross appears when an asset's short-term 50-period moving average moves below its long-term 200-period moving average. Such a chart pattern was seen in December 2007, foahead of the global economic crisis. Similarly, the ETH/BTC's previous death cross in May 2022 preceded an approximately 27.5% price correction, dropping in parts as investors reduced exposure to altcoins and sought safety …

While cryptocurrencies have been quite the rage over the past couple of years, nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have risen as an alternate asset class within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. This ecosystem is revolutionizing the world of art and gaming, among a host of other industries. Serving as a digital certificate that proves a collectible’s authenticity, NFTs also provide investors with proof of ownership and utmost security, aspects that have been instrumental in their proliferation as the future of representing real-world objects in the virtual world. As a result, NFTs are gaining increasing popularity among crypto investors looking to invest in metaverse platforms, …

The Bitcoin (BTC) price rose to a new six-month high of $24,800 on February 16, registering a double-digit surge of 15%. The prolific single-day Bitcoin price surge took many by surprise, given February has been historically bearish for the top cryptocurrency. BTC price rose by $1,820 in a single day, making it the biggest green day for the top cryptocurrency in six months. Many people attributed the BTC price surge to a number of factors, including a rise in dollar value and declining inflation. On-chain data indicates the current price momentum can be traced back to a mysterious fund that …

Matter Labs, the firm managing Polygon (MATIC), announced that the beta version of its zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) would launch on March 27, 2023. It’s possible that Polygon will enjoy a first-mover advantage in this space by launching a public mainnet before zkSync and Scroll. Zk-based roll-up technology is accepted as the gold standard for scaling. The existing optimistic-based roll-ups like Arbitrum and Optimism have EVM capability but are less secure because they are “fraud-proof.” Malicious transactions on an optimistic roll-up can stay valid for up to seven days or more before being reversed. Thus, giving an advantage to …

Ether (ETH), the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, has seen a constant decline in the exchange supply over the past six months post-Merge. Ethereum network went under a major network upgrade in September last year, moving from a proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) network and the event was called the Merge. According to on-chain data shared by the crypto analytic group Santiment, the amount of available ETH sitting on exchanges continues to fall. Since the Merge, there is 37% fewer ETH on exchanges. A constant decline in supply on exchanges is considered a bullish sign as there is less …