Just a few days before Bitcoin (BTC) price plunged below $30,000, the NFT sector was dominating headlines for the second time in 2021, led by a month-long 972% surge in the price of Axie Infinity. Another NFT-focused protocol that has been gaining fundamental strength in recent months is Worldwide Asset eXchange, also known as WAX — a protocol that claims to “deliver the safest and most convenient way to create, buy, sell, and trade virtual items to anyone, anywhere in the world.” Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that between June 27 and July 9, the price of …

In the early hours of July 14, Bitcoin price took a surprise hit to $31,550 before slowly recovering back above $32,900 in the morning session. The swift drop near the crucial $30,000 resistance raised alarms among bulls and bears and whilst the $30,000 to $32,000 level continues to function as a support level, a recent market update from ByteTree CEO James Bennett paints a mixed picture of what may be in store for BTC. According to analysis from Bennett, the price of Bitcoin has stabilized near the $34,000 level due to a reduction in miner selling and an increase in …

American megabank JPMorgan has continued criticizing El Salvador’s declaration of Bitcoin (BTC) as legal tender, warning of the potential risks for both the country and the cryptocurrency. A JPMorgan expert group led by economist Steven Palacio released a report suggesting that El Salvador adopting BTC as legal tender could put a strain on the Bitcoin network, Bloomberg reported Sunday. The experts said that Bitcoin is highly illiquid, noting that most Bitcoin trading volumes are internalized by major exchanges, with more than 90% of Bitcoin not changing hands in more than a year. The use of Bitcoin as legal tender in …

The concerns voiced about the consensus mechanisms of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) have played a part in the sideways price action both assets have seen over the past two months, opening the door for other competing projects to gain attention. One project that managed to overcome the sideways action in the market and rally to a new record high on July 10 is Constellation (DAG), a protocol that utilizes a directed acyclic graph architecture to achieve a consensus that is theoretically capable of infinite scaling. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that the price of DAG rallied …

Cryptocurrency payment provider Simplex has added SEPA Instant to its list of payment methods, giving European partners the ability to move funds into digital assets with greater ease and flexibility. SEPA stands for Single European Payment Arena, which enables payment harmonization across the European Union. With SEPA Instant, credit transfers are processed and settled within seconds. The fully automated process is connected to the traditional payment system but is much faster than traditional bank wires. For Simplex, SEPA Instant is considered a major milestone in promoting seamless adoption of digital assets. Under the new partnership, European users will have the …

An app says it offers crypto rewards for shoppers who make purchases at some of the world’s best-known e-commerce platforms — including eBay, Amazon, Lazada, Best Buy and Nike. Inevitably, one of the downsides of indulging in a little bit of retail therapy every now and again means that you’re left with less cash after splashing out on a brand-new pair of jeans or some headphones. Social Good Foundation Inc., the operating company behind SocialGood, says that it aims to change the status quo — and end a vicious cycle that means many everyday consumers struggle to amass savings, irrespective …

A crypto project says it is changing the game of decentralized portfolio management — and delivers an all-in-one platform that brings everything users need under one roof. DEXKIT has been built to provide a genuinely user-friendly way of managing and trading digital assets. The application features a DEX aggregator, professional exchange, NFT marketplace, and dashboard where users can monitor asset performance. The DSwap aggregator continually monitors more than 30 decentralized exchanges on the Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum networks, delivering up-to-the-minute crypto data. Swaps can be filled by multiple protocols at once which can result in more tokens for trades. …

A privacy-enabled blockchain platform says its goal is to build a responsible data economy and usher in a new era for this technology. Oasis Protocol says it brings privacy and scalability to DeFi — ensuring that this new approach to finance can expand beyond early adopters to reach the mass market. Controlling privacy Support for confidential smart contracts is a key differentiator of the Oasis Network. The contracts play an important role in preserving privacy by allowing a trustless decentralized blockchain without having to make that smart contract’s data public. This leaves the network able to solve emerging problems in …

The cost of using the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains is on the rapid decline, as evidenced by a 93%–95% reduction in average transaction fees over the past couple of months. Fees are paid to the miners who process transactions on a typical proof-of-work blockchain. The size of the fee depends on the size of the transaction in bytes and how many transactions a coin has gone through in the past (as these need to be checked every time a coin is moved). Supply and demand for space also dictate the size of a transaction fee since blockchains have limited capacity. …

Starling, a United Kingdom-based online bank, is preparing to resume payments to cryptocurrency exchanges after suspending crypto exchange deposits last week. A spokesperson for Starling told Cointelegraph on Tuesday that the bank is set to restart payments to crypto exchanges on June 23 after temporarily suspending the feature as a measure to protect its customers. Starling blocked payments to some cryptocurrency exchanges last week, citing “high levels of suspected financial crime with payments to some cryptocurrency exchanges.” The bank said that it will reverse the measure after adopting “additional checks specifically for payments to crypto exchanges.” The spokesperson stressed that …

The transaction fees of Bitcoin and Ethereum have slumped to six-month lows as the markets cool after the recent crypto downturn. According to BitInfoCharts, the average price of performing a transaction using Bitcoin has fallen from an early-April all-time high of $62.77 to around $7.20 — an 88% drop over just six weeks. The falling Bitcoin transaction fees appear to have been driven by a decline in overall market activity, with daily volumes evaporating from more than $67 billion on May 10 to $30 billion as of this writing, according to CoinGecko. The meteoric 2021 crypto bull run has seen …

The popularity of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, shows little sign of slowing down, despite the extraordinary marketwide crash that wiped more than $1 trillion off the crypto market cap. According to a report by decentralized app marketplace DappRadar, the average number of NFT sales rose almost 300%, from 21,815 per day in January, to 82,373 in May (so far). This number rose even higher as crypto prices started to plummet on May 12, with sales surging to almost 94,000 NFT transactions a day. The crypto market crash, which created a widespread panic as almost 1 million leverage trades got liquidated, …