China has completed its first cross-border pilots of the digital yuan with Hong Kong. Wang Xin, director of the People’s Bank of China research bureau, said that the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the PBoC have conducted technical tests on the cross-border use of China’s central bank digital currency. The official announced the news at a Thursday press conference hosted by the State Council Information Office of China, local news agency Sina Finance reports. The news comes shortly after Mu Changchun, head of the PBoC's digital currency research institute, proposed a set of global CBDC rules last week. Speaking at …

A layer-two DAO protocol has warned that there are some “significant issues” with many of the most popular Optimistic Rollup solutions on the market. As Ethereum continues to struggle with a long-running gas fee crisis, with spiraling transaction costs making the blockchain unusable for many DeFi enthusiasts, rollups have been touted as the silver bullet that will address scalability woes. Earlier in March, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin suggested that such a solution would serve as a sticking plaster until the long-awaited Eth2 upgrade delivers sharding — ensuring that the blockchain can scale by a factor of 100. But according to …

A report by analytics provider Coin Metrics has delved into the world of Ethererum transaction fees noting that they’re still at highest-ever levels and even a much touted approaching network upgrade is unlikely to alleviate the problem. According to the Ethereum Gas Report by Coin Metrics, median fees on Ethereum have been consistently over $10 for most of 2021. Comparatively, the average Ethereum transaction fee reached just $5.70 at the height of the 2017/2018 bull run. It attributed some of this increase to the increase in ETH prices themselves which will make gas more expensive. Since the beginning of 2021, …

Russian President Vladimir Putin has stressed the importance of developing additional measures to fight against illegal cross-border transactions of digital financial assets. Speaking at a board meeting of the General Prosecutor’s office Wednesday, Putin stated that “criminal elements have been increasingly deploying digital financial assets,” which needs special attention from the government. “There is one more point — quite new, but essential: we should take additional measures to suppress illegal cross-border movement of digital financial assets,” Putin said. The President ordered local enforcement as well as the Federal Service for Financial Monitoring, or Rosfinmonitoring, to give all their attention to …

Network congestion and high transaction costs on the Ethereum (ETH) network have been a persistent issue for investors and developers for the past year and this has shone a spotlight on blockchain projects that offer a solution to these issues. One class of tokens that has received a boost in both trading volume and price over the past two months are gas tokens that help power transactions on their respective blockchain networks. Data from Cointelegraph Markets and TradingView shows that Gas (GAS), Ontology Gas (ONG) and VeThor Token (VTHO) have all seen their prices increase more than 300% since the …

Binance has released its payments app, Binance Pay, in public alpha. The app is a contactless peer-to-peer cryptocurrency payment feature that lets users send and receive payments in cryptos like Bitcoin (BTC). Binance initially rolled out Binance Pay in a soft launch in February 2020 for P2P payments, enabling 250,000 users to interact with the product. Today, Binance Pay is launching in alpha with new features like merchant-based transactions and is available to all users. A spokesperson for Binance told Cointelegraph that the new service is not limited to certain jurisdictions and is “currently available to all eligible users on …

After only three days accepting Dogecoin (DOGE) as a form of payment, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is predicting the price of the token will eventually hit $1. In a Saturday tweet, Cuban said customers had used more than 20,000 Dogecoin — roughly $1,018 at the time of publication — in transactions for the Dallas Mavericks, claiming the franchise was now “the largest Dogecoin merchant in the world." The billionaire predicted that if basketball fans were to purchase 6,556,000,000 DOGE worth of Mavericks merchandise, the price of the token would “definitely hit $1.” The @dallasmavs have done more than 20,000 …

Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) appear to be experiencing something of a slowdown, as on-chain data shows a dramatic decrease in the U.S dollar value of coins being sent across both blockchains in the past week. At the same time, transaction fees for both chains have receded from recent highs, or in Ethereum’s case, an all-time high. Data from Bitinfocharts shows $46.68 billion worth of BTC was sent across the Bitcoin blockchain on Feb. 25. For some context, that’s around 5% of the total Bitcoin market cap, which stands at $925 billion at time of writing. By three days later, …

A decentralized ecosystem that uses cryptography to secure identities, transactions, documents and user accounts has announced that it is reducing the total supply of its tokens following a community-wide vote. Project Hydro says the supply of Hydro tokens will now be set at 111 million. The smart contract redeployment process is now under way, meaning the next step is to contact exchanges to ensure that everything is updated on their end. The news follows the platform’s announcement that it is going multi-chain — with Binance Smart Chain first on the list. The Polkadot parachains Moonbeam and Plasm, Algorand and Cardano …

A scalable blockchain allows transactions to be completed quickly and cheaply — and allows anyone to create their very own token for fun. Hathor says its infrastructure is so simple that a 13-year-old can launch their own token in under a minute… and the process takes just a few clicks. This could pave the way for companies to issue stock to investors, retailers to offer cutting-edge loyalty programs, votes to take place digitally and democratically, and for tokens to serve as proof of ownership. The project boasts novel architecture combining side-DAGs and blockchain that was inspired by the PhD thesis …

Ethereum use is surging this year, with the value of transactions settled on the network skyrocketing during 2021. According to research from Messari, Ethereum has settled $926 trillion worth of transactions this quarter so far — 700% more than it processed during the first quarter o 2020. The network is currently on pace to settle $1.6 trillion in transactions for the first quarter of this year. In the last 12 months, Ethereum has already settled $2.1 trillion in transactions. If Messari’s $1.6 trillion forecast is accurate, Ethereum’s quarterly settlement value will have increased 1,280% compared with the first quarter of …

A veteran miner has cracked open their 2010 stash of Bitcoin, with crypto analysts spotting 100 BTC being transferred from two wallets that had laid dormant for more than a decade. Prior to today’s transaction, the addresses had not seen any activity since receiving a 50 BTC Coinbase reward each nearly 11 years ago, except for two incoming transactions worth just 0.00000547 BTC each that were sent to the wallets in the last six months. The Feb. 25 transaction combined the two mining address outputs, indicating both addresses belong to the same owner. The two blocks were mined only a …