As on-chain activities slow down during the crypto winter, usage of cryptocurrency mixers has doubled in 2022, with addresses classified as “illicit” being the top contributor. Cryptocurrency mixers, also called “tumblers,” provide anonymity to transactions, making the sender or receiver of the transaction completely unidentified. While this has a valid use case for everyday users, hackers have used it to hide from authorities. In a report by analytics firm Chainalysis, data shows that the 30-day moving average of the total daily value received by crypto mixers reached a new all-time high of $51.8 million in April 2022. The amount is …

The Ethereum ecosystem’s biggest roadblock to mainstream dominance is often attributed to the extremely high transaction fees — known as gas fees — it requires to complete a transaction. However, with Ethereum’s average gas fees coming down to 0.0015 Ether (ETH), the narrative is set to change. The average transaction fee on the Ethereum blockchain fell down to 0.0015 ETH or $1.57 — a number previously seen in December 2020. However, starting in January 2021, Ethereum’s gas fees surged, owing to the hype around nonfungible tokens (NFT), decentralized finance (DeFi) and a promising bull market. For nearly two years, between …

Given Ethereum’s dominance coupled with the current crypto bear market, it remains questionable if L1s will flourish. This was recently highlighted in a Chainalsys blog post entitled “New layer 1 blockchains are expanding the DeFi ecosystem, but no ETH killers yet.” Ethan McMahon, an economist at Chainalysis, told Cointelegraph that Chainalysis published this report to raise awareness for the current L1 ecosystem: While Ethereum allowed decentralized finance (DeFi) to flourish in 2020, a number of layer-1 blockchains (L1s) have since been developed to address the challenges associated with the network. For instance, as Ethereum’s proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism and high …

Bitcoin (BTC) has seen its worst quarterly loss in 11 years with price and activity on the blockchain both plunging over the last three months. The second quarter ending Thursday saw Bitcoin’s price fall from around $45,000 at the start of the quarter to trade at $19,884 before midnight EST on Thursday, according to CoinGecko. This represents a 56.2% loss, according to crypto analytics platform Coinglass. It’s the steepest price fall since the third quarter of 2011 when BTC fell from $15.40 to $5.03, a loss of over 67% and worse than the bear markets of 2014 and 2018 when …

Crypto’s Black Monday continues to wreak havoc. Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, CEO of crypto exchange Binance, tweeted that there would be a temporary pause on Bitcoin (BTC) withdrawals. Temporary pause of $BTC withdrawals on #Binance due to a stuck transaction causing a backlog. Should be fixed in ~30 minutes. Will update. Funds are SAFU. — CZ Binance (@cz_binance) June 13, 2022 CZ, who often lends his opinion on projects and the market, regularly tweets on behalf of Binance to his 6.4 million followers. He quickly updated the tweet to state: “This is only impacting the Bitcoin network. You can still withdraw …

Developers have fixed the runtime bug that caused the latest outage of the Solana (SOL) network on June 1. According to a report published by Solana Labs on Sunday, Solana’s fifth outage of 2022 was caused by a bug in the “durable nonce transactions feature,” which caused the network to stop producing blocks for roughly four and half hours. “The durable nonce transaction feature was disabled in releases v1.9.28/v1.10.23 to prevent the network from halting if the same situation were to arise again.” “Durable nonce transactions will not process until the mitigation has been applied, and the feature re-activated in …

Crypto-focused companies have come a long way since their beginnings in terms of corporate structure, employee motivation, decision-making systems, compliance and other aspects of their operations. While the early 2010s saw startups founded by small groups of crypto enthusiasts, the space has since grown to become home to large institutional businesses. Still, crypto companies are engaged in business, and business is alien to anarchy. The rapid growth of the cryptocurrency industry in the 2010s transformed small, independent businesses into huge conglomerates with thousands of employees and offices worldwide. Investment funds and professional investors own shares of them, many have functioning …

Panama’s path to crypto adoption is stepping up a gear. Towerbank, a Panamanian financial institution with over 200 employees and 40 years of banking experience, has declared itself Bitcoin-friendly, paving the way for crypto accounts. Gabriel Campa, vice president of product for Towerbank, told Cointelegraph that “We believe that as a bank, we have much to offer to this community,” asserting the group’s status as “crypto-friendly.” “We want to become part of the community and build a service platform together, to satisfy the opportunities arising from their current needs, pains, and priorities. Within the next 90 days, as we implement …

Unwithered by the ongoing bear market, Bitcoin’s (BTC) underlying architecture continues to outperform itself — further securing, decentralizing and speeding up the impenetrable peer-to-peer (P2P) network. The same holds true for the Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN). The Bitcoin Lightning Network capacity attained an all-time high of 3915.776 BTC, as evidenced by data from Bitcoin Visuals, displaying a commitment to the cause of improving BTC transaction speeds and reducing fees over the layer-2 protocol. The Bitcoin LN was first implemented into the Bitcoin mainnet in 2018 to address Bitcoin’s infamous scalability issues and has ever since been able to maintain an …

Brazil's Federal Reserve (RFB) has declared that Brazilian investors in the crypto-asset market must pay income tax on transactions that involve the like-kind exchange of cryptocurrencies; for example, Bitcoin (BTC) for Ethereum (ETH). The RFB's declaration was published in the Diário Oficial da União and was the result of a consultation made by a citizen of the country to the regulator. At the end of last year, the group issued an opinion in which it claimed that trading between cryptocurrency pairs is taxable even if there is no conversion to the real (Brazil's national currency). Although it does not specify …

The United States Federal Reserve Board has included data on cryptocurrency in its new Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in the 2021 report. The Fed’s ninth annual report looked at survey results from 11,000 people questioned in October and November 2021. The report indicated financial wellbeing is the highest it has been since reporting began, with 78% of U.S. adults “doing okay or living comfortably financially.” That is an increase of 3% over the last three years. As a diagnostic of financial fitness, the report cites the 68% of Americans who say they could cover a $400 emergency expense using …

A mysterious Redditor has made a data-driven prediction that the next major phase of development in the blockchain space will be in layer-2 solutions, primarily on Ethereum. The May 22 post explains that “We’re at a turning point” where the industry is moving away from bridging between L1 blockchains toward L2s which are “right out of the gate, more secure and decentralized than alt-L1s and are built to use sound money on a credibly neutral platform:” “L2 adoption is happening now, even if it is slow and in bursts. Behind the scenes, L2’s are improving reliability, decreasing fees, and increasing …