Being a crypto-friendly country has paid off in terms of adoption, as a new study about Singapore revealed.
“The State of Crypto in Singapore Report 2021,” conducted by crypto exchange Gemini in partnership with CoinMarketCap and Seedly, found that more than two-thirds of Singaporeans who have financial investments currently hold crypto.
The report, which sampled 4,348 Singapore-based adults who self-identify as having or being interested in personal finance and investment products, shows that 67% of the respondents currently own crypto assets.
While one in five crypto holders are women, the study profiles the average Singaporean crypto holder as a “29-year-old male with an average annual household income of about 51,968 Singapore dollars ($38,456) a year.”
Regarding the distribution of crypto assets held by Singaporean investors, Ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, takes a clear lead with 78% as the most popular cryptocurrency, while 69% of crypto holders own Bitcoin (BTC). Cardano (ADA) and Binance Coin (BNB) follow the top two at 40% and 31%, respectively. One in four investors hold XRP and Tether (USDT), according to the survey.
The report reveals that people’s interest in crypto increased partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as 67% of crypto holders invested more during the pandemic to hedge against inflation or invest their increased disposable incomes due to lockdowns.
Related: Singapore grants first regulatory in-principle approval to crypto exchange
On the other hand, a lack of knowledge and understanding is the leading factor deterring non-crypto owners from investing in the assets class. The volatility of crypto markets, the risky nature of crypto investments and the lack of regulatory oversight were also noted as barriers to investing.
Another study with a smaller sampling group recently revealed that 46% of Singaporeans plan to buy digital assets in the next 12 months. With a zero capital gains tax on cryptocurrency income, Singapore established itself as a hub for crypto and blockchain in the Asia Pacific region.
Meet “The Bitcoin Family” that lives a decentralized nomad life solely on Bitcoin. 43-year-old Didi Taihuttu has a wife and three kids. They are known as the family that liquidated all their assets in 2017 to buy Bitcoin back when it was trading at around $900. Taihuttu is a true example of a Bitcoin enthusiast. According to him on his website, after losing his mother, and later his father, he “started reflecting life more and more and discovered that the life I was living was not the life I wanted to live. I experienced that Life could go very fast and that I needed to change.”
Related Reading | By The Numbers: What $10 In Bitcoin Each Day Would Net Investors
The Dutchman sold his 11-year-old business along with everything he owned – from his house down to his children’s toys. Then he bought a van hit the road with his family to live a minimalistic nomad life, waiting for a crypto boom to happen. This was in 2017.
Taihuttu’s Long-Running Involvement In Bitcoin
Before he became popular, Didi had learned about Bitcoin as far back as 2013. He, along with two of his friends, started mining for Bitcoin. In Taihuttu’s words: “I am an entrepreneur, so when I first heard about bitcoin, I said: Let’s do this.” Unfortunately, that venture was unsuccessful, so he shut it down. According to him, he lost his faith in BTC during the crash in 2014.
BTC price now trending around $46,000 | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com
But that was not the end of his relationship with Bitcoin, as he kept crossing paths with the cryptocurrency. When he saw that more people started to buy Bitcoins, he deduced that what would follow would be a monetary revolution. And he was not wrong. This revelation was what prompted him to go all in. It is estimated that at that time, after selling all his assets, he managed to acquire about 100 Bitcoins valued at roughly $350k.
The family’s Secret Crypto Vaults
The family has made a fortune from their investments and has decided to store this fortune in secret vaults. These vaults are located in different countries on four different continents. Taihuttu has two hiding spots in Europe, another two in Asia, one in South America, and a sixth in Australia, according to this CNBC article.
Related Reading | How Samsung Will Help The Bank Of Korea With CBDC Development
“I have hidden the hardware wallets across several countries so that I never have to fly very far if I need to access my cold wallet to jump out of the market,” said Taihuttu of the Bitcoin Family. The family told CNBC that the crypto stashes are hidden in different ways and a variety of locations, ranging from rental apartments and friends’ homes to self-storage sites. Taihuttu explained: “I prefer to live in a decentralized world where I have the responsibility to protect my capital.”
Didi Taihuttu And His Family’s Nomad Life
In 2017, the Dutch family embarked on a new life, documenting their travels on YouTube and other social media platforms. “My wife agreed that we were very happy as a traveling family and that we needed to teach the kids that they can be very happy without all the luxury we used to have,” explained Taihuttu.
Featured image from yolofamilytravel.com, chart from TradingView.com
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD rising to tackle a giant sell wall during Saturday, only to reverse downwards to Friday’s levels.
As Cointelegraph reported, the area of seller pressure from $47,000 and upwards had been a formidable feature on the daily chart throughout the week, with Bitcoin taking several days to prepare its attack.
In the event, the wall was only partially broken before momentum ran out and BTC/USD returning to more familiar territory.
At the time of writing, BTC price action focused around $46,500, a classic “Bart Simpson” structure characterizing the past 24 hours’ movements.
“Nothing special about this move, it’s just typical for a weekend,” Cointelegraph contributor Michaël van de Poppe summarized.
“However, the heavy resistance zone was hit between $47-49K, and no breakthrough happened for Bitcoin. Remaining cautious.”
Suitable volume would be needed to sustain another run-up and flip fresh resistance levels to support — a breakout without that volume could ultimately fail and cost overly optimistic traders
Fellow trader and analyst Rekt Capital meanwhile eyed the forthcoming daily close for confirmation of the $46,000 support zone reached just a matter of days ago.
#BTC is now in the process of a retest attempt of its Ascending Triangle
A 4HR Close above the top of the triangle would be great (left chart)
After cementing $2 support, ADA/USD thus went on to hit its highest levels since mid May, when it came off $2.50 all-time highs amid a sea of change in Bitcoin.
We are pleased to announce our next AMA on August 15th 2021 at 02:00 PM UTC Time: Satoshi Club x Liti Capital
Click to see the hour ️Total Reward pool: $500
️Requirements: 👉 Join Satoshi Club Telegram group 👉 Join Liti Capital Telegram group
We will have the following structure:
Part 1: 100$ /6 users — We’ll select 6 questions from the community. A user can post maximum 3 questions.
Part 2: 100$/10 users — Open chat for 120 seconds. You can post Max 3 questions. Liti Capital Team will select 10 questions and answer them.
Part3: 300$ — A quiz about Liti Capital
For more details: Liti Capital Website — liticapital.com Liti Capital Telegram — @Liti_Capital_Official Satoshi Club — @satoshi_club Russian — @satoshi_club_ru Spanish — @satoshi_club_spanish
The Lightning Network is one of the most bullish developments that the Bitcoin ecosystem has seen so far. And all the available metrics point up, a healthy and vibrant network is brewing. However, investor Kevin Rooke took a deeper look and found out that the Lightning Network is probably even bigger than previously thought. “Inaccurate comparisons and privacy preserving features make it hard to truly understand how big the Lightning Network is.”
Related Reading | Bitcoin Lightning Network Reaches Record Capacity
What does Rooke mean by that? Let’s find out.
The Lightning Network By The Numbers
A casual look at popular analytics platform 1ml tells us that, at the time of writing, The Lightning Network is composed of 24,688 nodes, 64,577 channels, and the network capacity is 2,272.89 BTC. All of those numbers are up. However, “The Lightning Network is not a borrowing protocol, an AMM, or a store of value. Furthermore, the idea that Bitcoin is “locked” on the Lightning Network is misleading at best.”
There are a number of DeFi protocols that have a much higher number of BTC “locked,” and people mistakenly compare that number to the Lightning Network ‘s capacity. In DeFi, usually, the funds are in fact locked and can’t be touched until the contract in question runs its course. In Lightning, things are quite different:
As explained in the book Mastering the Lightning Network, funds that are added to the Lightning Network are not locked, they are unleashed. As soon as a new Lightning channel is opened, those funds can be sent anywhere on the Lightning Network in an instant, and for almost no cost.
And speaking about channels, Kevin Rooke talked about them in an “investor letter” dated June 28th:
There are currently over 51,800 channels routing payments between 22,000 nodes, and 21% of those Lightning Network channels were created in the last 30 days.
On the surface, 21% monthly channel growth seems impressive, but new channel creation is a slightly misleading metric as nodes frequently open and close new channels.
A more accurate measure of growth is that the total number of channels on the Lightning Network is up by 10.8%, or over 5,000 channels in the last month.
Compare that to the more recent figure that we gave you at the beginning of the section and note how the number of channels grew in just a month and a half. That’s not all, take into account that:
Some nodes don’t want their channels to be included in the public Lightning Network graph, and instead choose to open ‘unadvertised’ or ‘private’ channels.
BTC price chart for 08/13/2021 on FTX | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com
Privacy Doesn’t Let Us See How Much Money Goes Through Lightning
Most of the transactions that take place inside the Lightning Network are private. Only at the time of settlement between two parties are the final numbers forever registered into the Bitcoin blockchain. That means it’s impossible to know exactly how much money is going through Lightning on any given day. Or in total.
Related Reading | Bitcoin Community Celebrates as Crucial Lightning Network Project Launches
However, Rooke estimates that “annual on-chain volume is almost 6x higher than the value locked into the Bitcoin network, despite the relatively high transaction fees and slow block times that make payments cumbersome.” That’s on the main Bitcoin blockchain. On the other hand:
The Lightning Network is designed for making fast and inexpensive payments, so if $85 million of Bitcoin is already on the Lightning Network, it would make sense for annual payment volume to be at least 6x higher, or at least $510M.
That’s a bare minimum. And things are just getting started. In September, El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law goes into effect and the whole country will start using the Lightning Network. And take into account that roughly a quarter of El Salvador’s GDP comes from remittances, so it’s not a stretch to think that Salvadoreans all over the world will start using it as well. Add to that Jack Dorsey’s projects, both Square and Twitter are looking into Lightning integration.
In fact, Dorsey published this tweet yesterday:
Agreed.
Every account on Twitter being able to link to a Lightning wallet however…
Poly Network, a cross-chain DeFi protocol, recently suffered a $600M hack — the largest DeFi exploit in crypto history. Mudit Gupta, security researcher and SushiSwap dev, breaks down the attack, explaining how it occurred, why the hacker is returning the funds, and what Poly Network should do next. Show highlights:
how Poly Network works
what specific mechanism the hacker attacked on Poly Network
why many people (including myself) had never heard of Poly Network before the hack
how “keepers” failed to protect Poly Network
why a failed transaction was the key to pulling off the hack
what SlowMist claims to have discovered about the hacker
what could be motivating the hacker to return the stolen funds
how the hacker is communicating with Poly Network
why Tether was able to freeze funds while USDC and BSC allowed the hacker to get away with their tokens
how Poly Network should handle negotiations with the hacker
Though Okcoin chief compliance officer Megan Monroe said that there are still certain grey areas over cryptocurrencies in the United States, further regulation may not be the best solution.
In a statement to Cointelegraph, Monroe said current U.S. regulations are sufficient to police cryptocurrency exchanges, token issuers and custody wallet providers, but “jurisdictional boundaries of these federal financial regulators are neither clear nor collaborative.” Rather, she advocated for a framework with greater clarity to determine which crypto firms should be subject to regulation and let investors know which protections are available.
“A clear regulatory framework with established jurisdictional boundaries, flexible compliance standards and open communication channels with registrants (as well as with state regulators) would be a good way to initiate an evolving framework for market participants to grow their businesses,” said the Okcoin chief compliance officer. “[This] would provide retail customers that seek to work with regulated entities a clearer understanding of the investor protections that would be available to them.”
She added:
“We do not believe that further regulation will necessarily prevent fraud and platform abuse […] Fraud should not be limited to focusing on retail customer regulatory compliance issues in the securities markets.”
Two of the major government agencies handling digital asset regulation in the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, have different jurisdictional claims regarding crypto.
The SEC often determines whether tokens are securities using the Howey Test, with Chairperson Gary Gensler arguing the crypto industry, including decentralized exchanges, falls within the regulatory purview of the federal agency. However, former CFTC Chair Christopher Giancarlo has claimed that cryptocurrencies are commodities and thus would be subject to regulation by the CFTC.
The apparent lack of clarity can be seemingly confusing to crypto firms that are considering relocating to the U.S., or local ones making the transition to the digital space. David Schwartz, chief technology officer of Ripple Labs, told Cointelegraph earlier this year that it was “difficult to figure out which laws apply and how they apply to something new,” like cryptocurrencies or blockchain technology.
“Over time, the regulators have educated themselves about the industry and expanded their scope to incorporate new blockchain technology, such as decentralized exchanges and DApps,” said Monroe. “But, the regulations still lag behind the industry innovation, which is why the regulators have yet to provide comprehensive regulatory guidance on decentralized finance technology.”
Related: Will regulation adapt to crypto, or crypto to regulation? Experts answer
The Okcoin chief compliance officer said that an “incubator” approach might be one possible solution to this “patchwork of financial regulations,” wherein crypto traders and businesses could operate without fear of legal action for a set period of time. She also encouraged projects to clearly identify the risks to both investors and users, and for greater communication and collaboration between agencies like the CFTC, SEC and Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
Axelar, a decentralized interoperability network that connects blockchain ecosystems, applications, and users, announced it has entered into a new partnership with Keplr, the largest Cosmos interchain wallet.
The partnership will integrate the Keplr Wallet into the Axelar network to unlock liquidity within the Cosmos ecosystem and beyond. Keplr is the most considerable Cosmos wallet and offers users all-in-one tools to manage their assets, access decentralized applications (dApps), and stake tokens.
Integration Interests
Through this integration, users will be able to transact, stake, and participate in the Axelar network governance via the Keplr web and mobile wallets.
Furthermore, the partnership will also allow assets to be transferred from the Axelar network to other Cosmos chains and back via IBC; supported by both the Axelar network and Keplr.
“Keplr is the go-to wallet for Cosmos users, and we are excited for them to partner with the Axelar network and support the ecosystem. This integration is a big milestone for the multi-chain future and to connect Cosmos networks with other external ecosystems.” – Sergey Gorbunov, Co-Founder & CEO of Axelar
Integration means users will be able to move assets from all Cosmos chains to other ecosystems connected via the Axelar network, such as EVM chains like Ethereum, Avalanche, Moonbeam, and others. This will not only increase liquidity for users but will expand Keplr’s network of dApps and their utility.
“This latest integration with Axelar network is satisfying a growing demand for cross-chain asset movement support across the industry. Axelar network will lead the charge in bringing highly in-demand assets such as Bitcoin to the Interchain; and further catalyze IBC adoption.” – Josh Lee, Co-Founder of Keplr Wallet
DeFi (decentralized finance) has expanded its frontiers beyond the imagination of users. From a TVL of just over USD 1 billion in June 2020, to the current staggering USD 80 billion, its exponential growth is becoming a focal point to measure the massive activity in the world of finance, not just the token economy. The genesis of the various chains and DeFi platforms fuels positive growth the industry has been…
