On August 23rd, Derivatives Exchange Bitget announced its new logo designed to indicate a place where people can exchange freely and realize their financial dreams with the help of leverage.
According to Bitget, Bit is a blended word coming from Binary and digit and the smallest unit of information. It implies a business that is based on digitalization and IT. “Get” represents interaction, a kind of connection between the platform and the external world. In combination, the name Bitget expresses its mission “Better Trading Better Life”, and its commitment to offer liberal, ultimate and fair trading services.
The new LOGO uses two interactive arrows to symbolize the liquidity and activity of Bitget and its pursuit of freedom and fairness. It also reflects the nature of platform trading. The interactive image shows that Bitget will always put users first and lead users to success and fortune through transactions. The newly adopted blue color represents the energy and vitality of the crypto industry and delivers a sense of boldness and creativity — an image the platform wants to show to its users.
The new logo is a testament to Bitget’s achievements in the past and an embodiment of its vision for the future. In just three years since its establishment, the platform has successfully made itself into the Top6 derivative exchange, closely after the professional ones FTX and Bybit. Bitget now has more than 1.6 million registered users in 48 countries and regions, including Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Russia and Turkey, with an average daily trading volume of $5.6 billion. It has become one of the fastest-growing derivatives exchanges in the world.
According to its CEO Sandra, Bitget will continue to dive deeper into derivatives trading in the remaining months of the year. It aims to bring users products and services focused on futures, and expand to global markets such as South America, Japan, Central Europe, and Russia under the principle of compliant and localized operations. As Bitget steps up its globalization efforts and connects with users from more countries, a simpler and unique logo to display a new corporate culture and values become a necessity.
Last month, it released a new slogan “Better Trading Better Life”, indicating that every user across the world can enjoy a liberal, ultimate and fair trading experience on Bitget and realize their financial dreams with the help of leverage. “The new logo conveys not only a change of appearance but also a stronger inner spirit. The updated logo and slogan deliver a message that is in line with our corporate culture. In the future, Bitget will bring more surprises to users with our brand new image.” says Sandra.
About Bitget
Established in July 2018, Bitget is one of the world’s fastest-growing derivatives exchanges that support futures trading, spot trading and crypto asset purchasing. As a platform in pursuit of perfection and innovation, Bitget has pioneered to launch three flagship products of USDT-Margined Futures, One-Click Copy Trade, and Quanto Swap Futures to provide the best services to users. It is now the Top6 derivatives exchange and the largest crypto copy trading platform in the world.
Singapore-based crypto exchange KuCoin is launching a mining pool aimed at providing revenue to proof-of-work miners after integrating their rigs.
In a Wednesday announcement, the exchange said its KuCoin Pool product would allow miners around the world to contribute to the Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and share rewards. At the moment, miners are required to install and run the necessary hardware themselves to join the pool, but KuCoin said it would introduce mining in the cloud in the future.
KuCoin CEO Johnny Lyu also claimed the pool would be encouraging miners to participate in environmentally-friendly solutions — people using renewable energy sources for mining will receive discounts on fees. The move is seemingly part of a shift in many mining firms beginning to transition to cleaner or renewable energy.
“For existing KuCoin users, it will become straightforward to set up their mining devices to generate passive income right away,” said Lyu. “Miners can benefit from the one-stop mining service platform and its features to get up and running very quickly.”
The exchange is coming in late to mining when compared with major firms like Binance, which launched its mining pool in April 2020. According to blockchain data, some of the largest BTC miners include Antpool — owned by Chinese mining giant Bitmain — Poolin, ViaBTC, and F2Pool.
Related: Are KuCoin Shares overvalued after KCS price gains 100% in one month?
Launched in 2017, KuCoin reported this week that it had reached 10 million users, having risen by 1,114% in the last year. Last year, hackers stole roughly $275 million from the exchange before KuCoin was able to recover the majority of the funds.
For ethics-based investment enthusiasts, here are two events to check out, solely because speakers from the first Shariah-compliant DeFi project, MRHB DeFi will be speaking there.
Islamic Fintech Leaders Forum 2021
To access event platform:
More info on event: https://emnesevents.com/fintech-islamic-leaders-forum/
Spotlight on:
MRHB DeFi’s Chairman of Shariah Board, Dr. Farrukh Habib, who will be holding a blockchain panel discussion today 25th August at 12:05 PM (UAE Time) at Islamic Fintech Leaders Forum, and Shariah Leaders Discussion session at 04:00 PM (UAE Time).
And MRHB DeFi’s Chairman of Governance Board, Khalid Howlader, who is also the Senior Managing Director and Head of Credit & Sukuk for R.J. Fleming & Co. for institutional and sovereign clients. With his global perspectives, he is a recognised authority in his field and has addressed investors worldwide as well as audiences at the World Bank, IMF, ECB and IIF.
ICCIA Leadership Talks “Digital Banking: The Way Forward”
ICCIA (Islamic Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture), a sub-organization of OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation), representing 56 Muslim countries, is organizing the event.
Spotlight on:
MRHB DeFi’s Chairman of Shariah Board, Dr. Farrukh Habib, who will be presenting followed by a Q & A session today.
Tl;dr: Coinbase is leveraging AWS’ Managed Streaming for Kafka (MSK) for ultra low latency, seamless service-to-service communication, data ETLs, and database Change Data Capture (CDC). Engineers from our Data Platform team will further present this work at AWS’ November 2021 Re:Invent conference.
Abstract
At Coinbase, we ingest billions of events daily from user, application, and crypto sources across our products. Clickstream data is collected via web and mobile clients and ingested into Kafka using a home-grown Ruby and Golang SDK. In addition, Change Data Capture (CDC) streams from a variety of databases are powered via Kafka Connect. One major consumer of these Kafka messages is our data ETL pipeline, which transmits data to our data warehouse (Snowflake) for further analysis by our Data Science and Data Analyst teams. Moreover, internal services across the company (like our Prime Brokerage and real time Inventory Drift products) rely on our Kafka cluster for running mission-critical, low-latency (sub 10 msec) applications.
With AWS-managed Kafka (MSK), our team has mitigated the day-to-day Kafka operational overhead of broker maintenance and recovery, allowing us to concentrate our engineering time on core business demands. We have found scaling up/out Kafka clusters and upgrading brokers to the latest Kafka version simple and safe with MSK. This post outlines our core architecture and the complete tooling ecosystem we’ve developed around MSK.
Configuration and Benefits of MSK
Config:
TLS authenticated cluster
30 broker nodes across multiple AZs to protect against full AZ outage
Multi-cluster support
~17TB storage/broker
99.9% monthly uptime SLA from AWS
Benefits:
Since MSK is AWS managed, one of the biggest benefits is that we’re able to avoid having internal engineers actively maintain ZooKeeper / broker nodes. This has saved us 100+ hours of engineering work as AWS handles all broker security patch updates, node recovery, and Kafka version upgrades in a seamless manner. All broker updates are done in a rolling fashion (one broker node is updated at a time), so no user read/write operations are impacted.
Moreover, MSK offers flexible networking configurations. Our cluster has tight security group ingress rules around which services can communicate directly with ZooKeeper or MSK broker node ports. Integration with Terraform allows for seamless broker addition, disk space increases, configuration updates to our cluster without any downtime.
Finally, AWS has offered excellent MSK Enterprise support, meeting with us on several occasions to answer thorny networking and cluster auth questions.
Performance:
We reduced our end-to-end (e2e) latency (time taken to produce, store, and consume an event) by ~95% when switching from Kinesis (~200 msec e2e latency) to Kafka (<10msec e2e latency). Our Kafka stack’s p50 e2e latency for payloads up to 100KB averages <10 msec (in-line with LinkedIn as a benchmark, the company originally behind Kafka). This opens doors for ultra low latency applications like our Prime Brokerage service. Full latency breakdown from stress tests on our prod cluster, by payload size, presented below:
Proprietary Kafka Security Service (KSS)
What is it?
Our Kafka Security Service (KSS) houses all topic Access Control Lists (ACLs). On deploy, it automatically syncs all topic read/write ACL changes with MSK’s ZooKeeper nodes; effectively, this is how we’re able to control read/write access to individual Kafka topics at the service level.
KSS also signs Certificate Signing Requests (CSRs) using the AWS ACM API. To do this, we leverage our internal Service-to-Service authentication (S2S) framework, which gives us a trustworthy service_id from the client; We then use that service_id and add it as the Distinguished Name in the signed certificate we return to the user.
With a signed certificate, having the Distinguished Name matching one’s service_id, MSK can easily detect via TLS auth whether a given service should be allowed to read/write from a particular topic. If the service is not allowed (according to our acl.yml file and ACLs set in ZooKeeper) to perform a given action, an error will occur on the client side and no Kafka read/write operations will occur.
Also Required
Parallel to KSS, we built a custom Kafka sidecar Docker container that: 1) Plugs simply into one’s existing docker-compose file 2) Auto-generates CSRs on bootup and calls KSS to get signed certs, and 3) Stores credentials in a Docker shared volume on user’s service, which can be used when instantiating a Kafka producer / consumer client so TLS auth can occur.
Rich Data Stream Tooling
We’ve extended our core Kafka cluster with the following powerful tools:
Kafka Connect
This is a distributed cluster of EC2 nodes (AWS autoscaling group) that performs Change Data Capture (CDC) on a variety of database systems. Currently, we’re leveraging the MongoDB, Snowflake, S3, and Postgres source/sink connectors. Many other connectors are available open-source through Confluent here
Kafdrop
We’re leveraging the open-source Kafdrop product for first-class topic/partition offset monitoring and inspecting user consumer lags: source code here
Cruise Control
This is another open-source project, which provides automatic partition rebalancing to keep our cluster load / disk space even across all broker nodes: source code here
ConfluentSchema Registry
We use Confluent’s open-source Schema Registry to store versioned proto definitions (widely used along Coinbase gRPC): source code here
Internal Kafka SDK
Critical to our streaming stack is a custom Golang Kafka SDK developed internally, based on the segmentio/kafka release. The internal SDK is integrated with our Schema Registry so that proto definitions are automatically registered / updated on producer writes. Moreover, the SDK gives users the following benefits out of the box:
Consumer can automatically deserialize based on magic byte and matching SR record
Message provenance headers (such as service_id, event_time, event_type) which help conduct end-to-end audits of event stream completeness and latency metrics
These headers also accelerate message filtering and routing by avoiding the penalty of deserializing the entire payload
Streaming SDK
Beyond Kafka, we may still need to make use of other streaming solutions, including Kinesis, SNS, and SQS. We introduced a unified Streaming-SDK to address the following requirements:
Delivering a single event to multiple destinations, often described as ‘fanout’ or ‘mirroring’. For instance, sending the same message simultaneously to a Kafka topic and an SQS queue
Receiving messages from one Kafka topic, emitting new messages to another topic or even a Kinesis stream as the result of data processing
Supporting dynamic message routing, for example, messages can failover across multiple Kafka clusters or AWS regions
Offering optimized configurations for each streaming platform to minimize human mistakes, maximize throughput and performance, and alert users of misconfigurations
Upcoming
On the horizon is integration with our Delta Lake which will fuel more performant, timely data ETLs for our data analyst and data science teams. Beyond that, we have the capacity to 3x the number of broker nodes in our prod cluster (30 -> 90 nodes) as internal demand increases — that is a soft limit which can be increased via an AWS support ticket.
Takeaways
Overall, we’ve been quite pleased with AWS MSK. The automatic broker recovery during security patches, maintenance, and Kafka version upgrades along with the advanced broker / topic level monitoring metrics around disk space usage / broker CPU, have saved us hundreds of hours provisioning and maintaining broker and ZooKeeper nodes on our own. Integration with Terraform has made initial cluster configuration, deployment, and configuration updates relatively painless (use 3AZs for your cluster to make it more resilient and prevent impact from a full-AZ outage).
Performance has exceeded expectations, with sub 10msec latencies opening doors for ultra high-speed applications. Uptime of the cluster has been sound, surpassing the 99.9% SLA given by AWS. Moreover, when any security patches take place, it’s always done in a rolling broker fashion, so no read/write operations are impacted (set default topic replication factor to 3, so that min in-sync replicas is 2 even with node failure).
We’ve found building on top of MSK highly extensible having integrated Kafka Connect, Confluent Schema Registry, Kafdrop, Cruise Control, and more without issue. Ultimately, MSK has been beneficial for both our engineers maintaining the system (less overhead maintaining nodes) and unlocking our internal users and services with the power of ultra-low latency data streaming.
If you’re excited about designing and building highly-scalable data platform systems or working with cutting-edge blockchain data sets (data science, data analytics, ML), come join us on our mission building the world’s open financial system: careers page.
How we scaled data streaming at Coinbase using AWS MSK was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Liti Capital is now trading on Bitcoin.com Exchange
Geneva, Switzerland, August 24, 2021 — Liti Capital’s wLITI token, a wrapped version of the Swiss company’s LITI equity token, has been listed on the Bitcoin.com Exchange on 24 August at 10:00AM UTC. wLITI is trading with BTC and USDT pairs.
Liti Capital, a Swiss-based blockchain private equity fund specializing in raising capital for legal cases, is making waves in traditional investing by bringing litigation financing to the masses, an investment practice traditionally monopolized by hedge fund heavyweights and elite investors.
Just last week, 19 August 2021, Liti Capital announced that it was funding a claim (www.binanceclaim.com) against Binance, which would enable affected individuals to pursue claims, including, if necessary, in arbitration, for compensation in relation to the exchange failing on 19 May 2021. This failure resulted in the trading accounts (including Futures, Margin, and Leveraged Token products) of at least 700 and potentially thousands of individuals being effectively untradeable for hours, causing traders to suffer losses that could exceed one hundred million dollars.
Litigation financing is the practice of bringing in investors to cover the cost of a lawsuit or arbitration in exchange for a portion of the profit. Litigation financing specialists, such as Liti Capital, purchase litigation assets for cases they deem to have a high chance of winning.
While litigation financing often requires an initial investment of $500,000 to $1 million from an investor, Liti Capital makes it accessible for anyone with as little as $50. It does this by tokenizing shares in Liti Capital and paying out dividends to Liti Capital (LITI) equity token holders when a case in Liti Capital’s portfolio is won.
Liti Capital has already secured a healthy case portfolio with its largest case potentially worth more than $1 billion when it finally settles. Cases like these, which tend to be commercial rather than consumer or personal lawsuits, usually target large-scale corporate disputes valued at more than $10 million. While they could take years before a settlement is reached, successful litigation funders can expect to pocket between three and five times their initial investments, according to estimates by litigation finance expert Steven Friel.
wLITI is an ERC-20 token that is the wrapped version of the LITI equity token. Launched on June 29, 2021, the wLITI token is suitable for trading on exchanges such as Bitcoin.com, whereas the LITI token is only available through liticapital.com after meeting KYC requirements. Liti Capital uses the blockchain to manage its share registry. Development of its own blockchain-based case management tools is on its roadmap.
Switzerland-based Liti Capital creates wLITI at a LITI token buyer’s request via Liti Capital’s app or website, which converts the LITI to wLITI at a 1:5000 ratio. The tokens will always maintain this ratio. The buyer is then able to trade their wLITI freely. Liti Capital does not directly sell wLITI.
LITI is a true digital share of Liti Capital that has voting rights, pays dividends and is protected under Swiss law. LITI is purposely not designed to be on exchanges at this time.
Both tokens represent Liti Capital, whose mantra is “private equity for all.” Liti Capital works exclusively in a single form of private equity — Litigation Finance, also called third party funding. This asset class has remained almost entirely exclusive to hedge funds and venture capitalists since its inception several decades ago. Litigation Finance is the practice of financing all or part of a legal case on behalf of a plaintiff for an agreed upon percentage of the court award.
Once Liti Capital purchases a portion of ownership of a case, it provides capital that can be used in many ways: legal fees, case management and strategy, expert witnesses, intelligence work and whatever else is needed to give the plaintiff the best chance of winning the case and collecting the award. The portion owned by Liti Capital becomes a “litigation asset” that backs the LITI token.
Danish Chaudhry, CEO of Bitcoin.com Exchange, shared his views on wLiti’s listing, saying,“The Liti Capital team are providing an equity token which is the first of its kind, focused around easy-to-access private equity investment opportunities for basically anyone with the help of blockchain technology.”
Chaudhry continues on by saying: “We’re very excited to see how Liti Capital will continue to empower their vision, and gain further outreach with our outstanding community at the exchange.”
Jonas Rey, CEO of Liti Capital, said, “Listing on Bitcoin.com Exchange is an excellent opportunity for us, and a milestone we are proud of. We have full confidence that once the public discovers just how valuable the litigation assets we are able to purchase on behalf of LITI investors are and how powerful blockchain-backed private equity trading can be, that wLITI will become a very popular token indeed.”
Listing details
Trading Opening: Aug. 24, 2021, 10:00AM UTC
Deposit Opening: Aug 24, 2021, 09;00AM UTC
Trading Pairs: wLITI/BTC
wLITI/USDT
About Liti Capital
Switzerland-based Liti Capital is a Swiss limited liability company specializing in litigation finance and fintech. Liti Capital buys litigation assets to fund lawsuits and provides a complete strategic solution along with connections to top law firms to help clients win their cases. Tokenized shares of the company lower the barrier of entry for retail investors and give token holders a vote in the company’s decision-making process. Dividends are distributed to LITI token holders upon the success of the plaintiff. Jonas Rey, co-founder of Liti Capital, also heads Athena Intelligence, one of the most successful intelligence agencies in Switzerland. His two co-founders, Andy Christen and Jaime Delgado, bring operational, innovation and technical skills to round out the leadership team.
Liti Capital recently onboarded seasoned industry leader David Kay as chief information officer and executive chairman. Boasting more than a decade of experience as funding partner and portfolio manager of a billion-dollar private equity fund in the litigation financing space, Kay successfully enforced what was at the time the largest international arbitration award in history, bringing in over $1 billion in cash and securities.
About Bitcoin.com Exchange
The mission of Bitcoin.com Exchange is to empower people from all over the world to trade cryptocurrencies with ease and confidence, from first-time traders to advanced trading professionals. With high liquidity, 24/7 multilingual support and dozens of trading pairs, complemented with a high level of security, we offer an attractive platform for trading any cryptocurrency. Within one year since launch, on average, the exchange has been visited by more than 500K active traders per month, and this number continues to grow by the minute.
Crypto has recently been suggested as a fix for the woes popular adult content platform OnlyFans has been going through. The company had announced last week that it planned to remove all of its adult content by October first. Speculations were that this was due to payment processors Visa and MasterCard making payment harder for the company due to the nature of its foremost content. But it was clarified that it was in fact due to the company wanting investors since they had been turned down due to the type of content they host on their site.
Related Reading | South African Man Loses $900,000 Worth Of Bitcoin After Accidentally Deleting Keys
This had sent a shockwave through the community and the news world. Crypto enthusiasts started suggesting that things like this could be avoided with decentralized platforms and payment services like cryptocurrencies. With Bitcoin leading in the suggestions for the type of crypto to be used for this.
The company has not responded to any of this, seemingly steadfast in its resolve to purge the site of all pornographic content. To this end, America rapper Tyga has announced that he plans to release his own platform that will be a direct competitor to OnlyFans. The platform the rapper plans to launch will be built on the Ethereum network.
Tyga Exits OnlyFans
Rapper Tyga had opened an OnlyFans account almost a year ago. Tyga had been a strong advocate for the platform and had started a modeling agency, Too Raww, that was dedicated to helping content creators get started on OnlyFans. Following the ban on pornographic content, the rap star took to his Instagram to announce his exit from the platform.
Related Reading | Crypto Market Goes Into “Extreme Greed,” What This Means For Bitcoin
Tyga announced that he had deleted his account on the platform and he was launching his own OnlyFans competitor, Myystar, which would provide content creators more freedom and a better cut of earnings. While also providing higher quality viewing for the audience. According to the press release, Myystar will only take 10% off creators’ earnings compared to the 20% on OnlyFans.
Building With A Crypto Backbone
Myystar’s most striking feature yet remains the fact that the platform is being built on the Ethereum network. The rapper seems to have listened to the suggestions coming out of the market recently and has run with this.
Related Reading | Here’s What Bitcoin Exchange Inventory Levels Means For The Bull Rally
In addition to providing better quality and a higher percentage of earnings, Myystar will also allow content creators to sell NFTs on the platform, and also, features that are relevant to the music industry. This will provide content creators the ability to mint pornographic content in order to sell them off as NFTs.
Crypto total market cap continues upward trend | Source: Crypto Total Market Cap on TradingView.com
A countless number of sex workers and adult content creators have been affected by the OnlyFans ban on pornographic content. Tyga told Forbes that he wanted to give these people hope with his platform. “I know how many people make a lot of money on OnlyFans, and that’s where most of their revenue is at. I want to give those people hope,” Tyga said.
The Myystar platform is scheduled to launch in October, following the ban of pornographic content on OnlyFans happening on October 1st. The site is currently up and is allowing creators to sign up ahead of the launch.
Featured image on Discotech, chart from TradingView.com
Bitcoin (BTC) is knocking at the doors of the key $50,000 level and most traders are still optimistic even after the digital asset rallied 70% from the July 20 low at $29,278 to an intraday high at $49,757.04 on Aug. 21.
Monitoring resource Material Indicators pointed to a lot of puts at the $50,000 strike price and the “positive funding almost across the board (overheated),” which suggests a rejection at the current levels and a “pullback going into September.”
Crypto market data daily view. Source:Coin360
Nikita Ovchinnik, chief business development officer of 1inch Network said that several new institutional investors had taken exposure to crypto in the past year, and that “they didn’t come for short-term gains.”
Another positive sign for the crypto sector is the ever-growing list of unicorns. Analysts expect more companies to join the list as the adoption of crypto and blockchain increases.
Bitcoin’s hesitation near the $50,000 mark may shift focus to altcoins? Let’s study the charts of the top-5 cryptocurrencies that are likely to attract traders’ attention in the short term.
BTC/USDT
Bitcoin rebounded off the 20-day exponential moving average ($45,049) on Aug. 19 and the bulls pushed the price above the stiff overhead resistance at $48,144 on Aug. 20. The bears are currently attempting to stall the up-move at the psychological resistance at $50,000.
BTC/USDT daily chart. Source: TradingView
If bulls do not give up much ground and flip the $48,144 level to support, it will indicate strength. The BTC/USDT pair could then pick up momentum and start its northward march toward $58,000.
The rising 20-day EMA and the relative strength index (RSI) in the positive zone suggest that the path of least resistance is to the upside.
Alternatively, if bears pull the price below $48,144, the pair could drop to the 200-day simple moving average ($45,816). This is an important level for the bulls to defend because a break below it could embolden the bears.
The sellers will then try to sink the price below the breakout level at $42,451.67. If they succeed, it will suggest the start of a deeper correction.
BTC/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView
The 4-hour chart shows that the bears are aggressively defending the zone between $49,500 and $50,000. If they can sink the price below the 20-EMA, the pair could drop to $46,600 and then to $44,000.
If that happens, it will suggest that the bulls are losing their grip and the pair could then remain range-bound between $44,000 and $50,000 for a few days. The bears will have to pull the price below $42,451.67 to gain the upper hand.
ADA/USDT
Cardano (ADA) is in a strong uptrend. The bulls pushed the price above the all-time high at $2.47 on Aug. 20 but the long wick on the day’s candlestick showed selling at higher levels. The altcoin formed an inside-day candlestick pattern on Aug. 21, indicating indecision among bulls and bears.
ADA/USDT daily chart. Source: TradingView
The uncertainty resolved to the upside today as the bulls have again pushed the price to a new all-time high. If buyers sustain the price above the breakout level at $2.47, the ADA/USDT pair could rally to $3.
However, the long wick on today’s candlestick suggests that bears are unlikely to give up without a fight. They will try to pull the price back below $2.36 and trap the aggressive bulls. If that happens, the pair may correct to $2.20.
If the price rebounds off $2.20, the bulls will again try to resume the uptrend. A breakout and close above the $2.47 to $2.65 will enhance the prospects of the continuation of the uptrend. Alternatively, a break below $2.20 could pull the price down to $1.94.
ADA/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView
The 4-hour chart shows the 20-EMA is sloping up but the RSI is forming a negative divergence. This suggests that the bullish momentum may be slowing down. The first sign of weakness will be a break below the 20-EMA.
Contrary to this assumption, if bulls do not give up much ground from the current level, it will suggest strength. That could attract further buying and the pair may then rally to the psychological resistance at $3.
AVAX/USDT
Avalanche (AVAX) rallied from $18.41 on Aug. 17 to $50.27 on Aug. 21, a 173% rally within a short time. This sharp up-move has pushed the RSI above 92, indicating the rally is over-extended in the short term.
AVAX/USDT daily chart. Source: TradingView
The long wick on the Aug. 21 candlestick shows that bears are attempting to defend the psychological resistance at $50. On the downside, the first support is at $40. If the price rebounds off this level, it will suggest that bulls are not booking profits aggressively as they anticipate the rally to continue further.
A breakout and close above $44 could improve the prospects of a retest of the all-time high at $60.30.
On the contrary, if bears pull the price below the 38.2% Fibonacci retracement level at $38.09, the AVAX/USDT pair could correct to the 50% retracement level at $34.34. A break below this support will indicate that the bullish momentum may have weakened.
AVAX/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView
The 4-hour chart shows that bears are attempting to stall the relief rally at the overhead resistance at $44.60 and the bulls are buying on dips to $40. This suggests that the pair could remain range-bound between these two levels in the short term.
If the bulls drive the price above $44.60, the pair could rally to $50.27. A breakout and close above this level will signal the resumption of the uptrend. Conversely, a break below the 20-EMA will indicate that traders are booking profits and not buying the dips. That could signal the start of a deeper correction.
CAKE/USDT
PancakeSwap (CAKE) is currently in a strong recovery. Sustained buying by the bulls pushed the price above the 38.2% Fibonacci retracement level at $22.74 on Aug. 20.
CAKE/USDT daily chart. Source: TradingView
If bulls sustain the price above $22.74, the relief rally could reach the 50% retracement level at $26.85 and then the 61.8% retracement level at $30.96. The bears are likely to mount a stiff resistance in this zone.
On the way down, the critical support to watch out for is the 20-day EMA ($20.37). If the price rebounds off this support, it will suggest that sentiment remains positive and traders are buying on dips. Conversely, a break below the 20-day EMA could open the doors for a further decline to $16.
CAKE/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView
The 4-hour chart shows the price is trading inside a rising wedge pattern. If bears sustain the price below the 20-EMA, the pair may drop to the support line of the wedge. This level is likely to act as a strong support and a sharp rebound off it will indicate that traders are buying on dips.
A breakout and close above $24.65 will suggest the resumption of the up-move. The next target objective on the upside is the resistance line of the wedge. The bullish momentum could pick up if bulls thrust the price above the wedge.
Related: Walmart seeks crypto product lead, Dogecoin Foundation returns, Coinbase amasses $4B war chest: Holder’s Digest, Aug. 15-21
ATOM/USD
Cosmos (ATOM) had been trading in a large range between $8.51 and $17.56 since late May. The bulls pushed the price above the resistance of the range on Aug. 18, clearing the path for a possible move to the pattern target at $26.61.
ATOM/USDT daily chart. Source: TradingView
However, the long wick on today’s candlestick and the RSI above 83 suggests the rally is overextended in the short term. This could attract profit-booking by the bulls, resulting in a minor correction or consolidation in the next few days.
If bulls do not give up much ground and flip the $17.56 level into support, the ATOM/USDT pair will again try to resume the uptrend. A break above $26.61 could open the doors for a rally to $28 and then to $30.
The bears will have to pull and sustain the price below $17 to invalidate the bullish sentiment.
ATOM/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView
The 4-hour chart shows that bears are mounting a stiff resistance near $24. Although bulls had pushed the price above this resistance, they could not sustain the higher levels as seen from the long wick on the candlestick.
A positive sign is that buyers are not dumping their positions in a hurry. The pair could consolidate between $21 and $24 for some time. A breakout and close above $24 will indicate strength and signal the resumption of the up-move.
Alternatively, a break below the 20-EMA will indicate the start of a deeper correction to $17.56.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.
Layer one network Polygon continues to expand and solidified its position in the crypto space. Recently, they announced a new partnership with Filecoin, a network that allows users to store and transfer data via a native marketplace.
The cooperation launched the Filecoin-Polygon Bridge, to increase their interoperability. Built by the Textile team, the bridge enables users to use any Polygon mainnet to connect with Filecoin’s storage and
(…) start storing data on Filecoin from any Polygon address without any conversions, signups, developer tokens, or secrets exchanged.
In addition, Textile, Polygon, and Filecoin announced further incentives for users and developers to leverage the bridge. For the foreseeable future, they will cover all storage costs for every project using the Textile Filecoin Storage Bridge. Thus,
Filecoin will bring greater functionality to Polygon applications that require decentralized and verifiable data storage.
The bridge will be “gradually” improved to increase its usability and will launch a governance model. In that way, the community will have the power to decide the direction of the project and will operate as an additional incentive for users and developers to jump in and participate.
📂 @textileio’s Filecoin-Polygon Storage Bridge can store data from any Polygon address owner accelerating the Web3 interoperability between Polygon & Filecoin ecosystems.
The bridge will benefit from Filecoin’s features, and any app, smart contract, or service will still rely on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to retrieve data. Information will be available on an entity called “storage contract” to be created with miners operating on the Filecoin Network.
One of Textile’s main objectives is to improve Polygon, and other blockchains capacity to hold and transfer data:
Filecoin brings many of the best parts of the IPFS stack, including verifiable data, peer-to-peer (p2p) data exchange, de-duplication, and more. We can create a more secure data storage layer for Polygon applications and their users (…).
An Improve Storage Layer For Polygon, How Does It Work?
According to a blog post published by Textile, the Filecoin Storage Bridge to Polygon is supported by two concepts. The first is “deposit” and is power by an API that enables them to take place on-chain, the second is “storage” power by several APIs that “interact off-chain with a storage validator that will interface with Filecoin”.
This system offers protection against bad actors and potential Sybil Attacks, as users must deposit funds proportional to the length of time that they’d like to keep their data storage, Textile clarified. The default amount to be deposited for an hour of storage is 100GWEI per second or 0.00036 MATIC every hour.
As seen in the chart below, research firm Messari records an increase in total value locked on Polygon. This metric, as research Ryan Watkins said, has many detractors but can be used as a proxy to determine “how much value” users place on the smart contracts running on this ecosystem.
Source: Messari
The metric has seen a recovery after a decline during June and is “trending nicely” towards previous highs. At the time of writing, MATIC trades at $1,64 with an 8.3% profit in the daily chart.
MATIC follows the general market sentiment with a rally in the daily chart. Source: MATICUSDT Tradingview
In a business school lecture hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a senior executive for Safaricom gave a prediction of decentralized finance and the future of commerce to a room of keen but confused MBA students. “You will be able to buy your first home on WhatsApp! Smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain will take care of everything and you won’t need a broker,” he said with conviction, pointing to a slide.
“How will the house’s title change hands? What about the funds? Can the blockchain do escrow? What role for lawyers? How could we possibly buy something worth a million dollars with the click of a button?” the class wondered.
Students in April 2017 — who hadn’t yet seen Bitcoin (BTC) crest above $20,000 — had little reason to believe that blockchain would change the world. They were intrigued anyway. Although these conversations took place back in 2017, the same discussions could still sound captivating to many today. That’s because there are still many individuals and businesses who have yet to experience the impact of DeFi and real-world assets (RWAs).
Looking to our present in 2021, after the excitement of the DeFi summer and the setback of Bitcoin’s recent sell-off, we are at another crossroads. DeFi total value locked is now above $150 billion, MakerDAO has now officially become a DAO, FTX has raised the largest private round in crypto, and a DeFi future seems more plausible than ever.
This would be a world where credit, payments and investing all take place on-chain in a decentralized system, without as great a role for financial institutions. In the spirit of blockchain, and the broader fintech movement, DeFi projects aim to offer innovative financial products with lower fees, fewer intermediaries and higher transparency.
While DeFi has made impressive strides and breakthroughs since 2017, the liquidity in the DeFi ecosystem represents only a fraction of what is needed for decentralized finance to go mainstream by bringing more real-world assets on-chain.
Related: The future of DeFi is spread across multiple blockchains
The question arises for this entire sector: How do we go from early customer traction to product-market fit? So that when a version of the 2017 conversation between the Safaricom executive and MIT students happens today, it won’t sound like something out of the ordinary and more like part of most people’s everyday life. Here are some key deterministic factors for DeFi to gain mainstream adoption.
A comprehensive data and analytic infrastructure
With a declining role for centralized financial institutions, the “guarantors” of the financial system, we are forced to rethink not only how data moves but also how it is controlled and custodied. Without banks, how will a blockchain manage one’s identity? How will we evaluate risk? How will we price assets if we can’t call on centralized datasets for valuations?
Oracles have successfully played a critical role in bridging the gap between real-world data and smart contracts. But how about the data analysis tools such as FICO and Bloomberg that are powering the financial markets? We haven’t seen any oracles that are providing a viable solution to that. The broader DeFi space needs a crowdsource-enabled solution to price historically opaque and illiquid assets so that we can bring these private assets into DeFi effectively and efficiently.
Collectively, this will accelerate the movement of real-world assets on-chain, including real estate and collectibles, and has the power to change the world. Still, we raise new questions: What is the right way to govern data in a decentralized universe, and how will laws apply in technological contexts lawmakers never considered? This question has plagued the social media industry and its reputation for the last several years. How can DeFi avoid similar pitfalls?
A DeFi ecosystem replicates full CeFi functionalities
China is the global leader in fintech innovation, with nearly 90% digital wallet penetration and 62 billion unique transactions made in 2020. This textbook definition of mass adoption is made possible by providing a complete banking experience for the wallet holders. Through Alibaba Group’s Alipay, China’s leading digital wallet, users can purchase insurance policies, invest in mutual funds, exchange currencies, pay bills and donate to charities. Alipay exemplifies a digital revolution built to allow people to continue the same routines but easier, faster and cheaper.
Similarly, the cryptographic innovations must be built upon a DeFi ecosystem that provides the same secured insurance, lending services and trusted currencies. While many DeFi veterans have already implemented RWA-based strategies, the lack of sufficient RWA on-chain severely hinders the ecosystem development.
Related: Decentralized and centralized finance need to collaborate
After having a proper pricing infrastructure, DeFi needs to offer a solution to onboard real-world assets on-chain at scale. The unique value proposition lies within their financing licenses. The space needs a protocol interfacing with traditional corporate borrowers globally to originate RWA at scale and bridge the funding demand in CeFi with liquidity in DeFi. This can be done by offering a frictionless lending process for real-world borrowers, eliminating the need for “crypto education” by allowing the borrowing and repayment to be made in fiat. On top of that, an RWA-based yield strategy has to be created, allowing DeFi and CeFi lenders to invest in income-generating real-world assets while maintaining exposure in crypto assets.
RWA lending will undoubtedly unlock numerous opportunities for DeFi innovations to replicate most, if not all, of the CeFi functionalities. With more projects eyeing RWA, the ecosystem will expand quickly.
An effective and efficient decentralized governance
When we talk about scaling decentralized finance and bringing more RWA on-chain, decentralized governance is an inevitable part. An effective decentralized governance solution could benefit DeFi in many ways:
Easier scaling. Organizations interested in scaling up can facilitate the process easier if they’re decentralized.
Faster decision-making. This largely depends on the governance form of that organization. Of course, some can be faster than others, but compared against centralized organizations where there is a wait for decisions to be approved, decentralized organizations have a clear advantage.
Transparency. All types of transactions are traceable and auditable by all permitted parties, resulting in much higher transparency and fraud prevention.
Related: Decentralized parties: The future of on-chain governance
A global standard for regulatory compliance
In an unpredictable market for regulatory enforcement actions, DeFi cannot afford to fly blind. Just last month, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Gary Gensler said:
“These platforms — whether in the decentralized or centralized finance space — are implicated by the securities laws and must work within our securities regime.”
The DeFi industry needs a strategy for compliance. The views that decentralization makes it difficult to hold any single entity accountable, or worse, that decentralization makes compliance unnecessary, have already and will continue to draw the scorn of regulators.
Related: FATF draft guidance targets DeFi with compliance
How can platforms reasonably fit their businesses within existing legal structures of the Bank Secrecy Act and Know Your Customer (KYC)/Anti-Money Laundering, or at least help to change the paradigm? Libra’s misadventures, though hardly DeFi, represent a missed opportunity to innovate without insulting our authorities. In its current state, the DeFi industry risks insulting regulators and advancing the theory put forth by antagonists like Elizabeth Warren that the cryptocurrency industry only truly exists to promote illicit financial practices, such as money laundering and drug and human trafficking. While the answer is not abundantly clear now as to how DeFi will integrate compliance into the technology stack, it seems clear that it must. Mainstream institutions and the general public will require better KYC standards before adopting.
Conclusion
There are protocols that have the potential to improve and secure the global financial system by introducing much-needed transparency and neutrality into a stable currency. Some stablecoin platforms have allowed anyone to generate their peer-to-peer cash in a trustless and decentralized environment.
But if we truly want everyone to realize the dream of accessible financial services for all people, then those of us in the DeFi space must leave our comfort zones. Our goal is for RWA to incorporate billions of dollars in non-digitally native. We must cross the chasm and step outside collateral into the DeFi ecosystem, but we can’t do it alone. We need to work together with a whole set of companies and projects that have a clear goal while encouraging competition from the legacy financial sector to benefit what is most important — the users.
This article was co-authored by David Lighton, Kevin Tseng and Mariano Di Pietrantonio.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors’ alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
David Lighton is the co-founder of Lithium Finance. He’s an entrepreneur passionate about inclusive financial innovation and also the founder of SendFriend, a fintech startup using blockchain for international money transfers. David also served as special assistant on the Haiti desk at the World Bank and co-authored the Haiti National Financial Inclusion Strategy. David holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and an M.A. and B.A. with honors from Johns Hopkins University.
Kevin Tseng is the founder of Naos Finance. Prior to Naos, Kevin was a serial entrepreneur and an investor. Kevin founded and exited three tech startups in China and Southeast Asia and led strategic investment at The Walt Disney Company and Alibaba Group.
Mariano Di Pietrantonio is the head of strategy for MakerGrowth, a MakerDAO Core Unit. He works primarily on the development and research of new use cases, including education, partnerships and communication activities. Mariano has 15 years of experience in product and marketing in industries such as pharma, banking and gaming, among others.
As Global Head of Tax for one of the largest crypto exchanges, while I appreciate the Bloomberg Editorial Board’s perspective on the crypto tax provision in the Senate infrastructure bill, I would like to respectfully offer the following critique from a real-world actor in the crypto space. I disagree with the timing and need for the unexpected and new crypto tax provision in the bill and how it was drafted. The best first step would be to issue regulations so that digital asset brokers would be permitted to issue the same third-party reporting that brokerage firms, like Fidelity and Charles Schwab, issue today. It is not a good first step, and certainly not good tax policy, to require non-brokers to report on transactions for people who are not even their customers.
First, some facts —
The IRS already has the authority to require crypto brokers to provide regular reporting of the gains and losses of their customers’ accounts. But they haven’t. For years, the crypto industry has asked for those regulations, and we are still waiting.
The Editorial Board cites the IRS Commissioner’s estimate of the tax gap as $1T to underscore the urgency for including the crypto tax requirement in the infrastructure bill. Meanwhile, Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the crypto tax gap is approximately $28B over 10 years. In effect, crypto is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the tax gap. The Editorial Board neglects to mention this discrepancy, or that neither figure has ever been accompanied with further explanation or additional data. Without supporting data, both figures only serve to create hype and drama.
And while it’s true that the Senate infrastructure bill’s overbroad and unworkable language alarmed us, it also roused a public outcry well beyond the crypto industry. According to public reports, Senate offices were “swamped” with phone calls and emails, with almost 80 thousand people contacting their senators in just a few days. This wave of public advocacy was diverse, ranging from civil liberties organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to the Americans for Tax Reform. Social media lit up with citizens from all walks of life protesting this threat to crypto’s future, including non-apparent champions such as TikTok influencers and rock stars.
The Bloomberg Editorial Board says that the IRS needs a broad statute to include non-brokers right now because we don’t know what we don’t know. But why would we impose reporting requirements on intermediaries who are wholly unrelated to brokering a transaction and have no customer relationship? The IRS doesn’t do that outside of crypto and it shouldn’t do that here.
It is disingenuous to suggest that the IRS will take time to issue these regulations and that non-brokers should have no fear of the law until then. Tax policy should be thoughtful and deliberate. Broad overreach is a regulatory mistake. As long as the statute says that software developers, miners, stakers must do the impossible, there is no lawyer who would advise them to risk operating in violation of laws whose penalties for non-compliance would easily bankrupt them. This will harm innovation and stifle the potential of a hugely important technology at its earliest stages of development.
The one thing on which I do agree with the Editorial Board is that the requirements should “apply to entities that can provide the necessary information.” The Editorial Board also should have acknowledged that crypto brokers, like Coinbase, are currently precluded from reporting sales and exchange related information to the IRS. Without a specific legal mandate (such as the IRS regulations), we cannot compromise or disclose customer information to the government.
Now, some suggestions-
“Brokers” of digital assets should be defined as it is understood in the real world today. It is well established that the predominant number of crypto transactions occur with brokers. If Congress decides that it must create a new definition of “broker” within the infrastructure bill for “digital assets,” then it should define brokers as persons who act as middlemen for compensation, with customers as counterparties. This is a traditional definition of broker and would cover entities like Coinbase.
Propose regulations to define the parameters of tax information reporting for crypto. We would welcome the rules of the road so that we can have a meaningful discussion on how it should be introduced and applied in the real world. The IRS has this authority today.
Hold hearings in Congress on tax oversight for crypto so that there is robust debate on the issue. Today, around 60 million Americans own crypto — roughly one-fifth of the entire U.S. population. Those Americans, and the entire crypto ecosystem, deserve more dialogue than midnight provisions inserted at the last minute.
We should not draft legislation that focuses on crypto ghosts that don’t exist now and have no roadmap to exist in the future. If we focus our laws on problems that don’t actually exist, we will erode America’s leadership in crypto. Why chill the industry in its infancy and send it (and the taxes associated with it) offshore?
Coinbase, as the largest U.S. exchange, agrees with the need for information reporting of crypto. We want people to pay all taxes required under the law. We are building systems and protocols for information reporting in response. While we continue to wait on Congress and the IRS to act, we will do our best to provide our customers with the information they need to comply with their personal reporting obligations.
We are rolling out a Tax Center for our customers in the coming month, with the goal of providing education, guidance, support, data, and historical transactional information. It’s hard to do this in practice, and it can’t be done overnight, but we are confident that we will get there and be best in class. Our customers want to be compliant with their tax obligations and have asked for this guidance and support.
We invite meaningful dialogue and discussion to set the appropriate regulatory parameters for our industry. We have offered this at every turn to both legislators and the IRS. The bipartisan leadership demonstrated by Senators Wyden, Lummis, and Toomey in offering their amendment to help resolve this unnecessary confusion underscores exactly how impactful meaningful dialogue can be.
Our response to a recent editorial from Bloomberg on Congress’s crypto tax proposal was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
