Posts – Page 1494 – Crypto Shuttle News

MRHB DeFi Launches IDO, followed by Listing of $MRHB on PancakeSwap and DODO | by Bit Media Buzz | Dec, 2021

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Melbourne, Australia, December 22nd, 2021 — MRHB DeFi, the world’s first inclusive and ethical DeFi ecosystem platform, has announced today the IDO of its BEP-20 token $MRHB on launchpads, ZeroSwap and DODO. Upon IDO completion, immediate listings of the token on DODO and the ever popular PancakeSwap DEX will follow. This is exciting news for the loyal community of over 1000 investors and supporters of the project who will be able to publicly trade $MRHB for the very first time.

“We are thrilled to announce the upcoming IDO and TGE (Token Generation Event) of the $MRHB token, which is the culmination of all the dedication and hard work of the entire Marhaba team,” declared CEO and founder Naquib Mohammed.

“Likewise, we are indebted to our diverse and global family of partners and investors, as well as our loyal community, who have offered steadfast support for the project throughout. The $MRHB token will be the fuel that underpins our entire ethical ecosystem platform, driving our shared vision of an inclusive DeFi for a more sustainable cryptoverse,” he added.

The public sale price of the $MRHB token is USD 0.04 on both ZeeDO, the launchpad of multi-chain DEX aggregator ZeroSwap, and on the DODO BSC launchpad, whose whitelist for the IDO has reportedly already been filled, as of this morning. There will be zero lockup periods for these tokens, which will be 100% released at TGE.

Massive Community Interest for Ethical, Sustainable and Inclusive DeFi Offerings

The community-first project has already concluded two successful pre-launch sales on their website. Unlike many other projects, where only VCs and VIPs get priority, MRHB opened their early rounds to the community to help share the crypto-opportunity — a move celebrated by the now 70,000 strong supporters. For the team, this served as an important validation of the interest for DeFi services rooted in ethics, sustainability and inclusion.

MRHB DeFi was founded with a vision of providing excluded and crypto-cautious communities greater access to the growing opportunities and utilities of the crypto sphere. The project is underpinned by offering faith-based DeFi services which adhere to the ethical investment and financing principles rooted in Islamic Finance — a sector valued at around USD 3 trillion of assets. Bringing even a small portion of Shariah-sensitive liquidity into DeFi will represent a major boost to the total value of the DeFi sector worldwide.

Business practices deemed ethical include those that avoid interest, usury, social exploitation as well as support sustainability, asset or utility backed financing, transparency and equitable risk-reward sharing. These principles have universal appeal far beyond the faith conscious community as evidenced by a large number of stakeholders beyond the halal-seeking population.

Many of the values upheld by the halal platform align with several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and MRHB is also a signatory of the Crypto Climate Accords, a group that seeks to achieve net-zero emissions from electricity consumption by 2030 as well as develop standards and technologies to accelerate the progress toward 100% renewably powered blockchains by the 2025 UNFCCC COP30 conference.

To date, investors include Sheesha Finance, Blockchain Australia, Australian Gulf Capital, Mozaic, Contango Digital Assets, NewTribe Capital, Acreditus Partners, EMGS Group, Sinofy Group, MKD Capital and a grant from Polygon Technology.

About MRHB DeFi

MRHB DeFi is a halal, decentralized finance platform built to embody the true spirit of an “Ethical and Inclusive DeFi” by following faith-based financial and business principles, where all excluded communities can benefit from the full empowerment potential of DeFi.

The diverse team comprises researchers, technocrats, influencers, Islamic fintech experts & business entrepreneurs, who came together to ensure that MRHB DeFi prevails in a manner that will impact society as a whole, essentially bridging the gap between the faith-conscious communities and the blockchain world.

MRHB DeFi Official Channels

Website: https://marhabadefi.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/marhabadefi

Telegram: https://t.me/mdf_official

Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/marhabadefi_ANN

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHuvZG9DbS5ffeoqLX_bERg

Medium: https://medium.com/@mrhbdefi

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marhabadefi

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MRHB-DeFi-105893235209147

Telegram (Arabic): https://t.me/mdf_arabic

Telegram (Russian): https://t.me/marhabadefi_russia

Telegram (Turkish): https://t.me/MarhabaDefiTR

Telegram (Persian): https://t.me/mrhbdefi_persian

Telegram (Urdu/Hindi): https://t.me/MRHBDeFi_Urdu_Hindi

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December 22, 2021

Perspective: Bitcoin is not boring

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By Mark Nesbitt

Crypto is a rapidly growing space, with many views on how it might evolve. This series explores various ideas on crypto’s future and does not necessarily reflect the view of Coinbase.

TLDR: This post explores a typical evolution of understanding Bitcoin, how its most common criticisms can actually be strengths, and why its value proposition is unique among cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin: Introduction and disillusionment

Many people first encounter cryptocurrency through bitcoin. They learn about private keys, mining, consensus mechanisms, and decentralization. They understand and appreciate the uniqueness of Satoshi’s invention, and the potentially transformative impacts of non-governmental money. It’s a fascinating discovery.

Not long after this “orange pill” phase, our new bitcoiner will inevitably encounter a fresh crop of criticism of bitcoin. These aren’t the standard “nocoiner” criticisms, but rather these are the “coiner” criticisms, and unlike many nocoiner critiques, they can’t be dismissed as uninformed. These criticisms are made by people who understand Bitcoin. They are sophisticated and persuasive. Our new bitcoiner finds them compelling. The bitcoiner’s eyes are opened to the many other exciting cryptocurrencies waiting in the wings to eat Bitcoin’s lunch. The new bitcoiner has now entered the “bitcoin is boring” phase¹.

Bitcoin is boring

The criticism usually includes many of the following arguments:

Bitcoin’s proof of work consensus mechanism is inefficient and inferior to proof of stake
Bitcoin is too slow — other chains reach finality much faster and therefore will support many more compelling use cases
Bitcoin can’t possibly succeed due to the lack of onchain privacy
Bitcoin’s lack of an expressive Turing complete programming language makes it less useful than other cryptocurrencies
Bitcoin is stagnant; there is no meaningful innovation in bitcoin, which means it is sure to be outcompeted
Bitcoin’s limited onchain transaction throughput will prevent it from being useful

The hot debate among the “bitcoin is boring” crowd is not about whether Bitcoin will last. They are all certain it won’t. The debate is about which among ETH or the mob of ETH-killers (let’s collectively label all these as the “web3 cryptos”) will first eclipse bitcoin. But regardless of who, how, or when, bitcoin WILL be eclipsed. It’s a dead coin walking, carried by nothing more than inertia, name recognition, and the foolishness of the Eternal September of new users flooding into crypto. Sooner or later, the world will realize this, and bitcoin will fade into irrelevance as a pioneering footnote like so many other “firsts” throughout the history of technology.

The view can be summarized as: “Bitcoin will be outcompeted.”

Nothing remotely competes with Bitcoin

There’s a huge oversight in this line of reasoning.

Proponents believe bitcoin is in competition with web3 cryptos. It’s not. It is trying to be one thing above all else: digital gold.²

Nearly every other actively developed cryptocurrency besides bitcoin has the same product vision as Ethereum: create a decentralized application platform, often called “web3.”³ They are trying to build the next internet, to enable “unstoppable apps”⁴, not build digital gold.

Once Bitcoin’s goal is understood, many of the purported weaknesses laid out in the “bitcoin is boring” view in fact reveals themselves to be strengths:

Digital gold must be transferable. Proof of work has thus far been highly censorship resistant.
Digital gold must be decentralized. Ensuring that a global network can consistently reach consensus without trusted parties is crucial.
Digital gold must be scarce. The transparency of bitcoin’s ledger ensures easy accounting of the total supply.⁵
Digital gold must be safe. Safety is aided through simplicity, driving a need to eliminate unnecessary complexity.⁶
Digital gold must be stable. Constantly changing rules are disqualifying.
Digital gold must be verifiable. Validation of the asset must be cheap and accessible.

The realization that bitcoin has a fundamentally different goal from the web3 cryptos reveals a crucial point: Bitcoin has no meaningful competitors. The web3 crowd is scratching and clawing at each other, while literally no one else is trying to play bitcoin’s game. Bitcoin is sprinting as fast as it can to get years under its belt and build the credibility required to be digital gold — a process that has no shortcuts. It can only do this by being stable, predictable, and functional over many years. For any competitors that do decide to challenge Bitcoin, they will have to overcome Bitcoin’s enormous 13 year head start. Currently, no one else has yet entered the race.

Bitcoin is boring, v2

There’s a second form of the “bitcoin is boring” argument, often a convenient fallback for those who belatedly grasp the shortcomings of the first argument. This form of the argument sees a far grander vision in crypto than “mere” digital gold, and goes something like this:

Digital gold!? Think bigger! Imagine disintermediating Facebook, Amazon, or Google. If the most innovative thing you can think to do is to digitally replicate the refinement of a largely useless metal that people value primarily due to centuries of superstition, prepare to eat my dust.

The proponent of the second version of “bitcoin is boring” might respond to the previous section with “Ok fine, so nothing competes with bitcoin because bitcoin is playing a different sport. But I’m still right, because bitcoin is shown on ESPN 8 while web3 is playing in the superbowl. So congrats on your win in the peewee league.”

The view can be summarized as: “Blockchains can be far more impactful than mere digital gold.”

Digital gold matters, and is here today

There’s nothing wrong with a moonshot. Maybe web3 can provide a democratic revolution for the internet. That’s an exciting possibility.

The error comes from dismissing bitcoin just because you also see value in something else. These are not mutually exclusive futures. Let’s review the impact of digital gold: Bitcoin is a form of value that a government cannot debase or easily seize, and it can be transferred globally with nothing but an internet connection. Such an invention is a big deal. The IMF is rightfully fearful of the threat to fiat currencies posed by nongovernmental money. The existence of web3 projects does nothing to change this potential.

In addition to an honest and thoughtful recognition of the massive impact of true digital gold, there’s another key point to consider: Bitcoin has shipped. Digital gold exists right here, right now. It is ready for investors, financial institutions, and nations.⁷

In contrast, none of the web3 projects have shipped anything close to their final product.⁸ Their current state should be considered as a successful proof of concept for what web3 could become. Readers can know that I’m right because of a simple observation: All the web3 projects have ambitious roadmaps that invariably include crucial breakthroughs to deliver results that have not yet been demonstrated. Will proof of stake effectively resist censorship? Will sharding enable true decentralized verification at scale? Will dev teams be able to step away from being critical points of centralization? Will L2s really allow for trustless scalability? Of course every web3 project insists that success in these matters is a certainty, that these questions will surely be answered in their favor. Perhaps. A truly independent minded skeptic is forced to conclude that only time will tell the answers to these questions.

Leaving the phase

Moving on from “bitcoin is boring” does not make one a bitcoiner.⁹ One can leave the phase and still run the entire gamut: bitcoin maximalist, multicoiner, or bitcoin critic. The hallmark of exit is ceasing to be dismissive of bitcoin.

Maybe bitcoin’s goals are not as interesting to you as web3 goals. But even the biggest web3 proponent has to acknowledge:

Bitcoin is not in competition with any other cryptocurrency. It is crushing its mission to be digital gold while literally no other project is even trying.
Digital gold matters, and is here today.

Recognizing those two things clearly drives the following conclusion: Bitcoin is not boring.

Footnotes

I call it a phase. That doesn’t mean that everyone goes through it, or that everyone leaves it. It’s like being rebellious in your teenage years — some teens don’t do this, and some adults have clearly never moved out of it. But enough people both enter and leave to call it a phase.
Not P2P electronic cash. The blocksize war had a very clear outcome. See the next footnote for more on electronic cash.
There are exceptions. Some cryptos aim to deliver a specific decentralized application, like object storage. Others aim to be cash. Interestingly, the “cash cryptos” can struggle with an identity crisis, since the high onchain transaction throughput requirements for payments also make the chain potentially suitable for decentralized apps. Isn’t “the new decentralized internet” more exciting than “the new decentralized venmo?” The temptation is irresistible, and they implicitly begin moving towards “web3.” Consider the OG cash crypto, Bitcoin Cash.
Unless a bunch of insiders lose a lot of money when the flagship app gets hacked. Then the app should be stopped, of course.
Privacy coins inherently suffer the risk of undetectable inflation vulnerabilities. These are not merely theoretical — they have happened to both ZEC and XMR, the two most prominent privacy coins. And don’t forget Bitcoin Private, a fiasco only made possible by the fact that BTCP is a privacy coin.
Solana recently suffered 17 hours of downtime, earning derisive criticism from many bitcoin maximalists. Interestingly, instead of reacting as if a catastrophe had occurred, a Solana developer downplayed the significance of the failure, and even suggested it could happen again. This would be absurd for bitcoin, and brought howls from the bitcoin crowd. But his view actually makes sense for what he’s building — sometimes web platforms go down. AWS recently suffered almost a day of downtime. While bad, it happens. This is a terrific anecdote for how bitcoin and web3 are playing entirely sports — 17 hours of downtime would be a disaster for digital gold, but not for an app platform.
This doesn’t mean that there’s nothing that can be added to bitcoin. Many improvements are consistent with the goal of being digital gold, such as taproot or improved transaction broadcast logic. But those are refinements to a product that has already cracked the core of its problem, and has delivered its key promise.
This tweet captures it perfectly: “We own bitcoin because it doesn’t change. We own ethereum because it does.” Ethereum can, should, and will change. Digital gold absolutely should not.
This is not a maxi manifesto. I would expect that most well informed web3 proponents would agree with most of what I’ve said here, perhaps with the exception of the skepticism about the ease with which they’ll achieve their roadmaps. Nothing in this article suggests that the web3 cryptos have the wrong objectives, or that they can’t or won’t succeed. Nothing even suggests that the web3 objectives aren’t more exciting or transformative than the digital gold objective. Nevertheless, when comparing them to one another, it’s important to point out that the objectives are different. In addition, the web3 cryptos have not yet shown that they can build everything they need to deliver on their objective. Consider watching Andreas Antonopolous’s talk: The Lion and the Shark.

Perspective: Bitcoin is not boring was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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December 21, 2021

Bitcoin Leads As Markets Sees Record Outflows. Bear Market Incoming?

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Bitcoin and altcoins have not had the best week according to reports coming out of the market. The crypto market as a whole has been enjoying months of continuous inflows following hot on the heels of the recent market rally. It has pushed crypto-assets such as bitcoin towards new highs as inflows had hit a new record alongside assets under management. But it seems that this is changing.

Coming off the back of what was 17 consecutive weeks of inflows, the market is now seeing movement in the opposite direction. While assets such as ethereum had previously recorded outflows at various times, they had been isolated to a select few. Now the whole market is seeing its first week of outflows after four months of inflows, setting a record at the same time.

Related Reading | Millennial Millionaires Are The Most Bullish On Crypto, Survey Finds

Largest Record Outflows

The total amount of outflows for last week came out to a total of $142 million. This marked the first week of outflows after a 17-week inflows streak that brought assets under management towards record highs. Not only was this the first week of outflows following over four months of inflows, but it is also the largest weekly outflow from the crypto market on record.

This follows an impressive rally from the crypto market where major cryptocurrencies touched towards a new high. There have been sell-offs all across the market as investors have taken profit and institutional investors are not left out. However, the outflows, despite being a record high, represent only a small total (0.23%) of the asset under management and are also meager compared to the outflows of 2018 that touched as high as 1.6% of total AuM.

The total inflows for the year had reached a record high of $9.5 billion, almost 50% higher than the record that was set in 2020 of $6.7 billion. So despite the outflows, inflows for the year still remain at a record high.

CoinShares also notes that the crypto market is not the only one that has recorded outflows either. Risk assets have all seen outflows after the U.S. Fed had released its statement on tapering.

Bitcoin Leads Outflows

Bitcoin took the lead for the asset with the most outflows for the week. The digital asset had seen its price plummet back to below $50,000 since hitting its all-time high of $69K but had continued to maintain inflows in the weeks following that. This marks the first outflows for over 17 weeks but remains firmly below outflows levels recorded in June that touched as high as $150 million.

Related Reading | Struggling Prices Beats Bitcoin Expectations Down From $100K To $50K

Ethereum has alternated between inflows and outflows for the last 17 weeks. The second-largest cryptocurrency also saw record outflows for the week with a total of $64 million in outflows as it continues to counter bitcoin’s outflows.

Solana, Polkadot, and multi-asset investment products were spared of the onslaught as they saw $6.7 million, $2.5 million, and $1.5 million in inflows respectively.

Bitcoin price chart from TradingView.com

BTC recovers above $48K | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com

Featured image from Wikipedia, chart from TradingView.com

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December 21, 2021

Incident Post Mortem: November 23, 2021

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Summary

Between 4:00 pm and approximately 5:36 pm PT on Tuesday, November 23rd, we experienced an outage across most Coinbase production systems. During this outage, users were unable to access Coinbase using our websites and apps, and therefore were unable to use our products. This post is intended to describe what occurred and the causes, and to discuss how we plan to avoid such problems in the future.

The Incident

On November 23rd, 2021, at 4:00pm PT (Nov 24, 2021 00:00 UTC) an SSL certificate for an internal hostname in one of our Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts expired. The expired SSL certificate was used by many of our internal load balancers which caused a majority of inter-service communications to fail. Due to the fact that our API routing layer connects to backend services via subdomains of this internal hostname, about 90% of incoming API traffic returned errors.

Error rates returned to normal once we were able to migrate all load balancers to a valid certificate.

Chart depicting overall 90% error rate at our API routing layer for duration of incident.

Context: Certificates at Coinbase

It’s helpful to provide some background information about how we manage SSL certificates at Coinbase. For the most part, certificates for public hostnames like coinbase.com are managed and provisioned by Cloudflare. For certificates for internal hostnames used to route traffic between backend services, we historically leveraged AWS IAM Server Certificates.

One of the downsides of IAM Server Certificates is that certificates must be generated outside of AWS and uploaded via an API call. So last year, our infrastructure team migrated from IAM Server Certificates to AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). ACM solves the security problem because AWS generates both the public and private components of the certificate within ACM and stores the encrypted version in IAM for us. Only connected services like Cloudfront and Elastic Load Balancers will get access to the certificates. Denying the acm:ExportCertificate permission to all AWS IAM Roles ensures that they can’t be exported.

In addition to the added security benefits, ACM also automatically renews certificates before expiration. Given that ACM certificates are supposed to renew and we did a migration, how did this happen?

Root Cause Analysis

Incident responders quickly noticed that the expired certificate was an IAM Server Certificate. This was unexpected because the aforementioned ACM migration had been widely publicized in engineering communication channels at the time; thus we had been operating under the assumption that we were running exclusively on ACM certificates.

As we later discovered, one of the certificate migrations didn’t go as planned; the group of engineers working on the migration uploaded a new IAM certificate and postponed the rest of the migration. Unfortunately, the delay was not as widely communicated as it should have been and changes to team structure and personnel resulted in the project being incorrectly assumed complete.

Migration status aside, you may ask the same question we asked ourselves: “Why weren’t we alerted to this expiring certificate?” The answer is: we were. Alerts were being sent to an email distribution group that we discovered only consisted of two individuals. This group was originally larger, but shrank with the departure of team members and was never sufficiently repopulated as new folks joined the team.

In short, the critical certificate was allowed to expire due all of three factors:

The IAM to ACM migration was incomplete.
Expiration alerts were only being sent via email and were filtered or ignored.
Only two individuals were on the email distribution list.

Resolution & Improvements

In order to resolve the incident we migrated all of the load balancers that were using the expired IAM cert to the existing auto-renewing ACM cert that had been provisioned as part of the original migration plan. This took longer than desired due to the number of load balancers involved and our cautiousness in defining, testing, and applying the required infrastructure changes.

In order to ensure we don’t run into an issue like this again, we’ve taken the following steps to address the factors mentioned in the RCA section above:

We’ve completed the migration to ACM, are no longer using IAM Server Certificates and are deleting any legacy certificates to reduce noise.
We’re adding automated monitoring that is connected to our alerting and paging system to augment the email alerts. These will page on impending expiration as well as when ACM certificates drop out of auto-renewal eligibility.
We’ve added a permanent group-alias to the email distribution list. Furthermore, this group is automatically updated as employees join and leave the company.
We’re building a repository of incident remediation operations in order to reduce time to define, test and apply new changes.

We take the uptime and performance of our infrastructure very seriously, and we’re working hard to support the millions of customers that choose Coinbase to manage their cryptocurrency. If you’re interested in solving challenges like those listed here, come work with us.

Incident Post Mortem: November 23, 2021 was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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December 21, 2021

NFTs Go Their Own Way

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The crypto world was always a little offbeat, but with NFTs that unpredictability is amplified. NFTs are a component of the crypto ecosystem, traded and HODLed and flipped for profit, or liable to get you rekt, and yet there are some factors that distinguish NFTs from the rest of crypto.

Contempt

That is a strong word: contempt. But, it is true, NFTs set off a visceral reaction in some people. Strangely enough, you will see this particularly in parts of the art and gaming worlds. It is odd because NFTs bring fascinating new avenues to both art and gaming, and if you don’t care to go down those avenues, you can just not go down those avenues.

What I have seen is NFTs allowing artists and designers to take their work directly to the market, make initial profits, garner royalties and establish meaningful connections with enthusiastic collectors. And yet, NFTs have remained controversial in the art world. They are sniffed at as crass, trashy and irresponsible, but what could be more delicious than a bunch of sanctimonious art snobs having their party crashed?

Among gamers, the reaction can be even worse. Discord was always the social platform of choice for gamers, and so it was interesting when it was taken up (along with Twitter) by NFT projects. But, when Discord implied that it might integrate NFTs, an outraged rabble of users threw a tantrum, causing the company to backpedal.

A similar meltdown happened this month too, when OG games titan, Ubisoft announced it would be utilizing Tezos to produce blockchain games which include NFTs. Ubisoft has in fact been moving towards blockchain gaming for some time, but nonetheless, (some) gamers freaked out, and Ubisoft took down the trailer video for Quartz, its new NFT-incorporating gaming platform.

These reactions are baffling to observe, but what’s really fun is the reaction of NFT creators, collectors and believers. Basically, they don’t give a flying one, because they have diamond hands and crystal balls (no, I mean, they can see the future).

Emotional Attachment

NFTs with utility may be a good investment, but up to now, the most famous and expensive NFTs have been based purely around visuals. And, being non-fungible, they are unique.

This brings an additional component that distinguishes NFTs: emotional attachment. You will quickly offload a mid-cap altcoin as soon as you can make a profit. And, even with the more substantial coins whose fundamentals you believe in, and that you think have a long-term future, you might sell and buy back later.

But, that 8-bit koala with the 3D glasses? The llama smoking a pipe? My collection of intergalactic monkeys? Forget it, mate, hands-off.

A Few Good Traders

There appear to be fewer competent NFT traders than there are decent crypto traders.

Perhaps that is because NFTs attract a more arty design-focused crowd who are less interested in financial matters. There is the issue of emotional attachment, as mentioned. And, parts of the NFT world are based around collecting, which tends to mean people who hold on to what they buy, along with fewer potential takers if you decide to sell.

But, I also sense that quick trading is a little scorned. It is one thing to sell a bag of coins, but with an NFT, a certain amount of creative work has gone into it, and it might be a philistine move to simply flip it for profit.

Whether or not you care about being regarded as a philistine is another matter. But, from what I have witnessed, traders who intuit psychology, rather than those who focus on Technical Analysis, are likely to do better with NFTs.