The cryptocurrency market remains bullish with Bitcoin (BTC) trading at $11,335, reflecting a gain of 1.5% in the past 24 hours. Ether (ETH) has gained 4.2% to trade at $398.21. XRP has gained 6.3% to trade at $0.3150.
Other major altcoins which have recorded gains in the past 24 hours include LEO (LEO-$1.28, 0.2%), Dash (DASH-$88.80, 3.6%), IOTA (IOTA-$0.3013, 2.5%), Tron (TRX-$0.0203, 5.1%), ChainLink (LINK-$9.27, 10.6%), Stellar (XLM-$0.1073, 3.1%), Tezos (XTZ-2.874 -6%), Cardano (ADA-$0.1383, 2.4%), Monero (XMR-$89.14, 3.7%), Huobi (HT-$4.94, 8.7%), Binance Coin (BNB-$22.18, 4.8%), Litecoin (LTC-$58.91, 2.5%), EOS (EOS-$3.07, 2.6%), Bitcoin SV (BSV-$232.15, 5.5%), Bitcoin Cash (BCH-$299.17, 3.5%) and OKB (OKB-$6.14, 5.5%). Altcoins, which have lost ground in the past 24 hours include Cosmos (ATOM, $3.92, -0.9%) and Ethereum Classic (ETC-$7.21, -1.1%).
Government level initiatives
Bank of Japan hires renowned economist Kazushige Kamiyama
The Bank of Japan has roped in a renowned economist, Kazushige Kamiyama, to guide a team mandated with expediting its study about Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). The appointment of Kamiyama signals the central bank’s change in stance from an earlier cautious view of cryptocurrencies.
The economist had earlier guided the central bank’s initiative to utilize big data for carrying out live econometric analysis. Such a measure turned out to be of great assistance when the economy was severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In spite of upholding its stance that it has no urgent intention to develop and issue a CBDC, the latest initiative does signal the Japanese central bank’s seriousness in moving forward with the research.
Private sector initiatives
NEAR embeds Chainlink decentralized data oracles
NEAR, a blockchain covenant competing with Ethereum 2.0, has turned out to be the latest venture to embed Chainlink (LINK) decentralized data oracles. NEAR blockchain was developed using a unique consensus algorithm named Doomslug. Importantly, it is able to scale up using sharding technology.
As per co-founder Illia Polosukhin, NEAR’s ease of use makes it unique from other blockchains. He pointed out that the development atmosphere and creation of the intended user interface are usually tricky and complicated. Polosukhin said: “So if you think of gaming applications, many of them have not managed to get to the market because users cannot figure out how to even start playing right now. They need to install stuff and to buy stuff, etc. So we are really focused on building a full stack of tools, but also making sure the developer can really easily onboard users into the platform.”
As of date, only a few decentralized apps are based on NEAR protocol and its native crypto still remains locked. Nevertheless, Polosukhin anticipates the token to be listed on exchanges in August. The co-founder believes that some of the early real-world use cases for Chainlink’s data oracles would likely be from DeFi domain.
In the years ahead, NEAR may utilize Chainlink’s verifiable randomness function (VRF). Polosukhin trusts that gaming apps may find great use of the function.
Bancor launches new variant of its decentralized exchange
The Bancor venture has rolled out a new variant of its decentralized exchange, after including a lot of changes, guaranteeing to address the issue which it refers to as “DeFi’s dirty little secret.”
The contracts have been hosted on mainnet in a beta launch mode. A liquidity limitation of $1 million has been set on each pool until a “pool manager” eliminates the cap after confirming its safety. The exchange nullifies the problem of short-term loss, where providers of liquidity could sustain loss due to price volatility. The problem can be resolved through a blend of rewards and Oracle-led price flow.
Additionally, the venture segregated the single pool token constituting the aggregate value of a specific exchange pair so that users are no longer need to be dependent on two assets concurrently. Eventually, an enhanced “bonding curve” should lead to a minimum slippage than earlier with no variation in pool liquidity. Before the upgraded decentralized exchange was launched, Bancor published the open-source code and rolled out of a bug bounty program.
Miscellaneous
A growing correlation between Bitcoin and gold
As Bitcoin (BTC) hit a 2020 high of $11,392 last week, the king of crypto’s correlation with gold rose to 0.66, as per data provided by CryptoCompare. The correlation began increasing after gold broke above $1,900 and sparked a rally in Bitcoin. Earlier, as per data provided by Kraken exchange, the correlation between gold and Bitcoin had been decreasing. So, there seems to be a change in the overall trend.
Notably, Ether (ETH), the native crypto of Ethereum blockchain, has been recording a decrease in correlation with Bitcoin during the same time period. The correlation between Bitcoin and Ether is 0.56.
James Li, an analyst at Crypto Compare, stated: “With innovations and hype around DeFi, we started to see prices decouple within the crypto space. Ethereum is an enabler and we saw a much stronger gain over the last few weeks, alongside gains from other DeFi tokens.”
As the US economy and greenback continue to remain weak due to the COVID-19 outbreak, investors are increasingly showing interest in Bitcoin and gold.
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