Crypto News of the Day (3.4.) | Keep Protocol earned $ 7.7 million for tBTC development • Brave registered 1 million new users in March • and more
4 min readTable of Contents
Here you can find an overview of the most important events that took place during the last day in the cryptoworld.
Markets
Crypto markets continues to grow today. At the time of writing, Bitcoin is just below the $ 7,000 he managed to break through for a short time yesterday. Then there was a slight correction to the current price, but now Bitcoin continues to grow. The Altcoins follow him.
You can monitor the current cryptocurrency prices – here.
Cryptocurrency
Digital banking app Revolut has rolled out its cryptocurrency services for all standard users, saying it is widening access earlier than planned due to the global economic crisis. In an email to users on April 1, the United Kingdom-born fintech announced that cryptocurrency accounts and trading — previously reserved from Premium and Metal tier users of the app — are as of now available for all standard users, at a 1.5% flat fee per trade.
“We had planned to make this official later this year, but in light of recent events, we’ve decided to give all Revolut customers the opportunity to explore different ways of diversifying, including through crypto, right now.”
tBTC, a much-anticipated Bitcoin token on the Ethereum network, is to launch on April 27, and the project just got a major boost. The Keep Protocol, a privacy layer for Ethereum and a contributor to the tBTC project, today announced that it’s completed a $7.7 million token sale to fund its development. The private token sale was led by digital asset investment firm Paradigm.
While tokenizing Bitcoin on Ethereum has been done before, tBTC aims to bring all the benefits of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) to Bitcoin, for the first time. Many proponents, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, believe it’s long overdue.
We should put resources toward a proper (trustless, serverless, maximally Uniswap-like UX) ETH <-> BTC decentralized exchange. It's embarrassing that we still can't easily move between the two largest crypto ecosystems trustlessly.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 24, 2020
Ripple co-founder and executive chairman Chris Larsen has made a full recovery from COVID-19. In a tweet on April 2, he thanked those working on the frontline against the virus, and also called for recovered patients to donate blood for use in antibody transplants. Larsen had not publicly shared the fact that he had been diagnosed with COVID-19. The majority of the crypto-community only discovered the truth when he posted his tweet, accompanied by a picture of himself wearing a facemask giving a thumbs-up gesture.
Thank you to everyone on the frontlines keeping us safe – am truly grateful to report that I’ve made a full recovery from #COVID19. If you’ve recovered from the virus, please consider donating your blood to help with antibody transplants: https://t.co/icm06Et5fr pic.twitter.com/331Mjv43Z6
— Chris Larsen (@chrislarsensf) April 2, 2020
Regulations, CBDC
The National Internet Finance Association of China (NIFA), a self-regulatory organization set up by the People’s Bank of China, has said that overseas crypto exchanges fake trading volumes. According to its own analysis published Thursday, NIFA said foreign-based crypto exchanges use “robot programs to brush and tamper with data to create the illusion of ‘prosperity’ in the virtual currency trading market.”
“In our sampling analysis based on trading data from some of the exchanges, the daily trading turnover rate for more than 40 coins is over 100%, while more than 70 coins’ rate exceeds 50%. Despite the relatively low price and small market value, there have been massive trading volumes”
The dreadful situation in Spain caused by the COVID-19 outbreak is not delaying local authorities to send notices to taxpayers. Those include traders and investors in cryptocurrencies, who have quadrupled in the past year. The Spanish Tax Agency (Agencia Estatal de Administracion Tributaria or AEAT) began sending the notices on April 1st and will continue until June 30th, according to a local report.
Last year the watchdog sent 14,700 notices to such investors. This year, the number has skyrocketed to approximately 66,000. The rapid rise signals the increased interest in digital assets from Spanish citizens.
Blockchain, Technology
Privacy-focused internet browser Brave added 1 million new users in March amid the coronavirus pandemic. That number brings the browser’s monthly active users (MAU) to 13.5 million and daily active users (DAU) to 4.3 million, Brave CEO Brendan Eich tweeted today.
@Brave hit 13.5M MAU / 4.3M DAU for March 2020. We will work on getting ration smaller by meeting all your Chrome user daily-driver needs. Sync v2 for all data types + wallet/ledger too.https://t.co/artKBsQdvA
— BrendanEich (@BrendanEich) April 2, 2020
Brave was founded in 2015 and continues to add users at a rapid pace. Just last week, Brave partnered with Binance to let users trade cryptocurrencies without leaving the browser. Brave also offers blockchain functionality and compensates content creators, users, and advertisers in its native Basic Attention Token (BAT) for viewing online ads. A Brave spokesperson told The Block on Thursday that the browser currently has over 530,000 “Verified Publishers.”
