Crypto News of the Day (8.4.) | Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV grow due to halving • Jack Dorsey donates $ 1 billion to fight coronavirus • and more
5 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
It seems that overall optimism at the beginning of the week is starting to disappear from the markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Index lost about 900 more points, so Wall Street continues to fall as a result of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Cryptocurrency markets also recorded a smaller fall in prices, except for BCH and BSV, which are growing in anticipation of halving.
You can monitor the current cryptocurrency prices – here.
Cryptocurrency
The Bitcoin community is preparing for one of the most important events that takes place once every three or four years – the halving. After block 630,000, Bitcoin miners’ reward will be reduced from 12.5 to 6.25. The resulted scarcity is expected to push prices to new highs. Bitcoin’s main forks, BCH and BSV will start earlier. Bitcoin Cash will slash the reward later today. At the time of writing, 629,933 have been mined so far.
The price of BCH is already surging, gaining 7.70% during the last 24 hours, to $274, as per Coinmarketcap data. The BCH/BTC ratio is also increasing, hitting the highest level since March 7. While the halving event will likely impact the supply/demand ratio in Roger Ver’s cryptocurrency, about a third of BCH coins haven’t been moved since the fork, which makes it scarcer than thought, at least for now.
What about Bitcoin Cash? Circulating supply is generally reported as 18.4M, but is it really 12.4M? Since 6M $BCH has never moved since the fork, should they be considered as circulating supply? pic.twitter.com/Udo9ODhIVP
— CoinMetrics.io (@coinmetrics) April 6, 2020
Twitter CEO and Square founder Jack Dorsey has started a new fund called Start Small LLC, aimed at fighting COVID-19. He’s seeding the fund with $1 billion, roughly 28% of his wealth. The fund’s efforts will initially focus fighting the global pandemic currently dominating the news cycle, but will eventually switch to providing money for girl’s health, education and universal basic income (UBI) initiatives.
I’m moving $1B of my Square equity (~28% of my wealth) to #startsmall LLC to fund global COVID-19 relief. After we disarm this pandemic, the focus will shift to girl’s health and education, and UBI. It will operate transparently, all flows tracked here: https://t.co/hVkUczDQmz
— jack (@jack) April 7, 2020
Virgin Galactic Chairman Chamath Palihapitiya has shared his bitcoin investment strategy, predicting that bitcoin’s price could reach a million dollars. He further suggested that everybody should have 1% of their assets in bitcoin since it is “a fantastic hedge.” In a podcast interview published last week with Morgan Creek Digital co-founder Anthony Pompliano, Palihapitiya was asked about his bitcoin investment strategy. Responding to questions about whether he had bought, sold or changed the bitcoin allocation in his portfolio in any way, the venture capitalist revealed:
In 2013, I bought a lot and at one point I think I had almost 5% of all the bitcoins. My basis is about 80 bucks a coin. I’ve never bought more.
He then shared his prediction of how high he thinks the price of bitcoin could be over the next 10 years. “It is a 10-year trajectory,” he began. “I’ve always thought of bitcoin as a very binary investment, whether it goes from 80 to 8,000 to 6,000 to 3,000 to 13,000, it doesn’t matter.” Noting that bitcoin’s price will be “either zero or it’s millions,”
In January 2019, cryptocurrency exchange Cryptopia suffered a major hack resulting in a loss of approximately $30 million. Soon after the hack, Cryptopia confirmed going into liquidation in May 2019, with Grant Thornton firm as its liquidator. In its recent update, Cryptopia took to Twitter to announce the delivery of judgment finding by Justice Gendall J.
(1/2) Today, 8 April 2020, Justice Gendall delivered his judgement finding firstly, cryptocurrencies are “property” within the definition outlined in s2 of the Companies Act 1993 and secondly, that account holders' cryptocurrency were held on multiple trusts, separated by …
— Cryptopia Exchange (@Cryptopia_NZ) April 8, 2020
Cryptocurrency exchanges, Banks
Decentralized or non-custodial cryptocurrency exchange Bisq has halted trading until further notice due to a “critical security vulnerability.” Announcing the news on Tuesday, Bisq said it has used the alert key to “temporarily disable trading.”
Bisq is a proper distributed peer-to-peer network. So you can override the latest alert key functionality that blocks trading. But we highly discourage you from doing this for your own security
Bisq is expected to release an update of its application “within a few hours.” In the meantime, the exchange has advised users not to send any funds to a counter-party if they active trades.
Blockchain, Technology
California-based and crypto-friendly financial firm Social Finance — SoFi — is acquiring the digital payment platform Galileo. In an April 7 press release, SoFi announced that it has signed an agreement to pay $1.2 billion for Galileo Financial Technologies. According to a CNBC report, the payment will consist of $75 million in cash, $875 million in stock, and $250 million in seller financing debt.
SoFi CEO Anthony Noto addressed how the partnership will help in the current financial market:7
Together with Galileo, we will partner to build on our companies’ strengths to drive even greater financial technology innovation, making those products and services available to both current and future partners
The financial firm has seen increasing demand since it launched zero-fee crypto trading on its platform SoFi Invest in September 2019.
Mining
Valarhash, the Chinese Bitcoin mining operator behind Bytepool and 1THash mining pools, has shut down internal Bytepool operations, according to local media reports on Monday. Bytepool contributed more than 4% of all hashing power for the Bitcoin network in December 2019, and the Bytepool and 1THash pools contributed more than 9% of all network power at their peak.
Valarhash launched Bytepool and 1THash in August 2019 after developing a mining facility in Chengdu, Sichuan province powered in part by hydroelectricity. The company reported a hash rate for Bytepool of over 4,000 petahashes per second (PH/s) in February (equivalent to more than 7,500 Antminer S19 Pros).
