El Salvador plans to build its own Bitcoin city – Crypto weekly update

This week, the total market capitalization exceeded 2.32 trillion EUR. Increase at the 7-day interval is 1.31 %. Bitcoin decreased by 4.2 % during the week to a current value of over than 51 500 EUR. Bitcoin dominance is 41.9 %.

El Salvador plans to build its own Bitcoin city

El Salvador continues to lead massive bitcoin adoption. This Sunday, president Bukele announces the launch of Bitcoin City.

The initiative was first announced by Bukele at El Salvador’s Bitcoin Week conference, which sought to celebrate Bitcoin’s mainstream adoption in the country and increase citizen participation. Bitcoin City will be funded initially by $1 billion (€891 million) Bitcoin bonds.

“In #BitcoinCity we will have digital and technological education. Geothermal energy for the entire city and efficient and sustainable public transport“ Bukele said.

The development of Bitcoin City will see the proactive involvement of prominent crypto companies including cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex and Adam Back’s Blockstream. According to Bitfinex CTO Bitfinex Paolo Ardoino, the exchange will support El Salvador’s Bitcoin City initiative by launching a securities platform to hold the Bitcoin bonds.

The president envisions Bitcoin City to become a fully functional city with residential areas, shopping centers, restaurants, a port, “everything around Bitcoin.” Moreover, the residents be subject to only value-added tax (VAT), which according to Bukele will be used to pay the municipality’s bonds, and the rest for public infrastructure and city maintenance. However, all residents will be exempt from income taxes, capital gains taxes, property taxes or CO2 emissions taxes. Source

Square releases Whitepaper for its Bitcoin DEX

Square, led by well-known bitcoin maximalist Jack Dorsey, has published the whitepaper of its upcoming Bitcoin-focused DEX this week.

According to an official statement posted by one of the project developers, the decentralized exchange (DEX) project, dubbed tbDEX, is set to merge the gap between fiat and bitcoin. Despite the widespread growth of the cryptocurrency industry and digital assets, a high percentage of people still receive their paychecks, pay for goods and services, pay taxes, and a lot of other things with FIAT currencies.

tbDEX aims to offer users a direct way to easily convert their rapidly depreciating FIAT currencies into bitcoin in a free market, without going through multiple platforms.

The whitepaper also noted that tbDEX will not work like most decentralized exchanges available in the market today, because the platform will not have its native governance token. Platform will be designed to enable trust among participants without relying on a central body to control access. In traditional DEXes, central authority is responsible for governance token, through which fees are paid on the network.

The creation of a tbDEX is no longer just a vision, because the introduction of Whitepaper is an important step towards the realization of this initiative. Source

Acala wins first Parachain auction

At the beginning of November, long-awaited parachain slot auctions were officially on Polkadot, which are an important part of the structure and vision of the Polkadot network.

After a tight race for Polkadot’s first parachain, DeFi platform Acala emerged as a winner, beating its competitor Moonbeam. The winner of the auction was decided through a candle auction process, which determines the highest amount of contributions in a randomly selected block from the past seven days.

The platform raised a total of 32.5 million DOT from 81,000 contributors, worth over $1.2 billion (€1.07 billion).

While many consider this to be a historic moment both for Polkadot and Acala, this isn’t the first time the platform won an auction– in June, Acala’s sister project Kurara was the first project to win a parachain auction on Kusama. Kusama is „canary network“ of Polkadot, where projects are tested before implementation into Polkadot.

The 32 million DOT users pledged to Acala will be locked for two years, or the duration of Acala’s slot as a parachain on Polkadot. In return, those that participated in the crowdloan will receive Acala’s native ACA tokens as compensation as they wait for their DOT tokens to be returned. Source

Mt. Gox rehabilitation plan

The Mt. Gox case has been a hotly debated topic for years. In early February 2014, the exchange suspended withdrawals after claiming to have found suspicious activity in its digital wallets. The news of the suspension resulted in the price of bitcoin plunging by 20%. The company discovered that it had “lost” more than 850,000 bitcoins, which represented over 6% of bitcoins in circulation at the time. Now, the rehabilitation plan to compensate creditors from the now-defunct crypto exchange is now finalized following confirmation from a Japanese court.

According to a Tuesday announcement from Mt. Gox trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi, the rehabilitation plan originally filed in the Tokyo District Court in February is now “final and binding.” The confirmation order of the rehabilitation plan in Japan’s court system is one of the final steps in a long process that began with a 2018 petition to compensate creditors of the exchange that collapsed in early 2014.

Progress on the case has been made over the past month, where roughly 99% of the creditors affected by the collapse of the Japan-based crypto exchange approved of the draft rehabilitation plan. Users affected by the 2014 hack will be compensated at least in part, as a total of 145,000 BTC will be redistributed to creditors, currently worth about $8.19 billion (€7.31 billion). In addition, bitcoin cash coins will also be included in the compensation.

However, it is not yet clear exactly when the bitcoin redistribution process will begin. However, according to the information available, the victims could choose whether to be compensated in BTC or fiat, with according to preliminary calculations, each victim receives approximately 20% of the originally stolen bitcoins. Source

Ethereum Layer-2 Total Value Locked Reaches ATH

The total value locked in Ethereum Layer-2 networks has surged to a peak of $6.13 billion (€5.47 billion), meaning it has surged by 13.26% in the last seven days.

Layer 2 solutions, also called sidechains, are independent, third-party blockchains integrated into the Ethereum network that alleviate the workload on the ETH platform.

Sidechains were born as scaling solutions that reduce gas fees and increase transaction speed. They achieve this by executing Ethereum transactions on the layer-2 platform while keeping the original data of that transaction inside layer-1 (the Ethereum mainnet), all through the power of smart contracts.

The growing demand for L2 solutions in the Ethereum network is mainly driven by lower fees and higher scalability of L2 protocols. One of the main reasons for users to prefer L2 solutions is the ever-expanding ecosystem of decentralized finance, which is an attraction for more and more users around the world. However, the massive traffic in Ethereum network resulting in a spike in gas fees.

Ethereum is the pioneer of the DeFi space, with hundreds of projects building on top of the network. However, the heavy workload on its ecosystem has triggered massive network congestion and an increase in gas prices, hindering its leadership in the space. Expensive transactions and low throughput has made institutional investors move to other networks such as Solana or Avalanche. The solution of these problems in the near future could be the long-awaited Ethereum 2.0, which should bring with it, in particular, more efficient scaling and lower energy consumption. Source

Australian pension fund wants to invest in cryptocurrencies

Australian superannuation fund Rest Super is set to become the first retirement fund in the country to invest in cryptocurrencies. The fund has more than $46.8 billion (€41.7 billion) worth of assets under management and around 1.8 million members.

During Rest Super’s annual general meeting on Tuesday, the firm’s chief investment officer, Andrew Lill, told members that the company sees digital assets as an “important part” of its portfolio moving forward but will proceed “carefully and cautiously“.

“It’s still a very volatile investment, so any allocation exposure we make to cryptocurrencies is likely to be part of our diversified portfolio as initially a fairly small allocation that may, over time, build” said Lill.

Lill went on to add his view that offering members exposure to crypto and blockchain tech could provide a “stable source of value” amid a time in which investors are flocking to crypto as a hedge against fiat-based inflation. Source

Start investing safely in cryptocurrencies now.

START INVESTING