Bitcoin News and Finance: What You Need to Know

Ukraine’s government-owned nuclear power plant picked a firm to build a massive data center in Rivne for cryptocurrency mining operations. After a bidding process, Energoatom chose Kyiv Energy Construction Company to handle the nuclear plant crypto mining project. Nuclear Power Plant Operator Expects to Launch the Data Center in 2022 According to official documents , the data center will be based in the Rivne nuclear power plant, after the construction firm got 8.92 million Hryvnia ($317,620) in funding. The only competitor in the bidding was Ukrenergobudproek. However, they allegedly made an expensive offer, said the regional news outlet Forklog . The Kyiv Energy Construction Company expects to finish the data center building by August 31, 2022. Per the announcement, the contractor is required to send the documentation that details the whole process. It includes “host state registers, electronic archives, and computing facilities.” In terms of technical details, the nuclear power...

The San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase recently announced the company plans to do a direct listing, as opposed to following the initial public offering (IPO) route. The decision means that Coinbase can float its shares on an exchange without hiring a financial institution to underwrite the settlements. Coinbase to Skip IPO Process, Shoots for a Direct Listing Just recently people familiar with the matter received a tip that the exchange giant Coinbase had plans to sell shares privately ahead of the IPO. In mid-December, Coinbase revealed the confidential filing of an S-1 initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. However, on January 28, 2021, Coinbase announced a proposed direct listing as opposed to the IPO that was initially planned. For instance, a few weeks prior rumors spread that Goldman Sachs would be the exchange’s underwriter. On Thursday Coinbase wrote: Coinbase Global, Inc. today announced its intent to become a publ...

Bitcoin mining rig manufacturers are dealing with a semiconductor supply crunch according to regional reports stemming from China. There’s been a global semiconductor supply shortage and it’s affecting nearly every type of business in the supply chain that manufactures cars, PCs, laptops, smartphones, and cryptocurrency mining devices. Moreover, the recent shortage has invoked the demand for second-hand and older generation mining rigs. Semiconductor Shortage Complicates Mining Rig Manufacturing Currently, the world is dealing with a semiconductor supply crunch which has been spurred by the aftermath of Covid-19 and the lockdowns. Automobile makers, PC manufacturers, smartphone production, and almost every electronics manufacturer under the sun is dealing with this issue. For instance, reports detail that auto giants like Toyota Motors, Nissan, Ford, Volkswagen, and more have been chomping at the bit to obtain microchips from suppliers like TSMC. On January 27, 2021, the financial...

As bitcoin struggles to kickstart yet another record-breaking rally, Scott Minerd, the CIO at Guggenheim Investments says this could be down to the inadequate institutional support. According to Minerd’s assessment, this lack of sufficient institutional investor support means it will be hard for bitcoin to trade above $30,000. The CIO, however, thinks the viability of the crypto as “an asset class is still very likely.” In a short video , Minerd chronicles bitcoin’s rise and how the crypto initially did not have a large enough market capitalization to attract institutions. However, after the crypto rose to $10,000, perceptions changed. The CIO explains: When we had bitcoin at $10,000, it was pretty easy to see that there was a clear path to $20,000.Once it went past $20,000 you could definitely see based on technical work how you could get to $35,000 or even higher. Minerd, who has previously predicted a maximum price of $400,000 for the BTC , says the current investor base is ...

The infamous meme token dogecoin has been skyrocketing in value rising more than 325.21% during the last 24 hours. After remaining below a U.S. cent for years, the humorous crypto asset is now exchanging hands for $0.05 per unit. The reason behind the big dogecoin price spike is similar to the recent Gamestop/Wallstreetbets story as a Reddit group called Satoshistreetbets has been behind the recent pump. In April 2019, the Tesla founder Elon Musk said dogecoin (DOGE) was his “fav cryptocurrency.” In June 2020, day traders from Tiktok decided to encourage people to buy dogecoin in order to get the price per unit up to a dollar. The dollar price per DOGE never came to fruition, but the crypto asset saw some significant gains from the pump. Then during the first week of January 2021, news.Bitcoin.com reported on dogecoin gathering well over 500% gains during the year. Now the K-9 crypto asset is making headlines again as the price has been surging during the last 24 hours. DOGE ...

Another class-action lawsuit has been filed against Ripple Labs and CEO Brad Garlinghouse. This lawsuit follows the one filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleging that the defendants sold XRP , which it considers unregistered security, for over $1.38 billion. The lawsuit, filed Monday in a Florida district court alleges that the “sale of XRP cryptocurrency tokens to Florida residents” violates Florida securities laws. The suit names Ripple Lab Inc., XRP II LLC, and Garlinghouse as the defendants. They have allegedly sold “millions of dollars (or more)” in XRP tokens since 2013 without registering either with federal or Florida authorities. Recently, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against Ripple Labs, Garlinghouse, and co-founder Christian Larsen alleging that they sold over 14.6 billion units of XRP for at least $1.38 billion. After the SEC’s lawsuit, several major cryptocurrency exchanges delisted XRP , including...

PRESS RELEASE. PARSIQ , a blockchain monitoring and workflow automation platform connecting on-chain and off-chain applications in real-time, announced that its PRQ token is now listed on OKEx with USDT base pair. Please take note of the following go-live schedule: PRQ Deposit : 07:00am January 28, 2021 (UTC) PRQ Spot Trading : PRQ / USDT : 10:00am January 28, 2021 (UTC) PRQ Withdrawal : 10:00 January 29, 2021 (UTC) PARSIQ is a blockchain monitoring and workflow automation platform that serves as a multi-level bridge between blockchains and off-chain applications. PARSIQ’s features automate the blockchain analytics and monitoring process, providing customizable workflows with real-time intelligence. Developers and individual users can transform the blockchain data to their favorite off-chain application or web service. Among the obvious use cases is monitoring the wallets of traders and ordinary users. Among the non-obvious are complex system integrations for financial ins...

Canadian investment management firm Ninepoint has completed an initial public offering (IPO) of its bitcoin fund on the Toronto stock exchange. The company says the offering is the largest IPO of a bitcoin investment fund in Canada to date. Ninepoint Partners announced Wednesday that its Bitcoin Trust has completed an initial public offering (IPO) of CAD$230 million ($180 million). “It is the largest initial public offering of a bitcoin investment fund in Canada to date,” said John Wilson, Ninepoint’s co-CEO and managing partner. The fund’s Class A units are now trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange in both U.S. dollars and Canadian dollars under the symbols BITC.U and BITC.UN respectively. The fund seeks to provide investors with exposure to bitcoin “through an institutional-quality platform that is cost-efficient” to them and “to provide a secure, simpler and exchange-traded investment alternative for buying and holding bitcoin.” The fund invests in BTC directly. ...

Elon Musk has changed his Twitter profile to just “#bitcoin.” The Spacex and Tesla CEO also tweeted, “In retrospect, it was inevitable.” The price of bitcoin immediately soared. Elon Musk’s Bitcoin Twitter Profile and Tweets Spacex and Tesla CEO Elon Musk changed his Twitter profile to “#bitcoin” on Friday morning. He also made a cryptic tweet that says, “In retrospect, it was inevitable.” At the time of writing, his tweet has been liked over 152.6K times, retweeted 22.2K times, and commented on 12.8K times. The billionaire entrepreneur has about 43.8 million followers on Twitter. Elon Musk’s Twitter profile and latest tweet. Source: Twitter The tweet was made at 3:22 AM EST on Jan. 29 when the price of bitcoin was hovering around $32,212 based on data from markets.Bitcoin.com. Immediately after the tweet, the price of bitcoin shot up and peaked at about $37,803, which was more than a 17% surge before retreating slightly. The current BTC price stands at $36,965. Bitcoin’s pri...

PRESS RELEASE. YFX, the first DEX that offers 100x trading leverage on perpetual contracts has just launched, adding an important piece to the DeFi money legos, and creating a direct competition against CEX on derivatives trading. The most traded Bitcoin product in centralized exchanges is Bitcoin futures, which is 10 times bigger than spot trading in terms of the trading volume. But in DEX, spot trading platforms like Uniswap are occupying a large portion of the total trading volume, and there is not a single decentralized futures trading platform that could reach even 1/10 of Uniswap’s trading volume. What stops decentralized futures trading platforms from becoming 10 times bigger than Uniswap? Why are decentralized futures trading platforms performing worse than their centralized counterparts? The main reason is that decentralized futures exchanges don’t currently provide an attractive futures product to compete with centralized futures exchanges. For instance, centralized future...

A Dutch bitcoin ( BTC ) exchange has filed a preliminary injunction at a court in Rotterdam to suspend the central bank’s additional wallet-verification requirements. Bitonic seeks to challenge the new rules enacted by the De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) on Sept. 21, 2020. Dutch Exchange Argues Additional KYC Rules Lack ‘a Proper Legal Basis’ Per the bitcoin exchange’s announcement , the additional know your customer (KYC) requirements imposed by the central bank violate users’ privacy. However, the crypto firm clarifies that the legal obligations “are not under discussion” within this case. A section of the first set of rules published by the Dutch central bank in 2019 reads: Crypto service providers must check whether their clients and any ultimate beneficiary owners (UBOs) are on a Dutch or European sanctions list and report any hits to DNB. Risk-based checks are not permitted … Compliance also entails that institutions must check incoming and outgoing payment transfers. But wh...