Bitcoin News and Finance: What You Need to Know

Yellow Card has announced the resumption of naira deposits and withdrawals in Nigeria via a statement from the cryptocurrency exchange platform. The move by the company comes almost a year after a central bank directive forced Yellow Card to suspend deposits and withdrawals. CBN’s Growing Interest in Digital Currencies Almost a year after suspending services following a central bank directive, crypto exchange platform Yellow Card now says it is resuming local deposits and withdrawals in Nigeria. The company’s resumption of services also comes a few months after the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) launched its own digital currency. In its statement published in the Vanguard, Yellow Card’s director of services Oparinde Babatunde suggested that the CBN’s altered stance on digital currencies may have influenced his company’s decision to resume services. He said: The tide has changed and we are now seeing a growing interest from the CBN in them creating their own digital currency. Arou...

The Arbitrum network, an Ethereum L2 (Layer 2) rollup, experienced some difficulties that caused a complete stop in the production of blocks and the confirmation of transactions. According to reports from the Arbitrum team, this incident had to do with downtime regarding its sequencer, a special node that manages the order of transactions, leaving the network unusable for approximately seven hours. Arbitrum Stalls for 7 Hours The network of Arbitrum, an optimistic scaling rollup for the Ethereum network, stopped completely on January 9, leaving users unable to make transactions for approximately seven hours. The Arbitrum team informed users that the difficulties were caused by issues with their main sequencer node, which experienced a hardware failure that led to the network stall. According to Arbitrum docs , the sequencer is a “specially designated full node, which is given limited power to control the ordering of transactions.” The Twitter account of the rollup reported the iss...

The price of bitcoin has been on a long losing streak since November 10, 2021, when the leading crypto asset tapped an all-time high at $69K per unit. During the last two weeks, bitcoin has shed more than 19% in value, and the network’s hashrate has dropped from over 200 exahash per second (EH/s) to 174 EH/s losing roughly 15% in ten days. Civil Unrest in Kazakhstan Leads to Hashrate Loss Speculation, Kazakhstan’s Bitcoin Miners Say Issues Did Not Affect Them This week the civil unrest in Kazakhstan caused a lot of people to speculate on whether or not it would affect Bitcoin’s global hashrate. The reason for this assumption is because it is estimated that Kazakhstan accounts for at least 18% of the global hashrate, according to the most recent estimates from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF). Looking at the 30-day chart for Bitcoin’s (BTC) hashrate indicates that the protocol’s hashpower lost roughly 15% in ten days. Reports stemming from Kazakhstan indicate ...

A recently discovered patent shows the American multinational entertainment and media conglomerate, Walt Disney Company, was approved by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for a “virtual-world simulator” patent. The simulator is composed of a “three-dimensional (3D) map of the geometry of the real-world venue.” Disney’s Virtual-World Simulator Patent Follows Bob Chapek’s Discussion About the Disney Metaverse Disney’s interest in the metaverse and blockchain technology has been showing recently as a recent patent approved at the end of December reveals the entertainment giant filed for a “virtual-world simulator” concept. The virtual-world simulator patent follows Disney CEO Bob Chapek’s earnings call in November when he explained the firm is ready for “our own” metaverse. Chapek also highlighted that Disney was always at the forefront of the latest technologies. “The Walt Disney Company has a long track record as an early adopter in the use of technology to en...

On January 6, Terra Research announced a proposal to expand the network’s stablecoin asset terrausd (UST) across a number of different protocols on Polygon, Ethereum, and Solana. Terra’s governance blog post discusses how the proposal to leverage $139 million of UST can bolster “awesome use-cases” in the world of decentralized finance (defi). Terra Research Proposes to Expand Terrausd’s Reach Across 5 Protocols At the time of writing, Terra’s terrausd (UST) stablecoin is the fourth-largest U.S. dollar-pegged token among all the stablecoins in existence. It is also the largest decentralized algorithmic dollar-pegged coin with $10.4 million in UST in circulation today. Furthermore, the stablecoin’s market capitalization has increased 21.4% during the last 30 days. Now the team behind the Terra network wants to increase the stablecoin’s exposure to five different defi protocols on three chains. The proposal’s author, Ezaan from Terra Research, explains how cross-chain UST liquidity ha...

PRESS RELEASE. XRPayNet is a cryptocurrency built on the XRP Ledger, with an upcoming global team focused on one goal: a globally adopted interface and ecosystem for payment settlements that is suitable for stores, businesses, peer to peer transactions and those who sell products and services. Whilst aiming to challenge existing technology such as Klarna, ClearPay/AfterPay. This will allow consumers to be able to ‘buy now, pay later’ which is an almost first in the entire crypto industry. The XRPayNet app currently under development promises just that, a world class payment interface for micropayments with transactions processed by the XRP ledger, ensuring very low transaction costs at just a fraction of a penny and ultra-fast speeds. We aim to capture and overcome the current needs of real-life and on-demand crypto payment systems that are increasingly demanded by people and businesses across the globe. About XRPayNet The XRPayNet team does not aim to compete with Ripple or XRP...

The situation across Kazakhstan, hit by anti-government protests in the first week of the year, is normalizing, central authorities claim. The country’s massive crypto mining industry, which faced an internet blackout during civil unrest on top of power shortages, now hopes that the country will nevertheless remain an attractive location for miners. President Tokayev Has Nation Under Control After days of turmoil, the embattled administration of Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev says it now has the country stabilized. Law enforcement agencies have retaken all administrative buildings that were attacked by protesters and communal services are being restored, officials informed the head of state during a meeting on Sunday, according to a released statement. The troubles in Kazakhstan began on Jan. 2 with demonstrations in the western Mangistau province against the increase of prices of natural gas and other fuels which turned into mass political protests engulfing the Cen...