1. Market Wrap: Bitcoin Rallies Near $58K, Stocks Soar to Record Highs
And yet, bitcoin’s trading volume shows no signs of returning to previous high levels.
Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $57,572.97 as of 21:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Climbing 2.11% over the previous 24 hours.
Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $54,323.61-$57,632.81
BTC trades above its 10-hour and 50-hour averages on the hourly chart, a bullish signal for market technicians.
The bitcoin market is back in bull mode but for one key attribute, almost like a missing tooth: low trading volume.
Bitcoin’s price on Thursday extended its winning streak to a seventh day as a renewed appetite for risk-taking in traditional markets sent U.S. stocks to new record highs. The catalyst was a U.S. government report on Wednesday showing a slower-than-expected inflation rate in February, which assuaged investors’ concerns that fast-rising consumer demand might send prices shooting higher as the economy reheats.
2. Tron Founder Beaten to Winning Beeple Bid by Mystery Buyer
A Tron spokesperson says Justin Sun did not win the $69 million Beeple NFT, as was initially reported by Bloomberg.
Justin Sun almost won the Christie’s auction of a non-fungible token (NFT) that sold for $69.3 million but was outbid in the final moments, a spokesman for the Tron founder said.
Bloomberg reported Thursday afternoon that Sun was the winning bidder in the auction of an NFT tied to a digital work by the artist known as Beeple.
But Tron’s Roy Liu told us that Sun did not win the auction, despite bidding $60 million as the clock wound down. “He was outbid by another buyer [at the] last minute,” Liu said via Telegram message.
(A buyer’s premium accounts for the difference between the winning bid of $60.25 million and the $69.3 million sale price.)
“NFT is definitely a revolution to the art industry for our generation,” the Tron spokesman said. “Both Justin and Tron Foundation are super excited for the technology and will heavily support the ecosystem around that.”
Christie’s auction specialist Noah Davis declined to comment when reached by phone.
3. Former US Senator Joins Binance as Policy Adviser and Government Liaison
Baucus will guide the crypto exchange in its dealings with U.S. regulators.
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has hired former U.S. senator and ambassador to China Maxwell Baucus as a government relations adviser.
The exchange announced Thursday in a press release it had hired the long-term government official to provide guidance and advice to the firm and work with U.S. regulators. The move could signal a shift in Binance’s approach to the U.S. market, which it currently doesn’t serve directly.
Baucus was an ambassador to China under former President Barack Obama between 2014 and 2017. Prior to that, he served in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives for nearly 40 years representing the state of Montana.
4. Start9 Labs to Build on Its Self-Sovereign, Private Internet Solutions With $1.2M in Funding
The funding round will be followed by a range of upgrades to the computing platform.
Most people never even see the server that runs the internet network in their houses. But Start9 Labs is working to change that with its latest upgrades to the Embassy Server, a self-sovereign, private internet server and operating system for your home.
It’s an ambitious project to make self-sovereign computing viable for consumers, but one that offers a way out of the centralized internet people know.
To expand on their efforts, Start9 Labs recently closed a $1.2 million funding round spearheaded by Collider Ventures, Ten31 and Erik Voorhees, CEO of the decentralized exchange ShapeShift. The money will drive additional Embassy developments including additional apps for its decentralized app store, further open-source development by contributors and the “killer of all messaging apps.”
“Self-sovereignty in a digital age is impossible when all applications and data are served by a handful of centralized custodians,” said Voorhees. “Start9 is building an ambitious alternative and it’s arriving upon the world stage at just the right time.”
Creating a self-sovereign, private internet network
Start9 Labs’ Embassy server and operating system (OS) creates its own private internet network. It comes with its own operating system as well as an expanding range of services such as bitcoin transactions, messaging and password management that cut out middlemen and use the Tor network to communicate.
5. The Graph to Host Protocol Governance on Decentralized GitHub Alternative Radicle
Radicle enables collaborative permissionless code in a decentralized way.
Web 3.0 analytics and querying platform The Graph announced Radicle, a peer-to-peer software building stack, will host its governance protocol, the Graph Improvement Proposal (GIP) Process. All future protocol governance will also be hosted on Radicle, which is akin to a decentralized GitHub.
The GIP process is meant to make sure protocol upgrades are frictionless and to allow the decentralized community and stakeholders to contribute to the overall development of the Graph protocol.
It lays out how contributors can propose an idea and provides a methodology for the The Graph Council, which governs The Graph Foundation’s Treasury, to assess not only if proposals are viable but also the level of community support from indexers, delegators, curators, and subgraph developers.
Radicle can be seen as a decentralized peer-to-peer version of a platform like GitHub, but without the middlemen or, ultimately, centralized control.
Radicle does not have any centralized servers and therefore cannot be unilaterally censored.
The Radicle protocol participants enable collaborative permissionless code, and the process of editing and merging code requests is decentralized.
According to a blog post announcing the development, “the GIP process includes both the stages and acceptance criteria that a proposal hits as it is fleshed out in The Graph’s Radicle repo.”
“Radicle is putting developers back at the heart of code collaboration and providing an alternative to the centralized gatekeepers and data silos that control most git repositories today,” said Brandon Ramirez, co-founder at The Graph, in the blog post.“This strongly aligns with The Graph’s vision of an open internet built on public infrastructure and was the natural choice for the GIP process.
The two projects have future plans to collaborate, including “storing subgraph repositories on Radicle and indexing Radicle projects using The Graph.”
“Radicle was designed with decentralized communities like The Graph in mind and its core properties of security, sovereignty, and permission-less nature make a great fit,”said Eleftherios Diakomichalis, co-founder of Radicle in the post.
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March 12, 2021
