1. Market Wrap: Ether Trading Volume Up, Closing In on Bitcoin; Crypto Market Struggles
Action in the ether market might take the spotlight from bitcoin over time due to very different mechanics between the two assets.
Investor interest in ether appears to keep growing, based on spot market volume and a pop in open interest in institutional-grade futures.
Ether (ETH) trading around $2,507 as of 21:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). In the red 5% over the previous 24 hours.
Ether’s 24-hour range: $2,397-$2,750
Bitcoin (BTC) trading around $37,310 as of 21:00 UTC (4 p.m. ET). Losing 5.6% over the previous 24 hours.
Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $36,591-$39,824
The second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, ether, was trading at around $2,507 as of 21:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET), slipping 5% over the prior 24 hours. The asset is near the 10-hour moving average and above the 50-day, a sideways signal for market technicians.
Ether dipped from $2,750 at 00:45 UTC (8:45 p.m. ET Monday) to as low as $2,397 by 12:00 UTC (8 a.m. ET), a 12.8% decrease. Bitcoin has since made gains, however, settling at $2,507 as of press time.
2. Michael Saylor: Mining Council Will ‘Defend’ Bitcoin Against ‘Uninformed’ and ‘Hostile’ Energy Critics
The Bitcoin Mining Council hopes to “manage concerns, especially from uninformed parties” about the cryptocurrency’s energy usage, Microstrategy CEO and bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor said.
The Bitcoin Mining Council was born of a desire to help shape the narrative around the cryptocurrency’s energy use, said MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor.
Speaking Tuesday at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2021, the bitcoin (BTC, -1.69%) evangelist said he worked with Tesla CEO Elon Musk and a handful of North American miners to create a loose organization that could publish energy usage data in an effort to address concerns that the cryptocurrency is not environmentally friendly.
“It became pretty clear that bitcoiners have a good story, but it’s a pretty complicated story and we need to find a way to share our story,” he said.
3. Mark Cuban Invests in Ethereum Layer 2 Polygon
“I was a Polygon user and find myself using it more and more,” Cuban said in an email.
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has made an investment in Polygon, a layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution.
Cuban confirmed the investment in an email to CoinDesk but would not disclose its size or composition.
The price of MATIC, the native token of Polygon, is up more than 9,535% year to date, according to Messari.
With decentralized finance (DeFi) and other projects going live on Polygon, users have increasingly turned to the platform to escape the high transaction fees of the Ethereum mainnet.
“I was a Polygon user and find myself using it more and more,” Cuban said in an email.
He said he’s also integrating it into Lazy.com, a Cuban portfolio company that allows people to easily display non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
“We have spoken to many investors but the discussion with Mark Cuban was truly mind blowing,” Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal told CoinDesk via Telegram.
4. Dapper Labs’ NBA Top Shot Has Crossed the Million-User Mark
Steady user numbers and a strong base of small-dollar sales could keep Dapper Labs’ darling humming even if NFTs cool off.
Dapper Labs’ non-fungible token (NFT) platform NBA Top Shot has notched over $700 million in total sales in less than a year, according to CEO Roham Gharegozlou.
Speaking at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2021 with investor Mary Meeker, Gharegozlou said Dapper’s NFT marketplace for basketball “moments” now boasts 1 million users, an eye-watering figure for a single crypto product. Half of Top Shot’s users have paid for packs or in trades, and between 150,000 to 250,000 log in every day.
The sterling growth numbers come as the broader NFT market gradually cools down from the breakneck highs of early 2021. Top Shot was no exception: desirable moments of top NBA stars traded for hundreds of thousands of dollars during peak NFT craze.
“The headlines are always, you know, ‘LeBron sells for $200,000 or $300,000,” Gharegozlou said, “but the reality is, out of the four and a half-ish million transactions on the marketplace in the past few months, over 3 million have been less than $50.”
NBA Top Shot user numbers
Paired with its steady daily user count, NBA Top Shot’s small-dollar figures illustrate how the platform has risen above the heady, techy and sometimes scammy NFT landscape to become a mainstream hit.
5. China’s BSN Builder Urges Developers to Look Beyond Cryptocurrency
Red Date Technologies CEO Yifan He was showing off the BSN stack in public for the first time.
It’s not often you hear a battle cry for enterprise blockchain these days. But that’s just what the architect of China’s powerful Blockchain-Based Service Network (BSN) delivered at Consensus 2021.
Somewhat in line with China’s latest spate of warnings, Yifan He, the CEO of Red Date Technologies, strongly advised blockchain companies to look beyond mere cryptocurrencies, and urged developers to access this new, multiple cloud-based, “one stop shop” and start building.
“Do not put 100% of your resources into public chains and cryptocurrencies,” said He. “Just give a little bit of money and resources to the underlying technology and research. Because we can do so much besides cryptocurrency.”
The hype around enterprise blockchain endeavors in the U.S and Europe has died down, but China’s BSN appears to be fired up over private/permissioned or “consortium chains,” citing applications across industry, government and areas like medicine.
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May 26, 2021
