Idelto

Cryptocurrency news website

Ethereum

Morgan Creek’s Mark Yusko Predicts Bitcoin Can Reach $250K in 5 Years

by

Morgan Creek's Mark Yusko Predicts Bitcoin Can Reach $250K in 5 Years

Mark Yusko, Morgan Creek Capital Management’s CEO and cofounder, is extremely bullish on bitcoin. Despite a period of consolidation, Yusko expects the leading crypto asset to tap $250,000 in five years. In a recent interview, he said that the network continues to swell in an “exponential way.”

Morgan Creek’s CEO Sticks to His Six-Digit Bitcoin Prediction

The founder of Morgan Creek is again reiterating his prediction that bitcoin (BTC) will surpass six digits in value within the next five years. In a May 6, 2020 interview, Yusko predicted that bitcoin could easily reach $100,000 in 2021 or 2022. Moreover, during the discussion, Yusko also stressed that bitcoin’s price could reach $400k to $500k as well.

During this week’s interview with CNBC’s Trading Nation, Morgan Creek’s Mark Yusko explained that he believes investors “overlook and underestimate” the leading crypto asset.

“It’s just about network adoption and increased usage,” Yusko said this week. “This is a network and networks grow in an exponential way. This is the fastest network in history to a trillion dollars of value, right on the heels of the FAANGS that took, you know, 15 to 20 years depending on which one you look at.”

Yusko’s Morgan Creek cofounder, Anthony Pompliano, has also said he believes BTC will reach $100k. Pompliano recently interviewed with the popular Youtube investor Andrei Jikh, explaining the fundamentals of his prediction to Jikh’s 1.52 million subscribers.

Yusko’s a Firm Believer in the Digital Gold Theory, Doge Is ‘Useless’

Yusko’s fundamentals are based on the equivalence of gold markets, which CNBC estimates to be around $4 trillion. If digital gold can capture a percentage of gold’s enormous global market, then Yusko insists BTC could make it to $1 million per unit.

“What people miss is this is a technological evolution of computing power that isn’t going away,” Yusko stressed on CNBC’s Trading Nation. Yusko further added:

It is a powerful computing network that is going to become the base layer protocol for the Internet of value.

CNBC’s hosts asked Yusko about the gains dogecoin (DOGE) and ethereum (ETH) have seen lately, and the Morgan Creek executive said only a few crypto assets will make it in the long run.

“Yes, there’s room for a couple of protocols to survive, but there are 1000s of coins and Doge is in that category that really are useless, they’re just utility tokens that have no underlying value or use case and they’ll eventually disappear,” Yusko insisted.

Yusko’s BTC price forecast is not too different from the venture capitalist Tim Draper’s prediction, albeit a bit longer out. Draper predicts that bitcoin (BTC) could be $250,000 by the year 2022. People look up to Draper’s forecast because he correctly predicted bitcoin’s price would surpass $10,000 per coin by 2018.

What do you think about Morgan Creek Capital Management’s Mark Yusko’s prediction? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Ethereum Skyrockets Past $4K Tapping a New ATH, Ether Dominance Jumps to 20%

by

The price of ethereum, the second-largest crypto asset in terms of market valuation, touched an all-time high (ATH) on Monday, capturing $4,246 per unit. Ethereum has been on a tear during the last year against the U.S. dollar, gaining a whopping 2,129% in 12 months.

Ethereum Captures Fresh Price Highs, ‘Flippening’ Begins to Trend

Ethereum (ETH) reached a new ATH this Monday, tapping $4,246 per ether. ETH is up over 6% during the last 24 hours and 21.9% over the course of the week. Against bitcoin (BTC), ETH is up 19% during the course of the last seven days. 30-day stats shows ETH is up 96% and 90-day data shows ether is up 136%.

Ethereum’s price rise has been dragging bitcoin’s (BTC) leading dominance down a great deal, as BTC only commands 43% today. ETH dominance is 19.6% and it’s been rising higher as each day passes. Data shows that reported volume for ETH is around $54.7 billion, while “real volume” stats from Messari indicates volume could be around $12.2 billion.

Since ETH dominance has risen significantly, crypto enthusiasts believe the crypto-asset could possibly flip BTC. The term “flippening” is trending on Twitter and a number of people are assessing the possibility of ETH dominating BTC.

“Maxis catching up on reality,” one person tweeted on Monday. “We are now just a little over 2x away. The flippening might indeed take a lot less than 5 years,” he added.

Ethereum Onchain Data Continues to Outpace Bitcoin, $85 Billion Locked in Defi

Data also shows that ETH is processing more transactions and settling more money than BTC in recent months. Holders making money at the current price is 100%, according to Into the Block data. Concentration of large ETH holders is 41% and correlation with BTC is only 0.09% on Monday afternoon. Transaction demographics between the east and west is 50/50 for Ethereum today, and 1-year holders composition by time held is 57%.

The total-locked value (TVL) in decentralized finance (defi) right now is more than $85 billion and a great majority of defi money leverages the ETH chain. Further, large sums of funds are frequently moving on the Ethereum network, as the past seven days of $100k transactions saw a massive $303 billion settled last week.

What do you think about ethereum reaching an all-time high on Monday? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

The Future of Ethereum in a Meme: Ultrasound Money

by

The Future of Ethereum in a Meme: Ultrasound Money

The “ultrasound money” meme has been running in Ethereum based circles for some time, gaining momentum as the asset rises and rises in value during this bull market. While it is considered a joke by many, like a myriad of memes, it hides a very complex array of factors that contribute to Ethereum’s newfound status. However, it is not without its critics from the Bitcoin side.

The ‘Ultrasound Money’ Meme Explained

If you have mingled in inner Ethereum cryptocurrency circles, you probably have heard the words “ultrasound money,” used as a meme to explain what the Ethereum network is going to become when it turns to proof-of-stake (PoS). But memes, being as they are, are a complete simplification of the subject, and fail to describe the whole mechanism behind it. Roughly, the ultrasound money meme serves to mock bitcoiners who describe bitcoin (BTC) as a “sound” money asset, meaning this that is not liable to sudden depreciation in its value.

Built by Justin Drake, a researcher from the Ethereum Foundation, the meme surfaced on Twitter last year on September 10. It compared the issuance of Bitcoin with the new issuance of Ethereum once EIP1559 (an improvement on how the network taxes transactions) and the change to proof of stake consensus are activated on the Ethereum blockchain. The meme has picked up steam since then, referred commonly to in social media. But what does it mean?

On the surface, the meme only shows that the issuance of Ethereum is likely to be deflationary over time, but fails to explain how this is achieved and what elements are put in place.

EIP-1559: Ethereum (Likely) Transforms to Deflationary

The first element that helps construct the thesis of ultrasound money is EIP-1559, an Ethereum Improvement Proposal that changes how fees are paid to miners completely, and affects the issuance of ether over time. It works by kind of standardizing fee payments using a base fee that will be calculated on a network demand-basis to be burned. This means that if the network is under heavy usage, more ether will be burnt in the future. On top of this, a new element is added on top of this fee called the miner tip, which will let users prioritize their transactions and compete for block space.

This proposal wasn’t so popular with miners, who will see the value of its rewards affected by it. In fact, some miners have even tried to signal against the proposal, but this protest failed to pick up majority support. Drake believes this is one important measure needed to prepares the network for the Ethereum 2.0 PoS upgrade, switching from a direct subsidy to a miners policy, to a possible increase of value to all ether holders in the network via scarcity increase.

With EIP-1559, the issuance of Ethereum is likely to decrease over time. This will happen because, under heavy network usage (like the Ethereum network has experienced this last year), the network will burn more ether than the ether issued, creating a deflationary tendency.

Ethereum Consensus Change Increases Efficiency and Security

The other element on the ultrasound meme book has to do with the change of consensus algorithm to proof-of-stake, which will bring many improvements to the protocol in terms of efficiency and security. While the upgrade will also have the downside of driving miners to other chains like ETC. According to Drake, the main improvement from going to proof-of-stake is that this helps to protect the network. His thesis proposes that PoS is really more efficient than PoW at securing the network. He believes so because it only needs the base asset to do so, shedding any external factors like miners who also exert selling pressure on the underlying mined asset by having to pay for expenses and hardware upgrades over time.

Also, he criticizes that Bitcoin (BTC) will be unable to secure the network without any issuance, relying on fees only in the long term. If the value of Bitcoin goes too high, and the value of the hashrate equipment securing the network keeps going lower, the Bitcoin network would become a target for attacks from governments and individuals with the economic power to do so.

Ultrasound Money Meme Criticized

The ultrasound money proposal has been criticized by proof-of-work (PoW) consensus proponents arguing that it has two fundamental flaws: unpredictability and centralization. The former has to do with the inability of knowing exactly how many ether will be issued in any given period of time, due to the dependence it will have on network utilization. A currency with no predictable issuance can’t be sound money, much less ultrasound money.

The latter describes these new measures that adjusted token issuance can be changed whenever needed to achieve some other objectives different from what Ethereum wants to achieve today. Increasing or decreasing issuance would be trivial, destroying the current proposal in little time.

However, the ultrasound meme and its described deflationary proposal seem to have some kind of validity: the price of ether has skyrocketed this last month to reach ATH levels of $4,100, and experts conclude it is likely to keep growing.

What do you think about the ultrasound money meme and its significance? Let us know in the comments section below.

Defi Project Rari Capital Hacked for $10M in Ether, Project’s Pool Drained for 2,600 ETH

by

Defi Project Rari Capital Hacked for $10M in Ether, Project's Pool Drained for 2,600 ETH

Reports from the decentralized finance project Rari Capital detail that the protocol’s ethereum pool has experienced a recent exploit. Rari Capital says they are assessing the situation and the team removed funds from the recent Alpha Finance Lab integration. At first, the project’s team revealed they were assessing the hack, but later estimates assume the project lost $10 million to the hacker.

Rari Capital Drained for 2,600 Ether, Hacker Taunts Project

There has been no shortage of defi hacks at the end of 2020 and into 2021, as a myriad of projects has seen funds drained from a wide range of vulnerabilities. Now it seems the Rari Capital project lost $10 million from a malicious hacker who gained access to an exploit in the ethereum (ETH) pool.

Essentially, Rari Capital is a Web3 defi tool that allows people to deposit crypto assets and rebalance them into the “highest-yielding stable opportunities.” The protocol builds a “lego effect” of defi apps and claims the platform provides “never-before-seen high yields from a risk-averse mechanism.”

On May 8, 2021, Rari tweeted that an exploit was manipulated, and “the rebalancer has removed all funds from Alpha in response.” Furthermore, Rari said that the team was “currently investigating the situation and a full report will be shared once everything is assessed.” The hacker also mocked the Rari Capital project with a base64-encoded message that said: “rari=REKT. alpha=ok # saved rari 6m.”

The interesting message from the hacker says that $6 million was saved by the Alpha Homura development team. “Funds are SAFE on Alpha Homora,” the official Alpha Finance Lab Twitter page wrote. “We are notified that Rari Capital has suffered from an exploit that was due to the incorrect assumption when using Homora Bank contract, as they were setting up an ibETH pool on their platform,” the team added.

Rari Capital Plans to Discuss the ‘Next Steps as One Whole Community’

Rari Capital will have to come up with a plan to give restitution to those who lost money. The team’s community will meet at 5 p.m. (PT) this evening (5/9/21) in order to “debrief yesterday’s events and discuss next steps as one whole community.”

The team’s post mortem addressed the losses on Sunday and said that the “attacker stole approximately 2600 ETH.”

“These funds were extracted from Rari Capital’s Ethereum Pool before the attacker was stopped when the contracts were paused,” Rari’s post mortem said. “This loss equates to 60% of all users’ funds in the Rari Capital Ethereum Pool.”

What do you think about the defi project Rari Capital’s recent exploit and the loss of $10 million? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Asian Auction House Phillips Will Accept Crypto at Auction for a Physical Piece of Banksy Art

by

Asian Auction House Phillips Will Accept Crypto at Auction for a Physical Piece of Banksy Art

The well-known Phillips Auction House has announced the company plans to accept cryptocurrency for the first time in a physical art auction set for June 7-8. Phillips will be auctioning a world-famous piece of artwork called the “Laugh Now Panel” created by the anonymous street artist Banksy.

‘Laugh Now’- Phillips to Accept Cryptocurrency at a Banksy Auction in June

Whether Banksy likes it or not, his artwork has been tied to blockchain technology and sold for crypto assets in recent times. Additionally, the infamous street artist’s work was even burned after it was transferred into a non-fungible token asset. The NFT sold for more money in an auction than the physical piece itself. Phillips Auction House has decided to accept cryptocurrency for the first time during a Banksy auction on May 7-8.

Phillips’ entry into the crypto space is a bit behind, in comparison to world-renowned auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s. In fact, Sotheby’s announced last week it was auctioning a physical piece of artwork created by the notorious Banksy.

Sotheby’s detailed on Tuesday that it would leverage the exchange Coinbase in order to sell Banksy’s “Love is in the Air” image. The “Love is in the Air” print has an estimated worth of around $3-5 million. The Banksy possessed by Phillips is the street artist’s famous print called the “Laugh Now Panel.”

Asian Auction House Phillips Will Accept Crypto at Auction for a Physical Piece of Banksy Art

Banksy’s art “Laugh Now” contains a picture of a monkey in the artist’s signature monochrome stenciled style. The monkey is wearing a sandwich board around his neck and it says: “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge.”

According to Phillips, the “Laugh Now Panel” created by Banksy has an estimated worth of around $2.8 to $4.1 million. The art panel is also on tour right now in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Taipei, Taichung, and Hong Kong ahead of the June auction.

The First Major Auction House in Asia Accepting Bitcoin and Ether

“This marks the first time a major auction house in Asia will accept Bitcoin or Ether as a payment option for a physical work of art,” Phillips announcement says. Banksy has been a disruptor in the art world with his distinctive oeuvre characterized by dark humor, satire, and political commentary,” the company’s announcement stresses.

Phillips further says:

Many of Banksy’s iconic original murals were transformed into canvas and editioned prints by the artist, allowing for the dissemination of his mischievous and satirical messages to wider audiences. By offering participants this new payment option to acquire Laugh Now Panel A, Phillips connects Banksy’s bold creations with tech-savvy collectors eager to quickly adapt to new technological advances.

The Banksy auction follows Phillips getting into the non-fungible token art space when it sold Mad Dog Jones’ multi-generational NFT, REPLICATOR for over $4 million. Like Sotheby’s, the Asian auction house Phillips will leverage Coinbase as well to conduct the crypto transaction settlement.

The auction of “Laugh Now” will be conducted in Hong Kong dollars and then the buyer will have the option to choose to pay via the crypto exchange’s payment service.

What do you think about Phillips accepting cryptocurrency for the Banksy art auction this June? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.