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Bitcoin, Tether, Ethereum Trade for Premiums in Ukraine, Hryvnia BTC Price $3K Higher Than Global Average

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Bitcoin, Tether, Ethereum Trade for Premiums in Ukraine, Hryvnia BTC Price $3K Higher Than Global Average

After Ukraine’s central bank imposed a limit on cash withdrawals, Kuna, a cryptocurrency exchange that provides trades in ruble and hryvnia saw a notable surge in volume. Moreover, to this day, crypto-assets being swapped on Kuna such as bitcoin, tether, and ethereum are trading for a significant premium.

Crypto in Ukraine Sees Premiums

The ongoing conflict continues in Ukraine after Russian troops invaded the territory. The United Nations (UN) estimates that roughly 100,000 Ukrainian citizens have fled the country during the last 24 hours.

Following the Russian invasion, two days ago, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) implemented a daily cash withdrawal cap of 100,000 hryvnias ($3,350). The NBU invoked the mandate on February 24, after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky imposed martial law.

Immediately following the NBU’s limit mandate on cash withdrawals, the cryptocurrency exchange Kuna saw trade volume surge by $3.5 million on Thursday. Trade volume on Kuna jumped from $1.4 million to a high of $4.8 million with most of the trading pairs in hryvnia (UAH).

Volume remains higher on Kuna as volume on the crypto exchange was $780 million six days ago, but today, Kuna’s exchange volume is $1.4 million. Not only does the exchange allow trading in hryvnia (UAH), traders can also swap coins in ruble (RUB).

There’s also a premium on bitcoin (BTC), ethereum (ETH), and tether (USDT) on the Kuna exchange as tether is swapping for $1.08 per token at the time of writing. Outside Ukraine, at the same time, tether (USDT) is exchanging hands for $0.99 per coin.

On Kuna, leveraging the hryvnia (UAH) pair, a single ethereum (ETH) is currently swapping for $2,982.83 per unit, while outside Ukraine ETH trades for $2,770 per unit.

Bitcoin (BTC) is exchanging hands for $42,106 when swapped with the hryvnia (UAH) pair, as the premium is $3,124 more expensive than the crypto asset outside Kuna’s platform.

Localbitcoins.com bitcoin (BTC) prices are also seeing a premium as some sellers are selling for prices as high as 1,296,879.12 UAH/BTC or $43,480 per coin. However, localbitcoins.com metrics for this week show trade volume in Ukraine is currently lower than usual.

Similarly, localbitcoins.com has not seen any meaningful upswings in BTC trade volume in Russia. As far as Kuna is concerned, there is a RUB/BTC premium as BTC is swapping for $40,705 or 3,414,848 RUB. ETH/RUB on Kuna has a premium as well but not as high as the premium for hryvnia (UAH) ether swaps.

What do you think about the premiums on bitcoin, tether, and ethereum in Ukraine? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Solana Restarts Mainnet, SOL Users Complain, Dev Says Network Stall Not Similar to ETH in 2016

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The blockchain network Solana had issues processing blocks on September 14 and according to a status report on September 15 at 2:01 a.m. (EST), the Solana validator community “successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta.”

Solana Validators Restart Mainnet Beta

Solana is now a member of the club of blockchains that have stalled for several hours stopping people from sending SOL transactions, using decentralized apps (dapps), and troubling block explorers and wallets with significant issues. During the early morning hours on Wednesday, following Solana’s block production stall on Tuesday, the “Solana Status” Twitter account gave the community an update. The official Solana Twitter page also retweeted the Solana Status tweet.

“The Solana validator community successfully completed a restart of Mainnet Beta after an upgrade to 1.6.25,” Solana Status explained. “Dapps, block explorers, and supporting systems will recover over the next several hours, at which point full functionality should be restored.” Despite the restart people still complained about errors stemming from two different block explorers. The individual said:

Why [do] Solscan and Explorer have different block heights? Solscan doesn’t show new blocks for an hour already. Explorer’s clock is wrong as well. Did Solana fork again?

Solana Users Ask for Compensation, Solana’s Use of Blockchain Questioned, Software Developer Explains Solana’s Bug Differences From Ethereum’s Issue in 2016

In response to the Solana Status report at 2:01 a.m. this morning, a few individuals asked for compensation. “Please compensate us solana holders who have been sh***ing our pants since the crash,” one individual replied on Twitter to the Solana Status update. The Solana blockchain community caught a lot of flak for the outage and some wondered why the network uses a blockchain in the first place.

“Why does Solana even use a blockchain?” the Twitter account ‘Mike in Space’ tweeted on Tuesday. “If you can just shut it down all day for “maintenance” it doesn’t sound very censorship-resistant to me,” he added. An individual responded to the tweet from Mike in Space and said: “It doesn’t matter that it isn’t censorship resistant because its main use case is something else.” But this did not satisfy the cryptocurrency supporter and he replied:

Why not a database then? Seems like a lot of unnecessary overhead.

Ethereum developer Hudson Jameson wrote about how he believes what happened to Solana “is not the same thing that happened during the Ethereum Shanghai attacks in 2016, but I understand why people think so.”

“Both attacks were DoS attacks meant to halt block production, so that is similar. The big difference is that in Ethereum blocks never stopped producing during the attacks because of our multi-client design decisions. Solana is literally having to do a network restart,” Hudson stressed. The software developer added:

I don’t like the rhetoric and comparisons to Ethereum [Anatoly Yakovenko] and others have made throughout the day on Twitter because it feels disingenuous and feels like it minimizes the issues Solana faced. I also don’t like that some people in the Ethereum community are bashing Solana for having to manually restart. Ethereum could just as easily be in a similar position if the merge has a bug. All that being said, I hold no ill will towards Solana and wish them the best.

At press time, solana (SOL) is down 7.5% over the last seven days and remains a top seven crypto asset in terms of market valuation. The incident did very little damage to people’s perspective of the market and in the past four hours, SOL prices have seen gains.

What do you think about the issues the Solana network has seen in recent times? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Solana Block Production Stalls for Hours, SOL Holders Unable to Transact, Validators Deploy a Fix

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Solana Block Production Stalls for Hours, SOL Holders Unable to Transact, Validators Deploy a Fix

According to reports on social media, crypto forums, onchain metrics, and the Solana Status Twitter account indicate that Solana’s blockchain has stalled. Solana mainnet-beta suffered a four-hour downtime and is still down after a technical glitch.

** Editor’s Note: At 3:30 p.m. (EST) on Sept. 14, 2021, this post was updated with a statement written by the Solana Status Twitter account. At the time of update, Solana’s issues still persist and the community is preparing a fix.

Solana’s Network Stalls

In recent times, solana (SOL) joined the top ten crypto assets by market valuation and today, SOL’s market cap position is the seventh-largest. At the time of writing, SOL has been exchanging hands for $159 per unit and is down 2.8% during the last week.

On September 14, the protocol suffered an error and at the time of writing, the chain stopped for a total of four hours so far, as the outage is still ongoing. On Tuesday, the Twitter account Lido Finance tweeted:

A tx overload has caused an OOM error in most Solana nodes, including validation nodes. The network is stalled, engineers in the team and the node operator community are working towards a resolution. Validators are preparing for a potential restart if necessary.

Lido Finance also told its Twitter followers to follow the ‘Solana Status’ Twitter account for more information. “Solana mainnet-beta is experiencing intermittent instability,” the Solana Status account detailed in a pinned Tweet. “This began approximately 45 minutes ago, and engineers are investigating the issue.”

Solana applications like explorer.solana.com have been displaying error messages like: “There was a problem loading cluster stats,” and popular SOL wallets like Phantom have had connection issues.

Estimates Say Solana Block Production Could Take a While

Some have said that the fix could take anywhere between 24 hours to 48 hours to fix the issues. “With transactions being filtered out, and failing commits, and validators need to upgrade and deploy… Will take about 24-48 hrs to fix,” the Twitter account called ‘bruce.codes’ explained.

In another tweet, ‘bruce.codes’ wrote that a “Solana fix [is] being deployed in v1.6.23.” The Solana Status Twitter account also added to the account’s initial outage tweet and said:

Resource exhaustion in the network is causing a denial of service, engineers are working towards a resolution. Validators are preparing for a potential restart if necessary.

Solana now joins the list of networks that have stalled by failing to produce blocks. For instance, back in February 2020, the IOTA blockchain was down for more than 11 days. The EOS blockchain has had issues with block production as well. Cardano has had issues with block production in the past and Solana had problems with block production in December 2020.

Furthermore, while Solana managed to knock XRP down a notch in recent times, XRP has once again managed to re-capture the sixth-largest market capitalization worldwide. At the time of writing, XRP is a touch over $3 billion ahead of solana’s (SOL) overall valuation.

** At approximately 3:12 p.m. (EST) the Twitter account called Solana Status tweeted about the ongoing issue one hour after this article was published. “Solana Mainnet Beta encountered a large increase in transaction load which peaked at 400,000 TPS,” Solana Status tweeted. “These transactions flooded the transaction processing queue, and lack of prioritization of network-critical messaging caused the network to start forking.”

The Twitter account added:

This forking led to excessive memory consumption, causing some nodes to go offline. Engineers across the ecosystem attempted to stabilize the network, but were unsuccessful. The validator community elected to coordinate a restart of the network – the community is preparing a new release, and instructions will be posted in Discord.

What do you think about the problems the Solana blockchain has been facing on Tuesday? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Solana Knocks XRP Down a Notch, SOL Taps Another All-Time High Rising More Than 400% in 30 Days

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The cryptocurrency solana reached another all-time high on September 9 at $213 per coin. The digital currency’s market valuation has swelled significantly, pushing dogecoin from its position in the top ten last week. Today, solana’s crypto market capitalization has managed to surpass XRP’s overall valuation, taking the sixth position in the top ten this week.

Solana’s Month-Long Tear Continues


Solana has managed to continue its ascent higher and higher as a great majority of the crypto economy coins have faltered in value. On Thursday, solana (SOL) reached an all-time high (ATH) at $213 per unit, and it’s a touch over 5.9% lower than that price point at the time of writing.

The higher price has ballooned the crypto asset’s overall market capitalization and for the first time, SOL knocked XRP down a spot in terms of the top ten crypto positions.

SOL also knocked DOGE down last week and today, solana’s market cap is hovering around $58.9 billion. Year-to-date, SOL has gained a massive 8,009% and a whopping 417% during the last 30 days. Today, SOL has $14.5 billion in global trade volume and the U.S. dollar is SOL’s top pair capturing 26.32% of all trades. This is followed by tether (USDT) with 21.5% of SOL swaps, bitcoin (BTC) with 18.57% of SOL trades, and BUSD with 14.73% of the market’s pairs.

Tether Increases Solana Issuance, $1K SOL Investment Turns Into $138K


Out of the $2.22 trillion crypto-economy, solana’s market valuation represents 2.64% of the entirety. The ecosystem surrounding the Solana project has seen a lot of growth as well, as Coin98 Analytics reports tether (USDT) has added a lot of tethers to the Solana chain.

“In less than a week, Tether has doubled its token release on Solana, from 390M to 790M,” Coin98 Analytics’ tweeted.

Coin98 Analytics data also shows that a $1,000 investment into solana (SOL) a year ago would produce a whopping $138,400 return. Solana has a great number of projects that are tethered to the network like Solfarm, Moonlana, Soluble, Solyar, Hedgehog, Luna Network, Solape, Sol Star, Hydraswap, Spiderswap, Popsicle, Traderdome, Cropperfinance, Kermit Finance, Lumos, Dexlab, Saber, and more.

What do you think about solana (SOL) capturing all-time highs this week? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Australian Tax Office to Prompt 400,000 Crypto Holders to Report Their Gains

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Australian Tax Office to Prompt 400,000 Crypto Holders to Report Their Gains

Australia’s revenue service has reminded a growing number of crypto investors about their tax obligations. Rejecting the common misconception that crypto gains are only taxable when coins are cashed back into dollars, the tax office is going to prompt hundreds of thousands of taxpayers to report profits and losses from their cryptocurrency transactions.

Tax Office Targets Australians With Crypto-Related Obligations

Concerned about crypto investors evading taxes, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has set out to debunk the myth that cryptocurrency gains are only taxable when digital assets are converted into fiat money. People often think the digital coins are currencies but in reality, they are classified as assets, and gains from cryptocurrency trades are like gains from other investments, the tax authority explained.

ATO has estimated that 600,000 Australians have invested in cryptocurrency recently amid the surging popularity of crypto trading and rising market prices. The agency is now going to send warning letters to 100,000 taxpayers asking them to review their previously filed returns. Another 300,000 Aussies will be prompted to report their gains and losses from cryptocurrency deals as they lodge their 2021 tax return, Australian media reported.

The tax office also revealed that it’s closely monitoring the points where cryptocurrency interacts with the fiat system, helped by both the traditional financial sector and the crypto industry. The agency tracks the money back to the taxpayer using data matching profiles with cryptocurrency exchanges, according to ATO Assistant Commissioner Tim Loh who also told news.com.au:

There isn’t a game of hide and seek. We have got that information and all we are asking people to do is follow the rules. We know most Australians follow the rules.

Australian Capital Gains Tax Applies to NFTs as Well, ATO Warns

The ATO official further elaborated that the tax administration treats gains from cryptocurrency similarly to gains from shares, for example. The tax is due not only when an investor swaps cryptos for fiat money but also when one coin is exchanged for another and such transactions must be reported too. Furthermore, the Australian capital gains tax also applies to the disposal of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Tim Loh remarked. At the same time, holding crypto funds as a long-term investment, for 12 months or more, entitles taxpayers to a discount.

A different rule applies when businesses or sole traders receive cryptocurrency for the goods and services they provide. Such payments will be taxed as income based on the value of the digital coins calculated in Australian dollars. Recognizing that the matter is quite complicated, the ATO is now focusing on helping Aussies to fill in their declarations correctly. Tim Loh advised them:

The best tip to nail your cryptocurrency gains and losses is to keep accurate records including dates of transactions, the value in Australian dollars at the time of the transactions, what the transactions were for, and who the other party was, even if it’s just their wallet address.

Loh’s comments also indicated that the Australian tax authority considers a failure to report obligations to be a bigger sin than a mistake on the declaration. “Failing to report on crypto-assets and not taking action when reminded will prompt penalties and potentially an audit,” the tax agent warned. Such penalties will be reduced significantly when taxpayers have corrected their returns.

What are your thoughts on the tax regulations for crypto investments in Australia? Let us know in the comments section below.