Idelto

Cryptocurrency news website

trading

Court Ruling Threatens 17 Crypto Exchanges in Russia

by

Court Ruling Threatens 17 Crypto Exchangers in Russia

Another batch of Russian online crypto exchanges in Russia face closure following a recent decision by a regional court. Information published on their websites has been deemed illegal meaning the country’s telecom watchdog can block access to their platforms.

Roskomnadzor May Take Down Blacklisted Crypto Exchanges

A number of websites providing options to exchange, cash out, and transfer cryptocurrency using various payment methods may be blocked by Russia’s telecom regulator, Roskomnadzor, if their operators don’t delete the illegal web pages. The threat for the online crypto platforms stems from a court ruling recognizing their content as prohibited.

Court Ruling Threatens 17 Crypto Exchangers in Russia

In early September, the Kushnarenkovsky District Court in Bashkortostan, a republic of the Russian Federation, confirmed that the information they are disseminating is banned under current law, Forklog reported. The register of banned Russian websites, maintained by the non-government organization Roskomsvoboda, lists 17 sites affected by the decision.

In its ruling, the regional court notes that in all these cases the platforms have allowed free access without requiring registration. “Any user can get acquainted with the content and copy the materials in electronic form. There are no restrictions on their transfer, copying and distribution,” the district court emphasized.

According to Digital Rights Center, a law firm hired by the operators of six of the crypto exchanges, the owners of the websites had not been summoned by the court at all. Sarkis Darbinyan, managing partner at the company, explained that apparently the sites had been identified on the Bestchange.ru crypto exchange aggregator.

In the past few years, websites featuring content related to bitcoin and crypto services have often been targeted with restrictive measures in Russia. Roskomnadzor blocked Bestchange.ru more than once but access to the popular site has been eventually restored. In March 2020, the agency added six crypto sites to its register of banned internet sources and in June this year, a court in the Perm region announced its decision to block several crypto trading websites.

Lawyers at Digital Rights Center are now preparing official complaints with the intention to seek the full cancellation of the court decision. “Apparently, prosecutors do not want to accept the reality that the law on digital assets has already been adopted and the legislator did not follow the path of a complete ban on cryptocurrency, but only limited the possibilities of its use and civil law turnover,” Darbinyan concluded.

Do you think the Russian crypto exchangers and their defense will be able to secure a reversal of the court’s decision? Tell us in the comments section below.

Investing Platform Public Holdings Launches Bitcoin Trading

by

The neobroker will enable over 1 million retail investors to buy, sell, and hold BTC and nine other cryptocurrencies.

  • Public.com will now allow over one million retail investors to buy, sell, and hold bitcoin.
  • The neobroker founded in 2019 will add BTC and nine other cryptocurrencies to the list of investment vehicles offerings, adding to U.S. stocks and ETFs.
  • It is unclear how the bitcoin custody will work for investors, but the feature won’t likely allow withdrawals, effectively functioning as an IOU.

Public.com, the investing platform operated by Public Holdings Inc., is rolling out bitcoin trading to its more than one million customers, The Wall Street Journal reported. The retail investors that utilize the platform are now able to get indirect bitcoin exposure in addition to trading U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Cryptocurrencies have “really attracted a new generation of investors to it as an asset class,” Stephen Sikes, chief operating officer of Public.com, said. “We also think…there is some validity to including crypto within a broadly diversified portfolio.”

The new feature will be rolled out gradually, starting October 7, to most Public.com users who will now be able to buy, sell, and hold bitcoin and nine other cryptocurrencies. But New York residents won’t be eligible to enjoy the new feature at first because the firm’s servicing partner “doesn’t have the required license in the state yet,” per WSJ.

Public.com launched in 2019, offering individual investors the opportunity to trade U.S. stocks and ETFs, unlike competing major retail investor platform Robinhood that provides customers with options and margin trading vehicles.

Another aspect that differentiates the competing companies is participation in payment for order flow — a common practice of brokerage firms to “route customer orders to high-speed trading firms in return for payments,” according to the report. Payment for order flow allows brokers to offer commission-free trading but encourages high-frequency trading to maximize revenues.

Public.com includes social features on its platform that bring investors together in sharing ideas and following each other. MaryAlexa Divver, director of product at Public.com, told WSJ that the investing platform would also provide customers with educational content on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin Doesn’t Just Represent The Future, But Also The Past

by

A legacy trader reflects on how the bitcoin market mirrors the past, and is poised to overtake the traditional market in the future.

Like many, the more I learn about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency markets, the more I see the future of the world economy. However, as a former market maker that started trading equity options on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange in 2001, when it comes to trading in this industry, it feels a lot like old times.

At this point, there’s been so much discussion around how Bitcoin will revolutionize the world, we almost take it for granted. There is a seemingly endless list: It will transform the monetary system; provide banking to the bankless; create an inexpensive and seamless global payments network while generating a non-inflationary currency; provide the monetization of energy, digital real-estate and the currency of the internet — all while eliminating the double spend. I could go on!

But we do not hear as much from a trader’s point of view, and for us, it can be a bit like déjà vu.

Liquidity is a good place to start. It has improved significantly from where we were, but we are still in the early stages. The spot and futures market have come a long way, especially for bitcoin. But when you do trade, you usually find that fees are much higher than you may be accustomed to when trading equities at Ameritrade.

The bitcoin options market is still in its infancy. Deribit holds the most liquidity for BTC options, but it is unavailable to those in the United States. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange feels more familiar to traditional U.S. investors, but at this point still sees little order flow. Given this, we see large spreads between the bid and offer, as not enough competition between market makers has flooded the marketplace.

It all seems like the options market from the late 1990s and early 2000s, when specific exchanges had the rights to trade specific equities, there was less competition, quotes were made in fractions rather than decimals, and execution was not nearly as straightforward as we see today.

Which leads to institutions. While we are seeing more and more hedge funds and trade desks getting into the space, the vast majority are still on the sidelines. Of course, this has been changing quickly, as with each new institution that joins the space, stability and belief in bitcoin grows. And as the institutions begin to flood in, we will see more of the past come to life.

This will mean enhanced regulations and the introduction of exchange-traded funds, structured products and high-yield instruments offered by wealth managers, as well as an entire side industry of vendors specializing in servicing the institutions, with risk-management software and data aggregation. All the while, the DeFi space will continue to compete, grow and replace the need for the middleman.

That said, it must be noted that many new trading concepts have already been developed by the cryptocurrency world. Perpetual futures and everlasting options — these are derivatives that never expire. Exchanges that never close — not for a single second of the year. Real-time margin calls and transfers. Fully-embracing partial contracts. On-chain metrics providing data that was previously unattainable.

Eventually, these concepts will be integrated into the traditional markets. Once everyone realizes what is possible, it’s only a matter of time before bitcoin trading goes completely mainstream.

Right now, many traders are realizing that they have been on the sidelines for far too long, and the time is now to act and take advantage of the opportunities. It’s hard to predict what will happen tomorrow or this month, but experience leads me to believe that in the coming years, bitcoin and traditional finance will look very much alike. The only question is which one will influence the other more. I wouldn’t want to bet against bitcoin.

This is a guest post by Patrick Baker. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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

by

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

by

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.