Coins.ph To Utilize PHPC Stablecoin for Australia-Philippines Remittances | Key Points | Aug. 29, 2024

In today's daily recap, Coins.ph announced utilizing its own stablecoin for Australia-Philippines remittance corridor.

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Is Another Bitcoin Rally Coming Soon? This Pattern May Say So

On-chain data shows a pattern in the stablecoin shark and whale holdings that may suggest the Bitcoin rally could make a return in the near future. Stablecoin Sharks & Whales Have Been Accumulating Recently According to data from the on-chain analytics firm Santiment, the sharks and whales of the major stablecoins have been increasing their reserves while Bitcoin has been struggling recently. The “sharks” and “whales” are two of the largest cohorts in the sector, with investors belonging to the former holding at least $100,000 and at most $1 million worth of the asset, while the latter has wallet balances in the $1 million to $10 million range. Due to such large holdings, these investors can potentially move around a large number of coins at once, something that can make them influential entities in the market. In the context of the current discussion, the sharks and whales of stablecoins are of interest. In particular, the four largest players in the market are of relevance here: Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), Binance USD (BUSD), and Dai (DAI). Santiment has used its “Supply Distribution” metric to track the holdings of these humongous holders and this indicator tells us about the percentage of the supply that each group in the market is holding right now. Here is a chart that shows the trend in this metric specifically for the sharks and whales of the top 4 stablecoins in the sector: The metrics appear to have been going up in recent days | Source: Santiment on Twitter As displayed in the above graph, the holdings of these stablecoin sharks and whales have been on the rise recently. Interestingly, while this trend has formed, the price of Bitcoin has dipped below the $30,000 level. A similar pattern in the supply held by these large investors had also formed last month, as these investors had been buying more stablecoins, while BTC had been on a decline. What followed this period of accumulation back then was a sharp Bitcoin rally that had taken the cryptocurrency’s price above the $30,000 level. An explanation of this curious trend may lie in what the holdings of these large stablecoin holders signify. Generally, these investors opt for stables whenever they want to exit volatile assets such as BTC. Related Reading: Stanford MBA Explains Why Next Bitcoin Cycle Could Be “Bigger” Such holders, however, usually only seek to temporarily take shelter in these dollar-tied tokens, because if they wanted to stay away from the sector for extended periods, they would have exited through other means like fiat. Thus, these investors would eventually shift their stablecoins into Bitcoin and others again, and with this exchange, provide a bullish boost to their prices. This is why the supply of these sharks and whales may be looked at as the available buying pressure that these humongous investors can put on the asset at any point they want. From the chart, it’s visible that the BTC rally above $30,000 didn’t actually kick off from new money being pumped back into the asset by the sharks and whales, but rather the conversions that they made back into the asset, as their holdings decreased while the rally happened. Related Reading: Bitcoin Miner Reserve Rising: Good News For BTC Bulls? As the large investors of the major stables have again been accumulating recently, it’s possible that Bitcoin could see a bullish effect from this down the road once more, although it’s uncertain how long it may be before these investors deploy their stablecoins back into the market. Bitcoin Price At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $29,300, up 1% in the last week. BTC has stagnated since the decline | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView Featured image from Kanchanara on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, Santiment.net

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Fintech Stables Launches AU to PH Cross-Border Remittances

Stables, a fintech firm, launches international remittance services from Australia to the Philippines using stablecoins like USDC.

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Sharks & Whales Accumulate Stablecoins, Why This Could Be Bullish For Bitcoin

Data shows the sharks and whales of the largest stablecoins have been accumulating, something that may turn out to be bullish for Bitcoin. Sharks & Whales Have Been Loading Up On Stablecoins Recently According to data from the on-chain analytics firm Santiment, the sharks and whales have recently improved their share of the total supply of stablecoins like USD Coin (USDC), Dai (DAI), and Binance USD (BUSD). The relevant indicator here is the “Supply Distribution,” which tells us what percentage of a cryptocurrency’s total circulating supply is being held by which wallet group in the market. Addresses are divided into these “wallet groups” based on the total number of tokens that they are holding at the moment. In the context of the current discussion, the 100,000 to 10 million coins cohort is of interest. This group naturally includes the wallets of all the investors who are carrying a balance of at least 100,000 and at most 10 million tokens. As the assets in question here are USD-pegged stablecoins (meaning that their value is fixed at $1), the bounds of this range convert to $100,000 and $10 million, respectively. As these amounts are massive, only the largest of the investors in the market would be sitting on these addresses. The sharks and whales are two such cohorts that are large enough to cover these wallets. These groups can be quite influential in the market, as they have the power to move a notable amount of coins at once. Obviously, the whales would be the more important group of the two, as they are the larger cohort. Related Reading: Santiment Explains How Bitcoin Investor Mentality Influenced Recent Price Action Now, here is a chart that shows the trend in the Supply Distribution of these sharks and whales for three of the most popular stablecoins in the sector: All three of these supplies seem to have gone up in recent weeks | Source: Santiment on Twitter As displayed in the above graph, the supplies of these three stablecoins hit a low back in March, but have since then observed an increase. This means that sharks and whales of the respective tokens have been accumulating during this period. Generally, investors use stables whenever they want to avoid the volatility associated with other assets like Bitcoin. So, sharks and whales picking up these coins can be a sign that they have been exiting the other assets recently. Eventually, however, such investors who have taken safe haven in stablecoins may exchange these tokens back for the volatile coins, once they feel that prices are right to jump in. Whenever these holders swap their stables, the prices of the assets that they are shifting into can naturally observe a buying pressure. This implies that the currently piled-up stablecoin supplies of the sharks and whales can be looked at as the potential dry powder that may be deployed into assets like Bitcoin. Related Reading: Litecoin’s MVRV Has Surged, Why This Is Bearish In the last couple of weeks, the USDC, DAI, and BUSD supplies of these humongous holders have flatlined, meaning that they may have slowed down their exit from the volatile coins. If the trend now reverses and they start scooping up the other cryptocurrencies with their stables, BTC could possibly feel a bullish effect. BTC Price At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $26,700, down 1% in the last week. BTC has erased the gains from yesterday | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView Featured image from NOAA on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, Santiment.net

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Makerdao Issues Emergency Proposal to Address $3.1B in USDC Collateral After Stablecoin Depegging Incident

On March 11, 2023, the decentralized finance project Makerdao issued an emergency proposal following the USDC depegging incident that saw the stablecoin dip down to $0.877 per unit. At the time of writing, Makerdao commands $3.1 billion in USDC collateral that backs a portion of the project’s stablecoin, DAI. Makerdao Proposes Changes to Limit Exposure [...]

The post Makerdao Issues Emergency Proposal to Address $3.1B in USDC Collateral After Stablecoin Depegging Incident appeared first on Crypto Breaking News.

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Lightning Speed: Taro Is Here! Lightning Labs Releases The Code’s Alpha Version

The controversial Taro protocol is ready for testing. The initial version of the code is available on GitHub, and it enables “developers to mint, send, and receive assets on the bitcoin blockchain.” Notice that the company isn’t talking about the Lightning Network yet. In a blog post announcing the Taro launch, Lightning Labs promised, “once the on-chain functionality is complete, we’ll work towards integrating the Taro protocol into lnd, bringing Taro assets to the Lightning Network.” Related Reading: An Interview with Ben Caselin on AAX- Lightning Network Integration and TARO Protocol Implementation This is the first step of many and it’s mainly aimed at developers. According to Lightning Labs, “this initial release is only designed for testnet usage as a way for developers to start using the code.” That means, no real value is flowing through Taro at the moment. But… what is Taro anyway? The blog post defines it as a “Taproot-powered protocol for issuing assets that can be transferred over bitcoin and in the future, the Lightning Network for instant, high volume, low fee transactions.” Taro Will Enable Stablecoins To Travel Through Lightning This is a multifaceted protocol that allows many things, but the feature everyone is excited about is the fusion of stablecoins with the Lightning Network. It’s controversial because you have to trust the issuer of stablecoins, which means they come with counterparty risk. Bitcoin doesn’t have that problem. In any case, in the subsection titled “The First Step Towards Bitcoinizing the Dollar,” Lightning Labs tries to convince us that stablecoins over Lightning are a good idea: “With Taro and the incredible developer community, we can build a world where users have USD-denominated balances and BTC-denominated balances (or other assets) in the same wallet, trivially sending value across the Lightning Network just as they do today. This leap forward will accelerate the path to bringing bitcoin to billions.” If that sounds too much like Galoy’s stablesats, it’s because both implementations are trying to solve the same problem. They use vastly different methods, though. And place the counterparty risk in different places. BTC price chart for 09/29/2022 on Fx | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com How Does Taro Work And What Else Does It Do? Don’t worry, these brand-new protocols are hard to master, or even understand. Luckily for us, Lightning Labs gave us a technical-but-easy-to-follow explanation as a refresher: “Taro assets are embedded within existing bitcoin outputs, or UTXOs. Think of these assets as “UTXOs within a UTXO.” A developer mints a new Taro asset by making an on-chain transaction that commits to special metadata in a Tapoot output. When minting a new asset, the Taro daemon will generate the relevant witness data, assign the asset to a private key held by the minter, and broadcast the newly created bitcoin UTXO to the bitcoin network. This new outpoint becomes the genesis point of the newly minted asset, acting as its unique identifier.”  When Lightning Speed first tackled the Taro subject, we explained what a Taro asset can be: “What is a “Taro asset”? Whatever you want, your BTC can be “converted into different assets such as USD to EUR or USD to BTC.” Or, as Bitrefil’s Sergej Kotliar puts it, “Pay in currency of sender’s choice, receive in currency of recipient’s choice. This means that every wallet can now have native Strike-type “USD balance” functionality for example. With no need to trust the wallet, the only trust lies in the issuer of the token.” How To Get Started With The Novel Protocol As previously stated, this Alpha release is mainly for developers. If you’re one or know of one, here are the protocol’s coordinates:  “To get started exploring Taro, download the daemon, check out the API documentation, and read the getting started guide. And for a more extensive explanation on how Taro works, take a deep dive into the Taro BIPs and our documentation.” Related Reading: Lightning Speed: Taproot And The Lightning Network, A Match Made In Heaven Have a blast, developers. And please report back to us with your findings. Featured Image by Jennyrang from Pixabay | Charts by TradingView

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Lightning Speed: Taro Wants To Abolish Cross-Border Payments, Disrupt The Market

Have you heard about Taro? It’s an improvement proposal for the Lightning Network that Lightning Labs introduced in April. “Taro makes Bitcoin and Lightning multi-asset networks,” the company claims in the latest edition of their newsletter. They also explain in simple words what the protocol does, how it does it, and the implications of its implementation. “In a world of omnipresent communications connectivity, nobody says “cross-border messaging” anymore. Taro promises to do the same thing to “cross-border payments” by decentralizing the entire global FX market into a protocol that can run on a Raspberry Pi by anyone, anywhere.” Is the Lightning Labs exaggerating? Or is Taro the protocol that will bring the next billion people to the Lightning Network? “The opportunity provided by Taro bringing assets like stablecoins to the Lightning Network is clearly enormous,” the company claims. Can Lightning Labs back that case and argue it convincingly? Let’s find out. What Taro Does And How It Does It   The first thing Lightning Labs makes clear is the psychology behind the improvement proposal. It almost seems like bitcoin’s Lightning Network will be serving Taro and not the other way around. “Instead of starting from scratch and bootstrapping a new ecosystem of nodes and liquidity, Taro will leverage the existing network effects of both the infrastructure that’s been built out over the last several years plus the 4000+ BTC allocated to the network today as a global routing currency.” How does it work, though? The “edge nodes” are the key. By “integrating with Taro,” normal Lightning nodes can now “process an instantaneous conversion from L-USD into BTC or vice versa, for a small fee.” That means that “every Taro transaction on the Lightning Network will be converted into BTC by the first hop, routed across the network as BTC, and then converted back into a Taro asset by the last hop before the destination” What is a “Taro asset”? Whatever you want, your BTC can be “converted into different assets such as USD to EUR or USD to BTC.” Or, as Bitrefil’s Sergej Kotliar puts it, “Pay in currency of sender’s choice, receive in currency of recipient’s choice. This means that every wallet can now have native Strike-type “USD balance” functionality for example. With no need to trust the wallet, the only trust lies in the issuer of the token.” The trust model is the main difference from Galoy’s Stablesats, another novel concept that looks for a similar result. BTC price chart for 08/13/2022 on Bitstamp | Source: BTC/USD on TradingView.com What Does Taro Mean For The Lightning Network? In a recent interview published by NewsBTC, AXX’s head of research and strategy Ben Caselin explained the protocol further “In Taro, smart contracts and asset transfers are not executed by the blockchain, and they are also not enforced by the blockchain. Instead, transfers are executed by the sender of an asset (who has to make a corresponding bitcoin transaction), and enforced by the recipient, same as the Lightning Network.” And in the previous Lightning Speed, we theorized about how big could this development be for the Lightning Network. “According to The Bitcoin Layer, “a global capital market operating on top of bitcoin-denominated financial rails is inching closer with each new onramp.” And the Taro protocol and all of the assets it would bring to The Lightning Network is the mother of all onramps.” Back to Lightning Lab’s newsletter, the company toyed with even bigger expectations. For example: “A community bank could issue a local stablecoin on Taro and it would only need a handful of nodes or liquidity providers to make a market between the local currency and the BTC core of the Lightning Network to be connected to a global community of buyers and sellers. No permissioning required!” They’ll Never See It Coming According to Lightning Labs, bitcoin “renders cross-border payments obsolete.” Stablecoins are a huge business and so are cross-border payments. In the intersection between them, Taro stands tall. “Visa’s 65% operating margin is one of the highest of all the companies in the S&P 500 index, and this margin is Lightning and Taro’s opportunity. They’ll never see it coming.” The company expects that the benefit for everyone working on the Lightining Network will be tremendous. “We expect that bringing Taro to market and making Lightning a multi-asset network will dramatically expand the Total Addressable Market for those building Lightning applications.” And you know what more users mean, more of those sweet-sweet fees.} Featured Image by Joseph Mucira from Pixabay | Charts by TradingView

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Galoy Brings U.S. Dollars To Bitcoin’s Lightning Network

In addition to its new bitcoin-backed U.S. dollar balance on Lightning, Galoy also announced a $4 million raise.

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Liquibrium, the most-efficient StableSwap on Tezos (English and Tagalog)

(English and Tagalog) Liquibrium facilitates swaps between stablecoins, providing users with low slippages and liquidity providers with high returns. The first pair they are launching with is $kUSD - $USDtz.

The post Liquibrium, the most-efficient StableSwap on Tezos (English and Tagalog) appeared first on BitPinas.

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Date of Nestables Public Alpha Announced

The public alpha of the game starts on 24 February 2022 for holders of Nestables Founders NFTs.  

Continue reading Date of Nestables Public Alpha Announced at DailyCoin.com.

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Weekly Crypto Gaming News – Bomb Crypto, Polkacity, Battle Racers, Nestables, ThunderCore, Splinterlands, Aavegotchi, Town Star, Axie Infinity, Sandbox

The journey into the crypto gaming world starts right now.

Continue reading Weekly Crypto Gaming News – Bomb Crypto, Polkacity, Battle Racers, Nestables, ThunderCore, Splinterlands, Aavegotchi, Town Star, Axie Infinity, Sandbox at DailyCoin.com.

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Stablecoins Supply Finally Shows Rise, Here’s Why This Is Bullish For Bitcoin

On-chain data shows the supply of stablecoins has been going up recently, a sign that could potentially be bullish for Bitcoin. Stablecoins Have Registered An Increase In Their Supply Recently As pointed out by an analyst in a CryptoQuant post, every increase in stablecoins’ supply since late 2022 has been accompanied by a rise in [...]

The post Stablecoins Supply Finally Shows Rise, Here’s Why This Is Bullish For Bitcoin appeared first on Crypto Breaking News.

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Stablecoins Interest Spikes As Traders Look To Exit Market

Data shows there has been a large spike in interest around stablecoins recently, a sign that investors of Bitcoin and other assets may be looking to exit. Stablecoins Have Observed A Sharp Rise In Social Volume Recently According to data from the on-chain analytics firm Santiment, there has been a major uptick in the social volume of the stablecoins recently. The “social volume” refers to an indicator that measures the total number of social media text documents that are talking about a certain topic or term. The social media text documents here have been collected by Santiment and include a variety of sources like Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, and other internet forums. Something to note about the metric is that it only tells us about the unique number of such posts that are mentioning the given term at least once. This means that even if a thread includes several mentions of the topic, its contribution towards the social volume will still remain only one unit. The social volume can provide insight into the degree of attention any particular coin is getting on social media platforms. Whenever this indicator’s value goes up, it means that the general interest in the asset among investors is rising currently. Now, here is a chart that shows the 7-day change in the social volume for the various assets in the cryptocurrency sector (including the stablecoins): How the metric's value has changed for the different coins in the market during the past week | Source: Santiment on Twitter As displayed in the above graph, the social volume of a lot of the volatile assets has registered a negative 7-day change, implying that there is a lesser amount of discussion happening related to them right now as compared to a week ago. Related Reading: Bitcoin Tweets Surpass Dogecoin Despite Meme Coin Craze Some of the assets like Bitcoin have seen a positive 7-day change in the metric, but the increase has only been minuscule for them, implying that their social volume is relatively unchanged. Interestingly, while the volatile assets may have seen decreasing or sideways-moving social volumes, the stablecoins have seen a completely different trend with the metric; their social volumes have sharply surged in the past week. USD Coin (USDC), which is the stablecoin second only to Tether (USDT) in terms of market cap, has seen an extraordinary rise of more than 300% in terms of this metric. This suggests that discussions around the coin have increased by more than 300% during the past week. Tether itself has observed a positive 7-day change in the social volume of more than 30%, which, while much lesser than USDC’s, is still quite significant nonetheless. Related Reading: This Week In Bitcoin And Crypto: Key Dates That Will Impact Prices Generally, investors use stables whenever they want to escape the volatility associated with the other coins in the sector. So, since the interest around these tokens has surged recently while the volatile cryptocurrencies have been seeing a red period, it would appear that holders may once again be seeking the safety of this stable form of digital assets. BTC Price At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $27,300, down 2% in the last week. Looks like BTC has seen some recovery | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView Featured image from iStock.com, charts from TradingView.com, Santiment.net

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Bitcoin To Smash $100,000? Rapid Stablecoin Exchange Inflows Continue

On-chain data shows exchanges have continued to receive stablecoin deposits recently, a sign that could be bullish for Bitcoin and other digital assets. Stablecoin Exchange Netflow Has Remained Positive Recently As pointed out by an analyst in a CryptoQuant Quicktake post, stablecoins have been flowing into exchanges recently. The on-chain metric of relevance here is the “Exchange Netflow,” which keeps track of the net amount of a given asset that’s moving into or out of the wallets associated with centralized platforms. When the value of this metric is positive, it means the investors are making net deposits of the coin to exchanges. Such a trend suggests the holders want to trade the asset away. Related Reading: 54% Of Bitcoin Supply Inactive Since 2 Years Despite 500% Price Jump On the other hand, the indicator being negative implies investors prefer to hold onto the cryptocurrency, as they are taking their tokens off into self-custody. The implication of these trends for the wider sector and the asset itself can be different depending on the exact type of coin that’s witnessing the outflows/inflows. In the case of volatile assets like Bitcoin, a positive Netflow can be bearish for the price, as it means the holders are looking to sell. BTC also acts as one of the main transition points for capital in the sector as a whole, so it being sold can be a bad sign for the rest of the coins as well. Stablecoin deposits also imply traders want to sell them, but since their price always remains stable around the $1 mark, the selling has no ‘bearish’ effect on them. Like Bitcoin, the stablecoins act as a gateway for capital into the sector. More particularly, investors invest their money into the stables whenever they want to avoid the volatility associated with other assets. Such holders usually eventually plan to delve into the volatile coins, and once they are ready, they transfer these fiat-tied tokens into exchanges to make the swap. This naturally acts as buying pressure for whatever asset that they are shifting to. As such, positive stablecoin Exchange Netflows are considered bullish for Bitcoin. Now, here is the chart shared by the quant that shows the recent trend in the Exchange Netflow for the stablecoins: From the graph, it’s visible that the stablecoin exchange netflow has mostly been sitting inside the positive territory for the last few weeks. Alongside these inflows, Bitcoin has been breaking record after record, so it’s likely that these stablecoin deposits have been acting as fuel for the asset. Related Reading: Bitcoin Officially In Overheated MVRV Zone, Rally End Near? The indicator’s value has continued to show strength recently, so it seems the investors aren’t done with their BTC accumulation yet. If the earlier trend continues, the latest stablecoin inflows can elongate the rally and perhaps help the asset to finally break through the $100,000 dream target. Bitcoin Price Bitcoin had seen a plunge under the $96,000 level yesterday, but it appears the coin has already bounced back as its price is now trading around $98,400. Featured image from Dall-E, CryptoQuant.com, chart from TradingView.com

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