The Coin Collector’s Guide: DeFi makes the rounds, and a dire prediction for your favourite coins

The DeFi craze heats up, a kinder gentler IPO and more.

It’s time for your Friday coin rundown. Let’s see what happened.

Here are your top ten coins.

Bitcoin

market cap $211,469,244,318

Square (SQ.NYSE) announced earlier this week that they have picked up approximately 4,709 bitcoins at an aggregate price of $50 million.

“Square believes that cryptocurrency is an instrument of economic empowerment and provides a way for the world to participate in a global monetary system, which aligns with the company’s purpose,” Thursday’s announcement reads. This bitcoin investment represents about 1% of the company’s total assets at the end of Q2 2020.

Damn. How’s that for faith?

The company’s mobile Cash App launched trading in bitcoin in 2018, giving users the ability to buy and sell BTC. In Q2, 2020, they announced that the Cash App’s revenue had jumped 600% and profits were 711%.

Nice.

Maybe they’re onto something.

Source: coingecko.com

Ethereum

market cap $42,625,550,716

Bitcoin’s been doing well for 2020, despite everything else in the world going to hell in a handbasket. But Ethereum’s gains dwarf it.

It’s the whole DeFi craze that’s swept through the crypto-sphere this year. The chart doesn’t include it but the specifics of the year-to-date boosts for Bitcoin are 33.2% and Ethereum’s is 95.5%. Seriously, if you’re only in Bitcoin, then you’re missing out.

Source: coingecko.com

Tether
market cap $15,811,747,502

According to The Block Research, the number of blastlisted Tether addresses on the Ethereum network has reached 100. Most of these blacklist actions are from 2020, and most are from after July. The term, of course, means that the addresses in question can’t send, receive, or redeem USDT, effectively closing off any traffic to and from the addresses.

There are plenty of reasons why an address might be blacklisted, and they’re mostly related to law enforcement requests. Tether is a fairly easy coin to use and operate—especially if your nefarious activities happen in the digital sphere—because it’s 1:1 with the US dollar. You can yank cash away from an exchange after engineering your way past an exchange’s security, and then shapechange whatever you’ve yanked into USDT, and then pull it off the exchange.

Now that’s not quite so easy. As of July 9, Tether blacklisted 39 Ethereum addresses holding their USDT coin. It’s a good step for Tether’s credibility.

Source: coingecko.com

XRP/Ripple
market cap $11,621,340,771

Ripple has been planning to launch the ability to extend lines of credit to people for awhile now. They’ reported this week that they’re finally good to go with that project. Ripple said its news product “line of Credit,” itself presently in beta, would give select customers working capital loans in XRP.

“Those using ODL on RippleNet can purchase XRP from Ripple on credit,” said the company, adding that it would charge “one fee” on the amount borrowed. Ripple is mum about the fee, but said that it’s a lot less than other available credit options. The offering specifically targets fintechs and small and medium-sized enterprises.

Source: coingecko.com

Bitcoin Cash

market cap $4,503,990,268

Technically, this one isn’t from this week, but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless.

In the middle of September, the Bitcoin Unlimited development team launched an application called votepeer. The software is powered by BCH’s network and lets anyone set up a transparent two-option voting process.

“Votepeer is powered by Bitcoin Cash and allows anyone to easily set up a two-option vote using the simple and transparent voting protocol. Participating, verifying, and tallying can be done through the SPV (Simple Payment Verification) technology in use in most bitcoin cash wallets and therefore does not require a full node,” the project announcement details.

Now I’m not saying that this use of blockchain technology wouldn’t be the solution to large swaths of problems in the present American election, but an electronic, vote-in, received, tallied and disseminated by immutable blockchain technology would probably go a long way towards closing down that whole “voter fraud” thing that the present Buffoon-in-Chief is talking about.

Just a thought.

Source: coingecko.com

Binance Coin

market cap $4,291,947,130

Earlier this week, Coingeek put Binance on notice, raising a handful of excellent points that maybe Binance’s tendency to play hard and fast with the rules may end up getting them in some regulatory hot water over time.

Here’s a taste:

“You can test Binance’s attitude toward money laundering yourself right now by opening an account and seeing how many barriers stand between you and being able to deposit, trade and withdraw on their platform. If you don’t want to do that, we can tell you now: there aren’t any.”

They’re dead right. It’s easy to make an account. Too easy. If you go to Kraken, they want your firstborn child as collateral in addition to your driver’s license. The Winklevoss twins exchange Gemini, in New York, wants your firstborn, your secondborn, driver’s license and a sworn oath before Odin.

If you show up at Binance, they’ll offer you a limitation—2 BTC withdrawal limit for non-verified users. Seriously, that’s it. Why this is relevant is because eventually someone in law enforcement going to catch Binance, and more specifically their office-less hobo CEO Changpeng Zhao and make him squeal until he gives up all of his illegal contacts, or maybe gets a virtual padlock. The question is what this would do for the nascent DeFi movement.

A report published in January 2020 tracked the movement of $2.8 billion worth of criminal BTC in 2019 to see where it went, and found that 27.5% of it ended up on Binance, making them the biggest money laundering machine in 2019.

How will you feel about your Binance coin when two or three government agencies from two or three different countries get tired of watching criminals get fat on the proceeds of this bloated, international money laundering empire?

Source: coingecko.com

Chainlink

market cap $4,172,456,250

In a curious bid for attention and development, the development team behind Chainlink’s Grant Program is offering more than $100,000 worth of blockchain integration grants available to developers that can integrate the smart contracts platform into new blockchains.

So far, Chainlink has one taker—the Solana network, including its Serum project.

The program is an addition to the Community Grant Program, which originally aimed to financially support only Chainlink’s developers. Now the network’s open to the larger blockchain development community, and Chainlink’s smart contract application is aimed to strengthen the DeFi ecosystem.

Source: coingecko.com

Polkadot

market cap $4,074,989,465

Polkadot is hosting an “Initial Parachain Offering.”  Cute, I know.

Parachains are similar to Ethereum shards, in which they spread transactions across multiple nodes, allowing for a potential scaling solution.  Since one of the largest issues impeding growth of projects like DeFi is scaling, then this could be a game changer.  If it works.

Slots for parachains are limited, and Polkadot intends to auction them off over the next few years. Only about 100 parachains are available for teams and developers, which creates a gap between supply and demand, and that’s where the initial parachain offering comes in.

“Most projects that want to launch a parachain are startups that may not be able to afford the bond required for a parachain lease. Thus, it’s natural that DOT holders would want to loan their DOT to projects who require DOT for a bond in exchange for some consideration,” said Polkadot.

Source: coingecko.com

Cardano

market cap $3,299,574,827

The so-called Ethereum killer has just gotten a good jumpstart on their foe by widening their ability to stake. Now if they can get the sharding to work, then maybe they could be suitable for DeFi.

Still, now Cardano can stake on Bitfinex, alongside EOS, Cosmos, v.systems and Tezos. Bitfinex offers customers the ability to earn rewards as high as 4.3% per year by depositing and holding, which is basically what staking is.

“We’re delighted to announce that Bitfinex customers will now have the opportunity to start staking their ADA assets. Our ADA staking service builds on the success we’ve already had since first launching our staking program,” said Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex.

Source: coingecko.com

Litecoin

market cap $3,267,616,545

Finally, Litecoin retakes 10th place, but analyst and crypto-trader says that several of the largest and most well-known cryptocurrencies might be overtaken by a new type of digital assets in the next little while. The difference could be accessibility to DeFi and other movements in the future.

His name is Michaël van de Poppe and he says the space is going through some changes that will shakeup the list in future weeks.

“I think we’re in a double-transition phase. The first one is the transition from the wild west towards a mature and regulated market surrounding bitcoin and blockchain. The second one is getting rid of overvalued top 10 coins like XRP, BCH (Bitcoin Cash) and LTC (Litecoin) to fundamentally strong ones.”

About this time last year, XRP was the third largest crypto by market cap. BCH was in fifth place and Litecoin was in sixth. XRP’s down one spot from that having been removed by artificially inflated stablecoin USDT, and BCH has only recently climbed back into the top five after getting bounced courtesy of the DeFi (probable) bubble coins, Chainlink and Polkadot. Litecoin, though, is in tenth.

The assets’ performances over the past year have all slipped.

One year ago, XRP was the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap with Bitcoin Cash sitting at number five and Litecoin at number six, according to CoinMarketCap. Today XRP and BCH are both down by one spot at number four and number six respectively, while Litecoin has dropped to number 10.

The crypto insights platform Santiment says that XRP’s declining social volume, which measures sentiment on social media, indicates that a possible price reversal could be on the horizon. Altogether, it’s a curious prediction and not entirely without merit. If DeFi doesn’t turn out to be another crypto-fad, and actually bears fruit for more than ponzi schemers and other malcontents, then the coins that utilize it could be real game changers. We’ll see.

Source: coingecko.com

—Joseph Morton

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