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Transaction fees on Ethereum (ETH) continue to rise
The rapid rise in transaction fees on the Ethereum (ETH) network does not seem to be stopping. At the beginning of the week, the median transaction fee was $3.5 and at the time of this article, it was over $6 and peaked on September 2 at over $8. According to the analysis firm Glassnode, miners in the network earned upwards of $500,000 in just one hour. This surge in Ethereum’s fees is linked to the launch of Sushiswap, a fork of the DeFi Uniswap platform that has reached a total block value of one billion dollars in less than 24 hours. Decentralized finance, in full swing this past week, continues to test the limits of the Ethereum network which will have to manage this congestion problem as soon as possible. Ethereum 2.0 can’t come quick enough!
Cardano (ADA) arrives in the DeFi market
Decidedly, decentralized finance (DeFi) interests many people. This week Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, implied in a YouTube video that DeFi was an area of intense interest for Cardano and that he had become “very obsessed with DeFi lately”. There have been some information leaks and Cardano’s teams are reportedly working on several DeFi projects including a stablecoin. Hoskinson doesn’t hide his ambitions. He said “It will be an algorithmic stablecoin and we think it will be much better than MakerDAO” but also that “Cardano is much better suited as a platform than Ethereum”. Announcements should be made in the coming weeks.
Indian Prime Minister’s Twitter account hacked
Truly terrible hackers have taken over the private Twitter account of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The hackers, who managed to access his personal account, asked his 2.5 million followers to send him cryptocurrency, but to say the least, they weren’t very clever. The hackers have indeed asked to make a donation in Bitcoin (BTC) on an Ethereum (ETH) address! If we look at the two addresses proposed by the hackers, we realize that the “loot” of the hacking is ridiculously small: less than a dollar and only one transaction recorded on each address. The real pity is that such attacks can tarnish the image of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in a country where the regulators are still trying to finalize the country’s policy on the matter. A possible ban on cryptocurrency is not to be excluded.
The porn site Pornhub now accepts Bitcoin (BTC) and Litecoin (LTC).
Users of the porn site Pornhub can now pay in Bitcoin (BTC) or Litecoin for the site’s premium services. If Pornhub already accepted Verge cryptocurrency since 2018, and Tether since January 2020 it is the first time it accepts so-called “major” cryptos. According to Pornhub’s vice-president, the site attracts more than 130 million visitors per day. “Our team continues to lead the way in developing, testing and implementing new technologies for everyday consumers, well ahead of the consumer market,” he said. Pornhub has been in existence since 2007 and is now the ninth most popular website in the world, with 3 billion visitors per month.
The price of Bitcoin: from $41,000 in 2020 to $100,000 in 2021?
We end this week not with a news item as such, but with a prediction about the price of Bitcoin. This week several analysts have stated that there is a link between the evolution of the price of Bitcoin today and its previous evolutions. When we look at the price curves by the halvings of 2012 and 2016, we can indeed observe certain parallels. Halving is a phenomenon of the Bitcoin protocol that happens every four years and halves the number of Bitcoins that are issued every 10 minutes. In concrete terms, according to the stock-to-flow forecast model, the price of Bitcoin could reach $288,000 at the end of the current halving cycle, which ends in 2024. And in the shorter term, the analyst Ecoinometrics estimates that the price of Bitcoin could reach $41,000 by the end of 2020.