ALPHA surges 152% in one week: What’s behind its meteoric rally?
ALPHA surges 152% in one week: What’s behind its meteoric rally?
ALPHA, the governance token of Alpha Finance Lab, has surged 152% in the past week. It is now the 85th most valuable cryptocurrency in the global market, breaking into the top 100 in a short period.
Behind its meteoric rally are three key factors, namely the rapidly rising total value locked (TVL) of Alpha Homora, the overall positive market sentiment around decentralized finance and the imminence of Alpha Homora V2.
Alpha Homora is essentially a protocol that enables users to yield farm using leverage.
The term “yield farming” means the process of providing liquidity to DeFi protocols to earn sustainable yield or APY. By using leverage, Alpha Homora allows users to provide liquidity to pools more efficiently.
Alpha Homora V2 adds various improvements to the first release. It adds more pool support on top of Uniswap, such as Curve, Balancer and SushiSwap. This allows users to benefit from a more diverse selection of pools to yield farm.
The second version also lets users hold up to nine-times leveraged positions, borrow multiple assets, and lend or borrow other assets apart from Ether (ETH), as Band Protocol’s Sawit Trisirisatayawong explained.
Ultimately, Alpha Homora should be useful for the average DeFi user with limited capital who wants to maximize their yield.
AlphaX, the decentralized futures exchange, also aims to be beginner-friendly by removing the manual futures funding rate and baking it into the price. The two key products in the Alpha Finance Lab ecosystem are both designed to serve casual users in DeFi.
At a market capitalization of $296 million, ALPHA is arguably a blue-chip DeFi asset. But the price of ALPHA has significant momentum and is continuously rallying.
The optimism around ALPHA stems from the rapid increase in Alpha Homora’s TVL and the active developer community of the project.
Alpha Homora’s $618 million alone could justify a high valuation for ALPHA, by calculating the potential fees the protocol could charge in the future and predicting its cash flow.
The existence of other key products like AlphaX that make Alpha a more extensive DeFi ecosystem has likely made ALPHA more appealing as a long-term DeFi bet.
The pace of growth is optimistic
Alpha Homora is the fastest DeFi protocol to reach a $600 million TVL in the history of the DeFi space.
Alpha Homora growth. Source: Alpha
The top DeFi protocols and lending platforms, like Aave and Curve, took around six months to reach the same TVL.
But while Alpha admittedly launched as the DeFi space was seeing explosive growth, it is still impressive that it was able to outpace the largest projects in the space.
Over the longer term, there are several potential catalysts for the price of ALPHA.
Most notably, the official document of Alpha Finance Lab shows that ALPHA tokenholders might soon be able to receive a portion of protocol fees through either staking or providing liquidity. The document reads:
“Utility token for all Alpha products (e.g. provide liquidity or stake to receive % protocol fees) (not yet implemented).”
More utility for ALPHA should act as a strong catalyst in the longer term and make the token itself more attractive.
Title: ALPHA surges 152% in one week: What’s behind its meteoric rally?
Sourced From: cointelegraph.com/news/alpha-surges-152-in-one-week-what-s-behind-its-meteoric-rally
Published Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2021 13:41:39 +0000
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Bitcoin price dips below $30K but here’s why pro traders are still bullish
Bitcoin price dips below $30K but here’s why pro traders are still bullish
In the last 24-hours Bitcoin (BTC) price dropped 10% today to test the $30,000 support. This drop below what traders have described as a ‘key’ support occurred just two days ahead of this month’s futures and options expiry.
Despite the record-high $4 billion options expiry being just two days away, both bull and bear sides traded similar sizes today.
Unlike futures contracts, options are divided into two segments. Call (buy) options allow the buyer to acquire BTC at a fixed price on the expiry date. On the other hand, the seller of the instrument will be obliged to make the BTC sale. Generally speaking, they are used on either neutral arbitrage trades or bullish strategies.
The put (sell) options are commonly used as hedge, protection from negative price swings.
To understand how these competing forces are balanced, one should compare the calls and put options size at each expiry price (strike). Options markets are all-or-none, meaning they either have value or become worthless if trading above the call strike price, or the opposite for put option holders.
Aggregate options trade volume in the past 24 hours. Source: Bybt.com
The trading volume over the past 24-hours has favored the more bullish call options by 51%. Nevertheless, this number is polluted by the ultra bullish strikes priced at $37,000 and higher. Considering there’s less than 36 hours before the expiry, these contracts are trading below $50 each.
Excluding these over-optimistic strikes, today’s trading added another $95 million worth of call options open interest below $35,000. On the other hand, the more bearish put options at $27,000 and higher amount to $90 million worth of open interest.
The result of today’s activity has been neutral for Friday’s options expiry. Nevertheless, one should check the overall open interest imbalance separate from today’s movement.
BTC Jan. 29 aggregate options open interest by strike. Source: bybt.com
By excluding the put options below $27,000 and the call options above $35,000, it is easier to estimate the potential impact of Friday’s expiry. Incentives to pump or dump the price by more than 16% become less likely, as the potential gains will seldom surpass the cost.
This data leaves $582 million worth of call options up to $35,000 for the aggregate options expiry on Jan. 29. Meanwhile, the more bearish put options down to $27,000 amount to $422 million. Therefore, there’s a $160 million imbalance favoring the more bullish call options.
Considering the volumes traded over the past 24 hours and the put options open interest, there’s not much gain for bears in pressuring BTC below $29,000, at least from the options market standpoint.
author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision.
Title: Bitcoin price dips below $30K but here’s why pro traders are still bullish
Sourced From: cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-price-dips-below-30k-but-here-s-why-pro-traders-are-still-bullish
Published Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2021 01:00:44 +0000
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Title: The adventures of the inventive Alex Mashinky
Sourced From: cointelegraph.com/magazine/2021/01/27/the-adventures-of-the-inventive-alex-mashinky
Published Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2021 18:43:17 +0000
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Mercuryo expands its fiat-to-crypto gateway to the US with Zero Hash
Mercuryo expands its fiat-to-crypto gateway to the US with Zero Hash
Mercuryo, a European-based cryptocurrency payments provider, today announced a new partnership with Zero Hash, a U.S. digital asset settlement service, in order to provide access to its crypto-asset payment services for businesses and individuals in the United States.
Since its launch, Mercuryo has been serving over 600,000 users and 180 crypto projects and prominent enterprises, becoming a leading digital asset payment gateway provider in Europe.
Mercuryo features two flagship solutions: a digital asset wallet and a widget service. While the wallet provides access to seamless crypto-to-fiat and fiat-to-crypto transactions, businesses can integrate the widget directly into their apps or websites. With just a few clicks customers can purchase digital assets in their local currencies via Visa and Mastercard cards. The widget also supports Apple Pay and Google Pay services, so clients can buy crypto this way too.
“We are excited about entering the US market. We are observing an interest from this region – 41% of payments on our platform are made in US dollars. Our vision is to build a financial infrastructure that provides customers worldwide with easy and fast access to cryptocurrencies.”
Petr Kozyakov, Mercuryo’s CBDO and co-founder.
Mercuryo’s partner firm is a registered Money Service Business under the oversight of FinCEN and a licensed Money Transmitter in over 40 US states, allowing the company to offer regulated payments solutions for all its customers across the country.
“We are pleased that Mercuryo is leveraging the Zero Hash compliance and technology infrastructure to service US customers. We empower innovators such as Mercuryo who are building Finance 2.0 by providing a turnkey and totally customizable solution for transactions in a regulated ecosystem.”
Edward Woodford, Zero Hash’s CEO
To kickstart the expansion, Mercuryo closed a €2.5m seed funding led by the international venture capital fund Target Global.
The company’s ecosystem has achieved significant growth last year. Its turnover went up 50 times, reaching $75.5M in Q4 2020. The number of employees has also doubled.
CryptoNinjas.net » Mercuryo expands its fiat-to-crypto gateway to the US with Zero Hash
Solana targets growth in Southeast Asia with a $5M grants scheme
Solana targets growth in Southeast Asia with a $5M grants scheme
Solana has turned its focus towards decentralized finance in Southeast Asia with a new $5 million development fund.
The Solana Foundation created the fund in partnership with Vietnam-based investment firm Coin98 Ventures, enabling regional startups building on Solana to receive technical, marketing, and community support, as well as up to $100,000 in funding. The fund will run for the next three years with a specific focus on projects within the DeFi and Web3 spaces, including marketplaces, exchanges, and other DApps or tooling.
This is one of the first grants specifying a core region of interest, with a particular focus on Vietnam. Solana Foundation Executive Director Eric Williams:
“Our goal is to create the optimal conditions for developers in Southeast Asia to build amazing things on Solana.”
According to the announcement, “project teams may be distributed, but must have a physical presence in Southeast Asia.” The announcement makes it clear that if they do not have a presence there, they will not qualify for the fund.
Williams explained that the foundation partnered with Coin98 Ventures because of the technical and community support they can provide, adding that the key to this fund being successful is the combination of financial and technical support:
“Sometimes hurdles can be solved with extra money, other times they cannot.”
DeFi is gaining traction within the Solana ecosystem, driving trading volume to all-time highs earlier this month.
Using treasuries and fund campaigns to boost developer ecosystems within blockchains is common with programs already available for a range of blockchain networks including Bitcoin, Ethereum, OkCoin, and Polkadot.
In September last year, Polkadot received one of the largest fund boosts to date with Digital asset development company RockX investing $20 million to support the Polkadot ecosystem over the next five years.
Title: Solana targets growth in Southeast Asia with a $5M grants scheme
Sourced From: cointelegraph.com/news/solana-targets-growth-in-southeast-asia-with-a-5m-grants-scheme
Published Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2021 04:48:36 +0000
Circle enables seamless USDC-USD transfers, providing a bridge from banks to DeFi
Circle enables seamless USDC-USD transfers, providing a bridge from banks to DeFi
Circle, the company behind the second most popular stablecoin USD Coin, has rolled out a new API that will allow for the seamless transfer of USDC to USD via automated clearinghouse (ACH) systems.
The first exchange to adopt the new API will be derivatives and futures specialist FTX, looking to speed up USD settlement processes on behalf of their customers.
In a blog entry, project manager Gee Chuang described how Circle’s ACH API improves connections between the fiat world and the digital world by introducing interoperability among payment rails, such as card, wire and blockchain transfers. Using the API, USD funds can be transferred easily between banks and blockchains with processing traditionally done manually, now automatic.
“Circle APIs give us a fast, reliable and trusted infrastructure for connecting bank transfers to our new retail products, and with settlement into USDC across Ethereum and Solana, this gives FTX the ability to offer the fastest experience for crypto investors.”
— @SBF_Alameda
— Jeremy Allaire (@jerallaire) January 26, 2021
Circle has partnered with Plaid, a company that specializes in online account security and verification, to provide a process for streamlining USD/USDC transfer through Circle. Chaung said:
“This process prevents common errors like mistyping bank accounts or routing numbers and ensures greater user security, while reducing fraud reversal risks. No digging around for numbers, no clunky codes, no switching between applications during the process.”
More than 50 countries use some version of ACH payment processing, including the EU, United States, United Kingdom, China, Japan and South Korea. Circle has also partnered with Visa to process crypto-related payouts across 30 countries covered by their network.
USD Coin is primarily an Ethereum-based token that can be exchanged for US dollars on a 1:1 basis and is backed by a reserve of regularly-audited assets. Launched in Oct. 2018 as an alternative to Tether, there are currently about 5.4 billion USDC in circulation, making it the second biggest stablecoin by market cap, after USDT.
Demand for USDC has been at an all-time high, setting weekly volume records during the first three weeks of the new year. In addition to being used heavily at Binance and Coinbase, USDC is also a stablecoin favorite among DeFi traders, with platforms like Uniswap, Curve and Compound accounting for hundreds of millions in daily trading volume.
USDC for redeemability of $1 at CEXs and holding $1 peg
USDT for liquidity
DAI for stablecoin interest earning
I don’t use TUSD ever
— DeFi Dad ⟠ defidad.eth (@DeFi_Dad) January 23, 2021
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has long been a proponent of integration between the digital currency space and traditional finance, appealing to the U.S. Treasury Department in Dec. 2020 to allow crypto industry collaboration in the regulation development process.
Speaking at a fintech festival earlier that month, Allaire predicted that upcoming breakthroughs in blockchain technology will encourage massive adoption, putting its potential benefits “in the hands of hundreds of millions, if not billions of users.”
Title: Circle enables seamless USDC-USD transfers, providing a bridge from banks to DeFi
Sourced From: cointelegraph.com/news/circle-enables-seamless-usdc-usd-transfers-providing-a-bridge-from-banks-to-defi
Published Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2021 01:39:55 +0000
Pragmatism: The true key to unlocking crypto mass adoption
Pragmatism: The true key to unlocking crypto mass adoption
When Bitcoin (BTC) launched in 2009, it was motivated by the distrust of financial institutions and their fees and the inflationary practices by central banks during the Great Recession. Bitcoin was supposed to usher in an era of decentralization, financial inclusion and democratization.
Yet more than a decade later, with Bitcoin prices surging, we’re witnessing the digital asset being hoarded by large, centralized financial institutions, risking the principles behind its creation. Bitcoin is now in danger of being predominantly in the domain of the financially included — exactly the types of institutions that the creators sought to avoid in the first place.
Related: Why institutions suddenly give a damn about Bitcoin
Meanwhile, in the context of other potential applications of blockchain on which Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are built, Big Tech has matured in its midst, with many seeing the problems of anti-competition and the abuse of power that come with its size. Problems such as economic and financial control, data privacy, disinformation and the general usurping of users are the symptoms of structures that we have let become too powerful.
It is 2021, and we risk never fulfilling the promise of adoption that will be possible with these technologies. While the community has been preoccupied with profit-making from crypto, we have the opportunity to create even more massive value as an industry. The potential is not today’s crypto market capitalizations but the billions of users and trillions of dollars of market potential that are this technology’s true promise.
Skepticism of the mainstream
As an entrepreneur who was around for the last technological disruption of the internet, I played a role in one of the internet’s most dominant categories: social networks. As a co-founder of LinkedIn, I’m struck by a similar kind of idealism that pervaded the Internet 1.0 era, but I also see the chasm between those in this new art and those who have yet to experience its benefits and question its existence.
Crypto and blockchain remain in their infancy many years after their creation. There are some hundreds of millions of Bitcoin and Ether (ETH) wallets, while the internet boasts 4.7 billion users. Even under an optimistic assumption of 250 million wallets and one user per wallet, crypto’s user base represents only 5% of internet users. The recent ascendancy of crypto’s market cap to $1 trillion is only 1% of the worldwide public stock markets’ total market cap, which stands at $90 trillion. Most blockchain projects today still have woefully limited adoption, and their tokens are subject to volatile speculation.
With the exception of Bitcoin, which is finally being endorsed by the experts, and decentralized finance, which in its current speculative state has the potential to demonstrate real-world value, this community knows its fair share of skeptics. The mainstream still wonders whether crypto and blockchain are solutions in search of a problem when centralized solutions seem to be working just fine at scale. The industry still has not captured the imagination of the mainstream nor shown signs of mass adoption.
Putting the ideals aside, I believe decentralized technologies can fix the vexing problems of Big Tech and finance in the years to come. To do this, we need to adopt a more pragmatic, business-minded approach to our industry. This mentality might run counter to the sensibilities of our entrepreneurs in the community. I’ve seen too many efforts that don’t work on products that are relevant to the mainstream. Nor do we measure success in terms of traditional key performance indicators such as product-market fit, user bases or revenue. We still talk about utopian concepts and the size of our communities that speculate on tokens but don’t mostly use them.
ppeal to mainstream audiences, not just enthusiasts
As an industry, we need to work on solutions that appeal to the mainstream, with a focus on applications or decentralized applications. We should figure out the applications before investing too much more in infrastructure projects that abound in the ecosystem.
Today the world’s top companies provide applications for end-users and are not infrastructure providers. Take a look at the top 50 internet companies: Almost all of them offer solutions to a large addressable market of users that have big active user bases. What’s more, for the ones offering infrastructure solutions, they started by bringing applications to market first. Only after these applications achieved some form of scale did these companies offer infrastructure tools. The most notable examples include Amazon and Amazon Web Services (in 1994 and 2006, respectively), Facebook and Facebook Platform (in 2004 and 2007), Google and Google Cloud (in 1998 and 2008), and LinkedIn and Confluent (in 2003 and 2014).
These companies fulfilled a need first for ordinary users, and only after their infrastructures were scaling did they launch their own tools. By then, these infrastructure technologies solved real-world needs, and they were also conveniently battle-tested. Sure, there were also plenty of infrastructure companies created during the first internet era, but can we name any of them today?
Our industry might have gotten it wrong when it focused on infrastructure from the beginning. Just because Ethereum won critical attention early on, it shouldn’t have resulted in so many other infrastructure projects.
We should be emphasizing the creation of more decentralized applications. Let’s identify and focus on use cases that have large addressable markets with pain points and opportunities to provide solutions. We should then strive to work on achieving product-market fit. Let’s also be bolder and look beyond financial use cases. There are plenty of mainstream opportunities, including better versions of Big Tech applications, and new use cases yet to be discovered. With working solutions for real users, we should work backward to technologies that will be truly useful to develop.
Our solutions have to be 10 times better than existing (centralized) solutions
Those decentralized solutions have to be noticeably better than existing centralized solutions. Decentralization promoted for its own sake is not enough, as the benefits for users have to be clear and tangible to convince them to switch and adopt the decentralized versions.
Digital assets such as Bitcoin are already on their way to demonstrating their superior characteristics as a hedge over traditional currencies, and DeFi has the opportunity to truly reach the underserved in financial services with its borderless capabilities. Many more types of services need to be developed.
While the industry will discover which solutions will be better than their centralized counterparts, the topic that we should be passionate about is digital identity and reputation. The category of social media platforms that have so dominated the first internet era and make billions of dollars of revenue (Facebook: $70 billion, Twitter: $3.5 billion, YouTube: $15.1 billion) and even more in market cap (Facebook: $805 billion, Twitter: $40 billion) depends on user data that consists of user identities.
These platforms make money knowing their users’ behaviors, interests and other aspects of their identity. Yet, monetary incentives between platforms and users are in conflict, with the platforms reaping all of the monetary benefits from user data while user identities are held hostage. The bargain in return is for users to continue to use the platforms for free. Since their rise, we’ve also been facing serious existential challenges from disinformation and data breaches.
Decentralized approaches hold the promise to address the vastly inequitable distribution of value from user identity and reputation. The overall value of user data can be more equitably distributed, with the worth of identities transferred to users. The better the reputation someone has, the more economic opportunities they can access. Think influencers but democratized to everyone, for everyone has a reputation. And there are additional benefits for users, such as control over the circumstances under which to share their identity data. There’s also the potential of a decentralized solution to disinformation.
Services have to be convenient and accessible
Finally, it’s necessary to make the benefits of this technology more accessible and convenient by making decentralized products much easier to use. When the overall friction of a product is reduced and it can be conveniently accessed, this is when it will gain more users.
We need to focus on ease-of-use. We should be spending as much time considering user experience as we do on smart contracts and blockchains. Truly secure wallets, one of the foundational elements of this technology, are still too complex for the average person. Let’s strive to live up to the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s saying that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Products should just work for people. A successful decentralized service means that users should not have to know that it is powered by a blockchain underneath, just like traditional applications don’t need users to know that there are underlying database systems.
As an industry, we have been terrible at explaining what we do to users and need to much better explain our solutions. Much of the technical jargon used in the space speaks to cypherpunks and finance wonks, whether it’s proof-of-anything or financial concepts such as yield farming. Granted, it’s natural for innovators and developers to create a common language for working together, but it’s a very limited group of people. It’s important to associate our work in everyday terms that a mainstream audience would value, speaking to benefits such as enablement, convenience, speed and/or lower costs. The efforts by mainstream companies like PayPal and Square should be celebrated, but the decentralized natives would be remiss not to offer their own hopefully superior versions.
Related: Will PayPal’s crypto integration bring crypto to the masses? Experts answer
In the arc of history, including the history of technology, the world oscillates between centralized and decentralized structures while always tending toward more decentralization. Let’s take full advantage of the approaching trend toward decentralization. As with the internet era, the winners of the decentralized economy may well be those efforts that play to massive addressable markets and connect meaningful value to the masses.
Title: Pragmatism: The true key to unlocking crypto mass adoption
Sourced From: cointelegraph.com/news/pragmatism-the-true-key-to-unlocking-crypto-mass-adoption
Published Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2021 19:41:08 +0000
