The US dollar and the euro are trading at virtually a 1:1 ratio – the last time this happened was 20 years ago
According to the Dollar Index, USD is in the strongest position since 2002
The strengthening of the dollar could mean that the value of crypto assets will continue to drop
The last time euro traded this low was in 2002
On Tuesday, the exchange rate for the euro expressed in the US dollar dropped to its 20-year low of roughly $1.001. This marks another in a series of drops that have seen the euro lose nearly 16% in the past 12 months.
EUR/USD 10-year chart. Image source: xe.com
Euro is the common currency for more than 340 million people living across 19 member states of the European Union. It is the second most-used currency in the world, trailing only the US dollar.
Euro’s faltering value comes at a time of great economic distress for the Old Continent – the war in Ukraine, energy crisis, rampant inflation, historic drought, and logistics problems have each contributed to the gradual weakening of the euro.
While the EUR/USD parity could be interpreted as the euro losing value, it must be noted that the current exchange rate could predominantly be a consequence of the US dollar reaffirming its position as the world’s most dominant reserve currency.
What does a strong dollar mean for Bitcoin and the crypto sector?
The US dollar has been steadily gaining ground on most major currencies in the past year. Going by data curated by Trading Economics, the US dollar’s value increased by as much as 102% in the past 12 months in comparison to the Turkish Lira. Against other major fiat currencies, such as the Japanese Yen, Indian Rupee, and Chinese Yuan, the US Dollar gained 24.1%, 6.7%, and 4.1%, respectively.
Dollar Index has reached a 20-year high on a 17% yearly surge. Image source: Trading Economics
The strengthening of the US dollar over time is neatly encapsulated when looking at the US Dollar Index (DXY), which is a measure of the value of the USD against a basket of currencies. DXY reached its 20-year high this week.
Historically speaking, the price of Bitcoin – and consequently other cryptocurrencies – has been inversely correlated with the value of the dollar.
BTC/USD and DXY comparison between December 2021 and July 2022. Image source: TradingView
In addition to the negative correlation with the dollar, Bitcoin has also been hurting in recent months due to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates to their 28-year high to combat inflation. Expansionary assets – such as Bitcoin and tech stock – have been particularly hard hit by the interest rate hikes, due to their inherently riskier investment characteristics.
Investment lead at Kaicho Capital Ajibola Lawal commented on why crypto is seeing a reduction in investments due to the current economic climate when speaking with Nairametrics in June:
“Crypto is still considered further out the risk curve than more traditional asset classes and while the others have suffered drawdowns just as dramatically, Crypto has taken that, and even worse by comparison.”
Lawal added that the downturn will continue until “general investor confidence in taking risk, is restored.”
Bitcoin dropped below $20,000 earlier today on a 4.25% 24-hour price decrease. The world’s largest crypto is predicted to drop even lower according to our algorithmically generated BTC price charts.
According to Polygon CEO Ryan Wyatt, 48 projects that were previously deployed on Terra Classic have begun migrating to Polygon
The news follows a commitment made in mid-May when the CEO said they will be putting “capital and resources” to support migrating projects
Polygon’s native token MATIC is showing the largest price increase out of any top 20 cryptocurrency in the past seven days
The Polygon team is helping former Terra projects migrate to their network
According to Polygon’s lead executive Ryan Wyatt, 48 projects that were formerly deployed on the Terra Classic blockchain have begun their migration to the Polygon chain. Wyatt shared the news on Twitter, alongside a short video showcasing the list of migrated projects.
Recall that in May, the Terra Classic (LUNC) token lost nearly all of its value after the platform’s largest stablecoin – TerraClassicUSD (USDTC) – lost its $1 peg. In total, investors lost more than $60 billion in one of the largest and swiftest market collapses in crypto history.
In addition to investors, dozens of teams developing on the Terra Classic blockchain found themselves in a hard spot. With user numbers plummeting and the value of the network’s native tokens plunging by more than 99.99%, developers of blockchain protocols and decentralized applications (dApps) on Terra Classic were forced to find a new home.
Polygon CEO promised “capital and resources” to developers in the wake of Terra’s collapse
On May 15, less than a week after the sudden market collapse of Terra Classic, Polygon’s CEO assured “Terra projects” that the company will help interested parties in their transition to Polygon. “We will be putting capital and resources against these migrations to welcome the developers and their respective communities to our platform,” stated Wyat on Twitter at the time.
Now, less than two months later, a significant number of dApps have begun moving to Polygon. The list includes popular projects such as non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OnePlanet and Play-to-Earn (P2E) blockchain-powered game Derby Stars.
Polygon is the leading Layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum. Thanks to its high efficiency and low-cost transaction, Polygon has become one of the most used blockchains in the industry. In addition, as a part of the Green Manifesto, the Polygon team has committed to pursuing carbon neutrality in a big way – it plans to become carbon negative in 2022 and climate positive beyond that.
Despite the broader cryptocurrency downturn, Polygon’s native digital asset MATIC saw quite a substantial uptick in its value in the past week. At press time, MATIC is showing a 7-day price change of 22.4%, the most out of all top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. For context, the second-largest mover in the same time frame – Avalanche (AVAX) – is up just 6.1% in the past seven days.
Cryptocurrency lender Celsius has repaid 20M USDC to Ethereum-based trading protocol Aave
The company has been paying off its debts at an expedited rate after pausing user withdrawals last month
Celsius has hired a new legal team as rumors of a potential bankruptcy continue to swirl
The crypto lender still owes 130 million USDC to Aave
Celsius (CEL), a struggling cryptocurrency lending platform, has paid off 20 million USDC debt to decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Aave (AAVE). Recall that Celsius paused withdrawals last month to protect itself from potential bankruptcy stemming from the broader cryptocurrency downturn and the drastic increase in user withdrawals.
Per data from blockchain analytics site Zapper, Celsius still owes 130 million USDC and 597,123 REN to Aave. PeckShield, a leading blockchain security company, shared a screenshot of the 20M USDC transaction on Twitter.
In addition to the roughly $130 million it owes to Aave, the crypto lender has an outstanding debt position of roughly 85 million DAI on lending and borrowing protocol Compound (COMP).
Per DeFi Explore, the troubled crypto lending platform paid off its remaining 41.2 million DAI debt to DeFi protocol Maker (MKR) on July 7. This allowed the company to regain access to 21,972 WBTC it used as collateral to secure the stablecoin loan.
CEL is up 50% in the past month despite Celsius’ liquidity problems
When looking at the historic data, the extent of risky investment decisions made by Celsius becomes more than apparent. For instance, the company barely avoided liquidation of its 15,553 WBTC it used as collateral to borrow 329 million DAI on May 9, which was the day Terra’s UST de-pegged and caused a severe drop in the value of all digital assets. At the time, Bitcoin was trading at $32,750 while Celsius’ liquidation price was $30,714.
Cointelegraph reported today that Celsius hired Kirkland & Ellis LLP as its new legal counsel. The legal team has also been working with Voyager Digital, helping the crypto trading platform manage the restructuring process and the bankruptcy procedure.
Despite rumors of potential bankruptcy dating back to late June, Celsius’ native CEL token has been experiencing significant positive price activity as of late. The token is up more than 50% in the past month and is trading at roughly $0.82 at the time of writing. Going by our algorithmically generated price predictions, CEL could see a substantial rally in the coming days.
The Global Digital Assets Investment Summit is a forum for the industry leaders and Investors to discuss the future of digital & Crypto assets investments. The Global Digital Assets market is continuously shaking up the financial system and has prompted the beginning of global regulatory change and monetary revolution that no one can afford to ignore. The regulatory overhaul and the development of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and the rise of cybercrime, stablecoins, innovation in cross border retail and wholesale payments infrastructure, and the ‘institutionalisation’ of digital assets investments are just some of the critical challenges that are forcing the financial institutions to change the way they operate, and force a change in the perception of fiat currencies and digital assets.
The focus of the conference will be on the core topics of digital assets. The Summit aims to build an international business and investment platform for the digital assets industry to connect and benefit in both the situations. There will be Keynotes, Fire side chats, Panel discussions. Speakers and Participants will explore new frontiers digital asset investing, yet also focus on operational, regulatory and compliance challenges that need to bridge for true institutional adoption
Institutions crypto tech including finance-focused blockchains
Crypto exchanges with an institutional focus
DeFi, Metaverse, Web3
ATTENDEE BREAKDOWN
Investors 35%
Tech Professionals 10%
Corporates 20%
Crypto Projects 20%
Media & Journalists 5%
Others 10%
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Build a ‘world class’ network around Digital Assets, Decentralized Finance, NFTs, Metaverse, Web3, DLT and Protocols with industry leaders.
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The “Unique GUGGENHEIM Shaving Brush” collection was created by Rudolf Guggenheim in April 1973. In 2022, Ruedi Guggenheim takes the idea of digital and virtual. A “digital art house” is what he envisions for UNIQG, where new opportunities for adolescents and adults are available.
UNIQG’s team is developing the NFT marketplace and expanding the smart contract. Every day, they work to grow their ecosystem and attract new partners. The project aims to build a strong community around the UNIQG token and its marketplace.
What makes it unique?
Uniq Guggenheim Collection (UNIQG) is a Swiss-based, innovative, collectible token company. With its professional network of art experts and partners, the team is developing the first NFT platform in Switzerland. The platform lets artists create and sell NFTs, and offers a variety of features for the creation and sale of NFTs.
Creating a healthy, sustainable community is the goal of the project. UNIQG is focused on the community and the NFT ecosystem, specifically the marketplace and incentives for users. At the time of the market launch, the company wanted to make sure the tokens were distributed fairly, without any individual holding large amounts. The UNIQG community gets 25% of the tokens.
Tokenomics
As mentioned earlier, 25% goes to the project’s community
NFT Ecosystem gets 25%
20% will go to the team
Partnerships and collaborations get 10%
10% goes to marketing
The rest goes to advisors and promotion
By the way, Uniq Guggenheim Collection is available for trading on the P2PB2B exchange. If you have an interest in this project, you have a fantastic chance to become a member of its community.
The total cryptocurrency market capitalization seems to be slowly climbing towards the $1 trillion level again. Throughout last week it increased from slightly less than $910 billion to $972 billion and thereby almost completely negated the losses of the week before that. Nevertheless, with no clear trend reversal in sight, this might not be enough to scare off the bears that have been raging through the markets the last couple of months. Bear market or not, you can almost never do wrong if you read our weekly Coins to Watch articles.
3. Axie Infinity (AXS)
Axie Infinity is a Pokémon-inspired blockchain-powered trading and battling video game. The game is developed by a Vietnamese gaming studio Sky Mavis and has netted more than $2 billion in NFT sales to date. Axie infinity players utilize Ethereum-issued tokens AXS and Small Love Potion (SLP) to breed, trade and battle with their virtual creatures called Axies, each represented by a one of a kind NFT. The growing userbase and protocol revenue has made Axie Infinity one of the most expensive NFTs collections.
Axie Infinity launches Land Staking and prepares for the first AxieCon Event
While AXS has been the CoinCheckUp’s #3 Coin to Watch already two weeks ago, the project developers have since added a few more reasons for monitoring or even acquiring AXS. Since AXS’s last time being featured in the C2W article, the Axies team has successfully deployed the Origin update and also the first Origin update patch. In addition, the Ronin bridge is now up and running again and the game developers launched a new feature called land staking, where players are rewarded with AXS for staking their in-game land plots. This recently rolled-out feature instantly became very popular as it increases the game’s earning potential. Data from the Ronin Chain explorer suggest that more than 87% of plots of land have already been staked. The introduction of plot staking has driven up the price of in-game land plots causing several virtual plots to sell for over 130 Ether (ETH) each, which suggests that the level of interest in the game is still very high. Last but not least, Axie Infinity started selling tickets for AxieCon event that will take place in Barcelona in September. AxieCon will feature three big tournaments with a combined prize pool of $1 million in AXS. The biggest of the three tournaments will be the Axie World Championship where top 16 Axies players will fight for the $500,000 of AXS prizes. As you can imagine, hosting a real-life event of this proportion is an important milestone for the Axie team and even more for the game’s community.
2. Maker (MKR)
Maker protocol was one of the earliest projects on Ethereum and remains the cornerstone of Ethereum’s decentralized finance ecosystem. This protocol, which launched already in 2015, allows users to lock up their Ethereum or other Ethereum-based assets as collateral to receive a loan in the form of Dai stablecoin. Dai, which is designed to trade as close to $1 as possible, is issued in a completely trustless manner. Its issuance and peg are governed by a complex system of Ethereum smart contracts. MKR is Maker Protocol’s governance token. Holders of these ERC-20 tokens can propose changes to the protocol and participate in governance polls.
Maker partners with Pennsylvanian Huntingdon Valley Bank
On July 7, the Maker community passed a vote to partner with Huntingdon Valley Bank (HVB). The proposal, which passed the governance vote with over 87% of the voting power supporting the proposal, involved creating a vault with 100 million Dai (DAI) for HVB as part of a new collateral type in the Maker Protocol. The partnership with this Pennsylvania-based traditional bank will allow the DeFi protocol to issue cryptocurrency-backed fiat loans in the future. At the launch, the bank will be able to borrow up to $100 million DAI, but the debt ceiling is predicted to grow to $1 billion DAI over the next 12 months.
Voting cycle has ended.
117,540 MKR voted YES (87.24% of all voting power used).
MKR holders have approved the addition of HVBank, a 100 million DAI debt ceiling participation facility proposed by the Huntingdon Valley Bank, as a new collateral type in the Maker Protocol. pic.twitter.com/HWqisl9xfi
In addition, the collaboration with a traditional banking institution lends additional credibility to the Maker protocol and the broader DeFi sector. Nevertheless, even without the traditional bank partnership, Maker is among the most reputable and oldest algorithmic stablecoin issuers. In addition, while many including USDD, and even USDT, struggled to retain the $1 peg in the past couple of bearish months, DAI seems oblivious of the market volatility, retaining its $1 peg throughout the whole time.
1. Ethereum (ETH)
Ethereum is an open-source blockchain that pioneered smart contract functionality in 2015. The blockchain operates as a decentralized virtual machine that can execute scripts – also called smart contracts – in a fast, immutable, and trustless manner. Ethereum’s native asset is Ether (ETH), which is currently the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. Although it can also be used as a medium for the transfer of value between different Ethereum addresses, it is more commonly used to execute various smart contracts. The Ethereum blockchain hosts a number of ERC20 tokens with different utilities – these include Exchange tokens (OKB, HT, UNI), DeFi tokens (LINK, MKR, COMP, SNX, etc.) and several stablecoins such as USDC, DAI, TUSD, and USDT. Ethereum is currently still in the process of transition from proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake blockchain. Once Ethereum 2.0 is fully launched, the network will be able to perform more transactions at a higher speed than today. Hopefully, this will also lower the network fees, which are a well-known Achilles’ heel of Ethereum ecosystem.
Gas fees hit a 2-year low as developers successfully merge another Ethereum testnet
After almost two years of insanely high Ethereum fees (average fee was above $40 most of the time) the Ethereum fees have recently finally started to normalize. Last week, the average Ethereum blockchain transaction fee fell down to 0.0015 ETH or $1.57 — a number previously seen in December 2020. The record low ETH fees are most likely caused by the dropping NFT sales, which have also hit a yearly low in this bear market, indicating that the NFT fever is starting to cool off fast. Whatever the reason for them, lower fees will allow investors to pursue DeFi investment opportunities more easily on Ethereum. In addition, we are all looking forward to Ethereum 2.0 which would further reduce the blockchain fees and last week developers brought Ethereum another step closer to ETH 2.0 by successfully performed the merge on the Sepolia testnet. Sepolia is now already the second Proof-of-Stake Ethereum testnet, the first one being Ropstein that moved to PoS in the beginning of June. Ethereum developers now only have to complete The Merge on Goerli testnet, before moving on to the Ethereum mainnet. The transition of the Ethereum mainnet to a proof-of-stake blockchain will reportedly be completed before the end of this year, with The Merge taking place in August.
Robinhood has launched a crypto transfer feature that allows users to send and receive digital currencies
The California-based trading company won’t charge any transfer fees for the service
Sam Bankman-Fired’s FTX crypto exchange has recently shown interest for acquiring the publicly traded trading platform
The highly-anticipated feature launches with no transfer fees
Popular trading platform Robinhood unveiled on Thursday the launch of crypto transfers. The new feature will allow Robinhood users to send and receive Bitcoin and a plethora of other supported cryptocurrencies directly on the blockchain.
The company shared the news in a Twitter post featuring a short video;
The new crypto-centric feature comes roughly two months after Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev announced the launch of the company’s own Web3 wallet, designed to streamline access to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized finance (DeFi). At the time, Robinhood revealed that it will cover gas fees associated with swapping coins on behalf of its users by seeking out best market rates available among the third-party liquidity providers.
According to the California-based broker, users won’t have to pay any fees for crypto transfers. The decision to do so was potentially influenced by the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance, which announced zero-fee trading on the US-focused platform last month, and expanded the promotion to thirteen Bitcoin trading pairs on its global platform earlier this week.
Robinhood has been integrating more and more blockchain functionality over the past year. The rapidly expanding catalog of supported digital currencies, a crypto wallet, and now crypto transfers, have apparently piqued the interest of FTX CEO and one of the richest people in crypto, Sam Bankman Fried, who bought $600M+ worth of Robinhood stock in May. In late June, Bloomberg revealed that FTX is exploring the acquisition of Robinhood.
The ParallelChain blockchain project has launched their second testnet, advancing forward on their roadmap towards the eventual launch of their mainnet. Per the ParallelChain team, the “Testnet 2” provides “dramatic” benefits to the platform’s user experience, performance, maintainability and reliability.
ParallelChain’s Testnet 2 features a redesigned SDK (software development kit) for creating Smart Contract. The new SDK was designed to make smart contract development on ParallelChain highly accessible, with the project drawing inspiration from modern front-end development practices. For example, the SDK features macros that automatically convert smart contract source code to lower-level code, abstracting some of the complexity away from the development proces.
The new testnet also introduces an expanded ParallelChain F REST API to support a bigger range of queries. According to the team, this change will help web application developers make better use of blockchain data sourced from ParallelChain. Another change that coincides with the launch of Testnet 2 is a redesign of the ParallelChain blockchain explorer.
ParallelChain is building a scalable blockchain platform that features a public mainnet that can interoperate with different private blockchain networks. The private networks in the ParallelChain’s ecosystem can rely on the mainnet for consensus and security, while still keeping their privacy intact. ParallelChain is compatible with WASM (WebAssembly) and EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), providing an easy transition for blockchain developers.
The project has also launched a mobile cryptocurrency wallet with advanced biometric authentication features. The wallet is designed to support assets on the Bitcoin, Ethereum and BNB Chain blockchains, and of course also ParallelChain’s native asset XPLL. The XPLL token will be used for paying transaction fees on ParallelChain, staking and governance. Another interesting use-case for XPLL is that the token will be redeemable for licenses to software developed by ParallelChain.
ParallelChain will release two more testnets before the launch of their mainnet, which is expected to happen in the fourth quarter of this year. We can expect to see the third and fourth ParallelChain testnet launches to be completed within the third quarter.
Reddit has launched Collectible Avatars, a limited-edition, blockchain-powered, cartoon-inspired avatar images
Collectible Avatars are NFTs issued on the Polygon blockchain that can be purchased with fiat
Reddit reportedly plans to implement more blockchain solutions on the platform in the future
Reddit launches NFT collection without admitting to doing so
Social media giant Reddit announced on Thursday the launch of so-called Collectible Avatars. Although the social media platform completely omitted any kind of NFT-related terms in its blog post, the newly-launched collector’s items are still image-based, blockchain-powered collectibles that are not fungible – in short, they are non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
“Collectible Avatars are backed by blockchain technology, giving purchasers rights (a license) to use the art – on and off Reddit.”
Collectible Avatars are available to purchase on the site’s own marketplace at a fixed price, ranging from roughly $10 to $100. Reddit also launched a subreddit dedicated to the avatars r/CollectibleAvatars.
Users can store purchased avatars in their Vault, which is Reddit’s own blockchain wallet solution supporting all Ethereum-compatible blockchains. It is worth noting that Reddit decided to use Layer 2 scaling solution Polygon as the platform to launch Collectible Avatars – reportedly due to Polygon’s low-cost transactions and carbon neutrality commitments.
The Reddit team noted that the launch of blockchain-backed collectibles is “one of the early steps” towards further implementation of blockchain solutions on the platform.
The company has previously launched blockchain-powered Community Points in 2020 in the form of ERC-20 tokens. The points are earned by contributing quality content to communities and grant access to premium perks. The initiative was further bolstered with Arbitrum scaling solution in 2021.
