The cryptocurrency market starts strong this week.
Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value, hit a three-month high on Sunday, topping $ 50,000 and trading at around $ 49,600 on Monday afternoon.
Other major cryptocurrencies, such as ether, cardano and dogecoin, are also rising, with the value of the entire cryptocurrency market at more than $ 2.15 trillion, according to CoinMarketCap.
Between Visa buying a non-fungible CryptoPunk, or NFT, six-digit token, and Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey testing bitcoin mining, here are six things that happened in the cryptocurrency space last week past.
1. Jack Dorsey says he’s “testing” bitcoin mining
It’s no secret that Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter and Square, he loves bitcoin. He has considered it the most important project of his life to work and Square, his digital payments company, bought bitcoins worth more than $ 170 million earlier this year.
Now, the billionaire CEO is exploiting it too. “I’m trying to undermine @compass_mining,” Dorsey tweeted Tuesday.
Compass Mining is a service that hosts, supplies and operates cryptocurrency mining platforms for individual miners who do not want to worry about buying and maintaining mining equipment for themselves.
Bitcoin works with a working test model, where miners have to compete to solve complex puzzles to validate transactions. The process is not easy: it requires a lot of power and energy from the computer, which is not cheap. Computers themselves, along with other equipment, can also be very expensive.
2. Robinhood says dogecoin accounted for 62% of cryptocurrency revenue in the second quarter
Dogecoin, a meme-inspired cryptocurrency that started as a joke, accounted for 62% of its revenue in cryptography, Robinhood reported.
In total, revenue from cryptographic transactions was $ 233 million in the second quarter.
3. Coinbase buys $ 500 million in cryptocurrency on its balance sheet
4. The second largest stablecoin in the world changes composition
This time, their reserves will consist of cash and US Treasury bonds.
Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that are supposed to be fixed in reserve assets such as fiat currency. While the developers behind USD Coin previously said it was backing 1: 1 in cash, in July it was revealed that cash accounted for just over 60% of its reserves. The other 40% was backed by debt securities and bonds.
USD Coin is the second largest stable currency, valued at $ 27 billion in circulation.
5. A hacker behind $ 600 million in cryptocurrency theft returns all stolen funds
Poly Network, a the decentralized finance platform, or DeFi, was hacked earlier this month, with a theft of more than $ 600 million.
The hacker exploited a vulnerability in the platform’s code, which allowed them to transfer the stolen funds. But as of Monday, Poly Network has recovered all the stolen funds.
“At this time, all user resources that were transferred during the incident have been fully recovered,” a Poly Network blog post said Monday. “We are in the process of returning full control of the assets to users as quickly as possible.”
The person who claims to be the hacker said the theft was done simply “for fun”.
6. Visa bought a CryptoPunk
Visa announced it bought a CryptoPunk NFT for $ 150,000 on ether.
“Today, as we enter a new era of NFT commerce, Visa welcomes CryptoPunk # 7610 to our collection,” the company said. he tweeted Monday.
CryptoPunks are an assortment of 24×24 pixelated avatars, each considered rare NFT collectibles. There are a total of 10,000 existing and none of them. Each has its own features and accessories.
“We believe NFTs will play an important role in the future of retail, social media, entertainment and commerce,” Cuy Sheffield, head of cryptography at Visa, said Monday. “To help our customers and partners get involved, we need to know first-hand the infrastructure requirements for a global brand to be able to buy, store and leverage an NFT.”
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