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It’s the last full week of the year. The ChangeHero team wishes you fun and happy holidays! As expected from the holiday week, there was not a lot of market action — but crypto never rests, and some hot crypto news did drop! Read our summary of the market situation, a Bitcoin digest and the events you should know about in our weekly crypto digest!
ChangeHero Updates
But first, we have some news to share with you in this crypto digest.
Celebrating Holidays with TOR
Starting this week, ChangeHero is holding a charity event for the holidays. During this event, all fees collected from exchanges made with the links from our posts will be donated to the Tor Project. If you wanted to put your crypto to a good cause while doing business as usual, this is your chance!
Celebrating Holidays with Verge Currency
On Christmas day, we have also partnered with the Verge community to bring you a good old giveaway of $500 in XVG. Check out the Twitter post for the full rules and to enter!
1INCH Listed on ChangeHero
DEX aggregator 1InchExchange has just launched their own governance token — 1INCH (ERC-20). We are proud to announce that it is already available for exchange on ChangeHero. Get it while the supplies last (just kidding)!
Latest Cryptocurrency News
Bitcoin News
- Is it a new ATH we see on the graph just a couple of hours ago? It certainly is, BTC hit $24,596.34! What a Christmas present. This nice long green candle surely makes up for the scary-looking dip to $22,000 on Monday.
- The increased volatility can be attributed to options expiry on Friday, some analysts claim. Max pain (the difference between strike price and possible losses) is rather low, and it is considered to signal volatility. So, is Bitcoin going to crash again? There is a possibility, but for now the initiative belongs to the bulls.
Tech News
- As the market became more active, so did hackers. This week, EXMO exchange has suspended withdrawals. According to the preliminary estimations, the exchange lost about 6% of all the users’ assets it held. Just a friendly reminder: this would have never happened to ChangeHero, a non-custodial exchange platform;
- Don’t write off Ethereum 1.0 just yet! The Foundation team submitted EIP-1559 just this week. This update will introduce dynamic block size and fee burns to address some of Ethereum’s sorest issues: congestion and inflation respectively.
Business & Cryptocurrency News
- Last weekend, a Ledger database with customer data was put into the wild. This list includes emails, phone numbers and addresses of Ledger customers, and was leaked back in July. The incident was first reported by Alon Gal on Twitter. Needless to say, the company went full damage control mode. Nevertheless, the customer base voiced concerns over the rampant phishing attacks and possible assaults.
Cryptocurrency News on Adoption
- In October, the insider information from PayPal suggested the company was considering purchase of a crypto custodian BitGo. Only recently it became known that the plans fell through. Despite that, both companies perform pretty well in the crypto space on their own.
Regulation & Politics Cryptocurrency News
- It is not a secret that Ripple has been in a legal battle about the status of XRP for a while. However, the most decisive development in this battle has happened only on Monday. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the US regulator, filed a lawsuit against Ripple Labs, Inc., Christian Larsen and Brad Garlinghouse (ex- and current CEO of Ripple) on charges of unregistered securities offering. The news made XRP lose all November gains in a single day, and launched a wave of delistings. For now, it has only happened on less known exchanges, like Beaxy, OSL and CrossTower. The larger exchanges like Coinbase are considering their options, though. The delistings are understandable: for the time being, until the court hearings, the exchanges that have XRP listed are essentially breaching the US law.
- Italian Banking Association started testing the digital euro. The experiment will focus on infrastructure and programmability of the digital version of the currency. One of the reasons for kickstarting this project was rising competition from other private and national digital currencies, the source claims.
Twitter Crypto Digest
Yet another $/€/£ privileged Western journalist, blind to the fact that millions globally rely on Bitcoin to escape high inflation, extortionate remittances, frozen accounts, sanctions, financial isolation.
Maybe he’d read Nigerian journalism to learn?https://t.co/M3xAc8zAQ3 https://t.co/vMDUUjlwbp — Alex Gladstein (@gladstein) December 21, 2020
Alex Gladstein is Chief Strategy Officer of the Human Rights Foundation. In his words, Bitcoin is finding plenty of use cases in communities stricken by humanitarian crises. The examples he gave are BYSOL and Nigerian Feminist Coalition. Both NGOs used Bitcoin to help protestors circumvent the regime-imposed restrictions on their bank accounts and other sources of financing.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2020
Despite the fact that the Falcon 9 launch and test flights were happening at about the same time, Elon Musk found the time to shitpost on Twitter in between the coverage. He made some vaguely sceptical and some straight up confusing tweets about Bitcoin, thus summoning the entire Crypto Twitter to his mentions. We may not know what he meant by this meme, but we are sure he had some fun.
The #Bitcoin dominance chart rallies to 69% amid the selloff of #XRP.
Will history repeat itself with a top in December? This small video from @CryptoMichNL explains this theory. Full analysis:https://t.co/XEqBThDg1i pic.twitter.com/ASlSW4Pgrw — Cointelegraph Markets (@CointelegraphMT) December 23, 2020
According to Michael van de Poppe, altcoin holders can brace themselves for some action in December. So far, this rally did not look like the repetition of 2018 for altcoins, but the metrics like BTC dominance and total market capitalization suggest further growth of the whole sector, he says.
Influencer of the Week
Exchanges & XRP
You run a corner store. DEA comes in and says “ABC lemonade has THC in it and is an illegal narcotic.” You can either stop selling the lemonade or wait until the lemonade co goes to court and maybe wins or maybe loses. This is the sort of risk exchanges face. — Bruce Fenton (@brucefenton) December 23, 2020
Bruce Fenton is an active member of the crypto community , stockbroker and a cypherpunk. For the past week, he has been providing tremendous insight into the most resonant crypto news. Particularly, he took great care to explain what the SEC lawsuit of Ripple means for the whole crypto industry. If you are looking for educated opinions with a reasonable degree of being laid back — follow @brucefenton.
Top Coin Digest
At the moment of writing the crypto digest, the market’s dynamics for the last 7 days are the following:
- Total Market Cap: $661,042,321,329 (+2.25%);
- BTC Dominance: 68.69%.
7d Top Coin Change
What is happening to cryptocurrencies? This week the crypto market is looking all grown up, with some assets decoupled from Bitcoin. At the moment of writing the crypto digest, the 7-day change of the top currencies is the following:
- Bitcoin (BTC) $24,334.87 (↑5.62%);
- Ethereum (ETH) $628.70 (↓4.01%);
- XRP $0.371767 (↓36.83%);
- Litecoin (LTC) $120.70 (↑10.32%);
- Bitcoin Cash (BCH) $316.28 (↑1.18%);
- Binance Coin (BNB) $33.24 (↑7.45%);
- Chainlink (LINK) $11.72 (↓13.26%);
- Polkadot (DOT) $5.23 (↓2.60%)
- Stellar Lumens (XLM) $0.16201 (↓12.59%);
- Bitcoin SV (BSV) $167.90 (↓5.88%);
Gainers of the Week on ChangeHero
At the time of writing this crypto digest, the altcoins that saw the most gains are:
- Synthetix (SNX) $7.71 (↑30.17%);
- Dogecoin (DOGE) $0.004547 (↑20.43%);
- Litecoin (LTC) $120.70 (↑10.32%).
Key Takeaways
- On December, 25, Bitcoin has reached a new ATH: $24,596.34;
- Some of the assets on the market follow the growth (LTC, BNB) but others retrace (ETH, LINK) and even plunge because of other news (XRP, XLM);
- The largest story for the crypto market is the SEC lawsuit of Ripple, as it will demonstrate the degree of power the US government has on the market and establish a precedent for other assets of ambiguous status;
- Another huge story is connected to the Ledger database leak. The community is concerned as not only emails but phone numbers and physical addresses became public.
Summary
This has been quite an eventful week for both the crypto market and the industry. Some of the stories, like the Ledger leak or Ripple lawsuit will be intriguing to follow in the future.
Did you enjoy this week’s crypto digest? Stay tuned to our blog for more to come! We publish updates on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Telegram, so subscribe not to miss out!
The ChangeHero team wishes you a very happy Christmas and a prosperous new year!
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