Tesla began accepting Dogecoin in an online store, two lone miners included blocks in the bitcoin blockchain, the head of the RF Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin proposed to identify the owners of cryptocurrencies and other events of the outgoing week.
The price of bitcoin fell below $40,000
On January 10, the price of bitcoin dropped to $39,650 (on the Binance exchange). The subsequent buyout allowed the quote to rise above $44,000. However, digital gold failed to gain a foothold above this mark.
At the time of writing, the first cryptocurrency is trading near $43,400.
Against the background of a partial recovery of bitcoin quotes, all digital assets from the top 10 by market capitalization closed the week in the green zone. Terra (+28%), Cardano (+19%), Binance Coin (+16%) and Polkadot (+16%) showed the best dynamics.
According to the CoinCodex service, the token of the cross-chain protocol Multichain (formerly Anyswap) ANY has risen in price most of all among digital assets over the week. Its price has increased by 71%. The project no longer supports the asset, however, holders can convert it into a new native MULTI token.
The algorithmic token of the Olympus v2 project fell in price more strongly than others. OHM price down 31%.
The total capitalization of the cryptocurrency market amounted to $2.2 trillion. The bitcoin dominance index dropped to 37.1%.
The first bitcoin transaction turned 13 years old
On January 12, 2009, the creator of bitcoin under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto made the first cryptocurrency transaction by sending 10 BTC to cryptographer Hal Finney.
Elon Musk announced the start of sales of Tesla merchandise for Dogecoin
Tesla has begun selling certain goods for Dogecoin (DOGE). Some products on the website of the manufacturer of electric cars can only be purchased for cryptocurrency. At this stage, buyers are not given the opportunity to choose the form of payment.
The support subsite states that the company only accepts DOGE payments. Tesla does not support other digital assets and emphasizes that senders of incorrect transfers will lose their money.
Against this background, Dogecoin has risen in price by 30% at the moment, to $0.214. A day before the announcement of Tesla, an unknown user purchased 8 million DOGE for $1.4 million.
Single miners received 6.25 BTC for finding a block
On January 11, an unknown bitcoin miner with a hardware capacity of 126 TH/s included block 718,124 in the blockchain. This was reported by the administrator of the CKPool pool to which the devices are connected. The probability of finding a block at the current hash rate was 0.000073%.
On January 13, history repeated itself with another CKPool user. He included block 718,379 on the Bitcoin blockchain with a hardware capacity of 116 TH/s. It is noteworthy that the miner used the service for only two days.
The RF IC called for mandatory identification of cryptocurrency owners
Cryptocurrency owners should not remain anonymous due to the risks of using such assets for criminal purposes. This was stated by the head of the Investigative Committee of Russia Alexander Bastrykin.
At the same time, the National Financial Association proposed to reconsider the issue of a total ban on Russian investments in digital assets.
Tether blocked three Ethereum addresses with $160 million in assets
Tether has blacklisted three addresses on the Ethereum blockchain at the request of law enforcement. The total value of USDT stablecoin assets on them exceeded $160 million – it is impossible to transfer funds from these wallets.
Tens of thousands of bitcoins from the BTC-e exchange were sent to Coinbase on the day of Vinnik's arrest
An unknown person withdrew 66,143 BTC from the hot wallet of the BTC-e cryptocurrency exchange to the Coinbase trading platform address. Sergey Mendeleev, CEO of Indefibank, announced this.
The transaction was carried out on July 25, 2017, the day of the arrest of the alleged BTC-e co-owner Alexander Vinnik. According to Mendeleev’s investigation, the amount was distributed from the Coinbase wallet to thousands of wallets using a pre-written script.
NEAR Protocol and SEBA Bank raised funding in new investment rounds
< p>On January 13, the NEAR Protocol native token (NEAR) hit a new all-time high as the project team announced a new $150 million funding round led by venture capital fund Three Arrow Capital. The project was also supported by Andreessen Horowitz, Alameda Research, Dragonfly Capital and other investors.
About raising $120 million in a Series C funding round this week, the licensed cryptocurrency bank SEBA from Switzerland also announced.
Jack Dorsey's company will create a team to develop a bitcoin miner
Block (formerly Square) by Jack Dorsey has opened positions on the team to develop a “next generation” ASIC miner and a hardware wallet “for the next 100 million bitcoin users.”
This week, Dorsey also announced the creation of a protection fund bitcoin developers in lawsuits. The organization is ready to provide lawyers, develop defense strategies and cover legal costs so that they can continue their work.
A group of American banks created a consortium to issue a stablecoin
The USDF Consortium, a group of FDIC-insured financial institutions in the United States, has announced plans to create a network of banks to promote the USDF stablecoin issued by its members.
The consortium has set a goal to solve the problem of opaque reserves of non-banking institutions like Tether. Provenance blockchain will be used in the implementation of the “banking alternative”.
Visa announced the readiness of small businesses to integrate crypto payments
In 2022, almost a quarter of small merchants in nine countries plan to accept digital currencies as a form of payment. This comes from a Visa survey of 2,250 small business owners in Brazil, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Russia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.
At the same time, Visa is working with ConsenSys on infrastructure to help central banks and financial institutions create user-friendly services on top of CBDC networks.
Vitalik Buterin asked followers about an alternative to Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin conducted a poll on his Twitter in which he asked about the most popular currency in 2035, with the exception of Ethereum.
“You wake up in 2035 and 80% of the world's transactions and savings are in one currency, and that's not ETH. What do you think the currency will be?” he wrote.
The winner of the vote was Cardano. The company behind the development of the latter, IOHK, this week also spoke about the plans for the development of the project in 2022.
