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New $1M ad campaign against Bitcoin mining after Ethereum’s Merge

  • Climate groups want Bitcoin to follow Ethereum into switching from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism.
  • The groups have announced a new $1 million ad campaign targeted at pressuring Bitcoin and companies like Fidelity, PayPal and Jack Dorsey’s Block to help push the agenda.
  • Bitcoiners already scoffed at the calls when the campaign “Change the Code, Not the Climate” first launched in March.

It was bound to happen and so it has.

A new campaign is underway targeting Bitcoin’s energy use as a proof-of-work (PoW) network. The debate is getting new impetus after Ethereum finally launched its software upgrade via the Merge to become a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain.

And as Ethereum cuts its energy consumption by 99.95%, which Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin confirmed will reduce global consumption by 0.2%, a host of environmental groups want Bitcoin to follow suit.

Bitcoin is an ‘outlier’, group claims

A statement published on Thursday by the Environmental Working Group, says a $1 million ad campaign has been launched to push for a rethink of Bitcoin’s “outmoded” PoW consensus mechanism.

Apart from online advertisements, the initiative through Greenpeace is petitioning Fidelity Investments – which recently added Bitcoin to its clients’ retirement (401(k)) accounts – to push for a PoW-to-PoS transition for BTC. Other players mentioned in the release are PayPal and Jack Dorsey’s Block (formerly Square Inc.).

“Change the Code, Not the Climate” director Michael Brune said Bitcoin needs to look at the climate crisis and take its responsibility. He noted:

“With fires raging around the world and historic floods destroying lives and livelihoods, state and federal leaders and corporate executives are racing to decarbonize as quickly as possible. Ethereum has shown it’s possible to switch to an energy-efficient protocol with far less climate, air and water pollution. Other cryptocurrency protocols have operated on efficient consensus mechanisms for years. Bitcoin has become the outlier, defiantly refusing to accept its climate responsibility.“

According to the “Change the Code, Not the Climate” group, discussions involving Congress and the Biden administration are taking place as they try to push the campaign goal.

Bitcoiners already put it to the group after the $5 million anti BTC campaign’s launch in March that no such thing will happen. In fact, people pointed to Bitcoin mining already going green across the globe. 

Darin Feinstein, the co-founder of blockchain-focused firm Core Scientific, explained why Greenpeace should have been fighting for Bitcoin and not against it. His tweet in March: 

So, will Ethereum’s merge give the “Change the Code, Not the Climate” campaign the thrust it hopes to get to make “the change” happen? .

The post New $1M ad campaign against Bitcoin mining after Ethereum’s Merge appeared first on CoinJournal.

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Broadridge partners with Coinbase to offer integrated trading solution

Despite the crypto winter, institutional investors have largely been unfazed. And the increased demand is seeing more mainstream companies offer products and solutions tailored for institutional clients.

Broadridge Financial Solutions, a leading fintech provider with over $5 billion in revenue and whose infrastructure and platforms help power over $9 trillion in daily trading across equities and fixed income, has partnered cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase to offer an integrated trading solution.

Institutional adoption of crypto

The collaboration will help Broadridge boost access to crypto trading and offer greater liquidity for institutional clients looking to benefit from opportunities in crypto, the companies said in a press release.

In particular, the partnership seeks to offer interoperability between the fintech firm’s NYFIX order-routing network and Coinbase Prime.

According to the firms, buy-side traders will be able to leverage the integrated solution to tap into crypto liquidity on Coinbase, allowing them to trade directly from their order management system (OMS).

The solution will initially be available to US domestic clients before being rolled out to other regions subject to regulatory approval.

“Despite short-term cycles, momentum in institutional adoption is trending one way – toward more exploration and more interest,” Coinbase VP of Institutional Products Greg Tusar noted in a statement.

He added that the use of NYFIX’s order-routing network will help lower barriers to adoption of crypto as an asset class, with buy-side traders benefitting from the “deep, multi-venue crypto liquidity.”

Coinbase Prime’s offering of an institutional-grade trading platform, custody and prime brokerage capabilities will be key to the two firms’ goals, the news release added.

“Now, through Coinbase’s deep access to liquidity and NYFIX’s extensive market reach, we can integrate more than two thousand clients to bring crypto trading to the institutional market,” said Ray Tierney, President of Broadridge Trading and Connectivity Solutions.  

Recently, Coinbase partnered with the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock to offer crypto trading to clients. Investment giants Fidelity, Charles Schwab and Citadel Securities also made a massive move with the launch of a crypto exchange.

The post Broadridge partners with Coinbase to offer integrated trading solution appeared first on CoinJournal.

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Ethereum miners flock to Ethereum Classic and elsewhere, in wake of Merge

One of the most covered criticisms of Ethereum since its creation in 2015 has been its mammoth energy usage.

While not as heavy as Bitcoin, it nonetheless consumes 0.2% of the world’s electricity, and is responsible for between 20% and 39% of cryptocurrency’s electricity consumption as a whole (Bitcoin claims between 60% and 70%).

Now – and going forward – that energy consumption has fallen 99.95% following the successful completion of the Merge. It’s an incredible achievement.

What is the Ethereum PoW token?

Miners will thus have to find another coin to mine. However, some are clinging to hope that a fork of Ethereum will maintain the Proof-of-Work validation consensus which will allow them to continue to mine.  

The PoW token will be received via airdrop to holders of Ethereum, with its price varying over the last few days quite drastically. Peaking as high as $60, it currently trades at $18.

How does Ethereum mining work?

Ethereum miners have to date used powerful computers known as ASICs to validate transactions. With staking, this is no longer necessary, meaning their livelihoods are in question. Many have swapped to other cryptos in order to continue to mine, and the effect of this can be seen in the hash rate of these other cryptos.

Hash rate is a measure of the computing power on a network, and is a key security indicator – the higher the hash rate, the higher the security, as more miners have to verify transactions. For Bitcoin, the hash rate hit an all-time high last week. 

Let’s zoom in on this year, which may be more indicative.

This shows the hash rate opened the year at around 170 EH/s, yet is now north of 200 EH/s (and hit 280 EH/s earlier this week). This is despite the price of Bitcoin plummeting from the mid $40K’s to below $20,000.

Ethereum Classic

More interestingly, however, is the uptick in hash rate seen on Ethereum Classic. This has been drastic, rising from around 50 TH/s last week to over 300 TH/s. This points towards Ethereum miners flipping over to the Classic variant with their equipment – a much easier shift than would be required to move to Bitcoin.

Indeed, other coins have seen upticks in hash rate as well – Monero, Ravencoin, Ergo, to name a few.

For the miners that have not flipped to alternatives, they will hold out hope that the Ethereum PoW alternative takes hold. Otherwise, they’ll be left with expensive ASICs and no real use case, now that Ethereum is Proof-of-Stake and no longer generating miner revenue.

The post Ethereum miners flock to Ethereum Classic and elsewhere, in wake of Merge appeared first on CoinJournal.

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Is it safe to buy Firo after crossing an important resistance level?

Firo price rose to the highest level since July 16 of this year as demand for the coin rose. It jumped by more than 28%, bringing its total market cap to over $43 million and its diluted cap to more than $80 million. Other privacy-focused coins also did well.

What is Firo and why did it rise?

Cryptocurrencies like BTC and LTC were created to facilitate transactions in an anonymous way. However, since Bitcoin works on a public ledger, its role as a privacy coin has been diminished since authorities can easily track transactions.

Firo is one of the few privacy tokens in existence today. Others are Monero, Dash, and Decred. These coins work by ensuring that no one can track transactions. They achieve that by automatically changing a user’s address as the transaction is being implemented. 

Investors have been focused on the privacy sector in the past few months as authorities got more concerned about the industry. Their most recent action was to sanction Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixer that promoted privacy when using popular coins like ETH and BTC.

Firo is a privacy cryptocurrency that works using the proprietary technology known as Lelantum. This technology allows users to burn coins or destroy them so that they stop existing. After doing that, users can then redeem them at a later date for coins that do not have a previous history. 

Redeeming involves giving them zero-knowledge proof that you previously burned coins without showing those that you burnt.

Firo price has risen in the past few days even after a major development in the privacy token industry. Last week, Huobi, one of the biggest companies in the industry, said that it would delist the coin together with other privacy tokens. The company said that this delisting was done in order to comply with regulations. 

It is also rising as demand for proof-of-work cryptocurrencies following the success of Ethereum merge. Indeed, its hash rat has risen to the highest level in a few days.

Firo price prediction

The daily chart shows that Firo price has been in a strong bullish trend in the past few days. It has managed to move from the year-to-date low of $1.1715 to about $4. Along the way, the coin jumped above the 25-day and 50-day moving averages while the Relative Strength Index (RSI) has moved close to the overbought level. It also crossed the important resistance point at $3.42.

Therefore, Firo seems to have momentum, meaning that the coin will likely continue rising as buyers target the next key resistance level at $5.

Where to buy Firo now 

Binance

Binance is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. It is better suited to more experienced investors and it offers a large number of cryptocurrencies to choose from, at over 600. Binance is also known for having low trading fees and a multiple of trading options that its users can benefit from, such as; peer-to-peer trading, margin trading and spot trading.

Buy FIRO with Binance today

Wazirx

WazirX is India’s largest crypto exchange. Started in 2018, WazirX has grown to be the most trusted exchange in the Indian crypto market. It is a part of the binance group, serving users in 180 countries.

Buy FIRO with Wazirx today

The post Is it safe to buy Firo after crossing an important resistance level? appeared first on CoinJournal.