Kategorie: Bitcoin News

Michael Saylor has revealed that MicroStrategy is working on enterprise applications of Lightning.

Michael Saylor, the chairman of MicroStrategy, has revealed that the software company is enterprise applications of Lightning. He revealed this while speaking to an audience at the Baltic Honeybadger conference in Riga, Latvia, over the weekend.

Saylor is responsible for transforming MicroStrategy into a cryptocurrency powerhouse, with the company now holding billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. 

The former CEO revealed that MicroStrategy’s developers are currently working on solutions that would enable them to onboard large numbers of people onto the Lightning network.

Lightning network is a payment network on top of Bitcoin, enabling faster and cheaper transactions on the blockchain. Saylor said Lightning is the most important thing in it the world of technology at the moment. He said;

“MicroStrategy has got some R&D projects going on right now where we’re working on enterprise applications of Lightning: enterprise Lightning wallet, enterprise Lightning servers, enterprise authentication.”

He added that the company is looking for solutions that would allow firms and companies to introduce Lightning to a hundred thousand employees every day. The solutions would also open Lightning wallets for 10 million customers overnight, Saylor added. 

The MicroStrategy chairman confirmed that the solutions are still in their early stages. He said;

“The advantage of Lightning is not just that you could scale up bitcoin for billions of people, or drive the transaction cost to nearly nothing, but also, the ethos of bitcoin is to go very carefully and not move fast on the base layer without the universal consensus, but in Lightning, you can move much more aggressively developing functionality and take more risks with the applications than you can with the underlying bitcoin layer.”

 Lightning protocol makes it possible for users to open payment channels with each other and exchange multiple transactions before settling them on-chain. Thus, minimising the transaction fees and confirmation time. 

MicroStrategy currently holds 129,699 BTC, worth about $2.58 billion at current prices, making it one of the largest Bitcoin holders in the world. 

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Bitcoin continues to trade above $20k per coin but could decline soon if the broader market underperforms further.

Bitcoin, the world’s leading cryptocurrency, is currently trading at around $20,200 per coin. This comes after failing to surge past the $21k resistance level on Tuesday despite adding more than 3% to its value.

The broader cryptocurrency market has retraced after increasing its value by more than 4% yesterday. So far today, the crypto market has lost less than 1% of its value, with the total market cap now around $990 billion.

After failing to move past the $21k resistance level, Bitcoin is down by 1% in the last 24 hours. If the market continues to underperform, Bitcoin could drop below the $20k psychological level for the second time in a week.

Key levels to watch

The BTC/USD 4-hour chart is bearish as Bitcoin has been underperforming over the last 24 hours. The technical indicators show that Bitcoin is retracing after improving its performance yesterday.

The MACD line dropped into the negative zone on August 25th and has remained there ever since. Thus, indicating strong bearish momentum for Bitcoin.

The 14-day relative strength index of 50 shows that Bitcoin could head down into the oversold region if the bearish momentum continues. 

At press time, BTC is trading at $20,293 per coin. If the bearish trend continues, BTC could drop towards the $19,588 support level before the end of the day. 

Unless the bearish momentum thickens, BTC should maintain its position above the $18,950 support level in the short term.

However, the bearish grip is not tight, and the bulls might still regain control of the market. If that happens, BTC could move past the first major resistance level at $21,059. 

Unless there is an extended bullish performance, the second major resistance level at $22,722 should cap further upward movement in the short term. 

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The United States Federal Reserve has been hiking interest rates in recent months, and Bitfury’s CEO believes it is suppressing Bitcoin’s price. 

Bitfury CEO Brian Brooks told CNBC in a recent interview that the Federal Reserve’s inflation fight is bad for Bitcoin in the short term.’

The United States and other top economies in the world are dealing with heightened inflation as the economic impacts of Covid-19 continue to bite harder. 

To fight inflation, the Fed has been hiking interest rates in recent months, and that has affected the broader financial markets, Bitcoin included. Brooks told CNBC,

“We have talked about the idea that bitcoin is an inflation hedge. The more the market expects tough policy from the Fed, the more people think the Fed is going to keep an aggressive posture, and that would tend to harm Bitcoin.”

Since the start of 2022, the United States Fed has implemented a policy of aggressive financial tightening. The Fed has increased the cost of borrowing via interest rates.

At the start of the year, the interest rates were close to zero. However, the Fed increased interest rates by 0.25% in March, another 0.50% in May, 0.75% in June and 0.75% in July. So far, the interest rates have gone up by 2.25% since the start of 2022. 

This has affected the financial markets, including cryptocurrencies. The total cryptocurrency market cap has dropped from the all-time high of $3 trillion to currently stand around $1 trillion.

Bitcoin has lost more than 65% of its value over the past nine months. After reaching an all-time high of $69k in November 2021, Bitcoin is struggling to maintain its price above $20k.

Brian Brooks discussed his annoyance with how the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is handling regulation in the crypto space. He said;

“Regulation does not mean suing people, and the approach the SEC has had for the last couple of years has been to not tell anybody what the rules are in advance but to sue people after they’ve launched a project, started a company, or listed a token, and then caused people to infer what the rules were later. That’s not a good thing, and so at some point, congress and the regulators need to get serious about telling people, ‘what is the speed limit on the crypto highway?’”

The US SEC has rejected numerous spot Bitcoin ETF proposals over the past few years. 

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• CME says there’s growing demand for non-USD denominated crypto derivatives products. 
• The company also plans to launch options on Ethereum futures on 12 September. 

Derivatives marketplace CME Group has announced its Euro-denominated Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) futures contracts are now live.

On Monday, August 29, 2022, the company officially unveiled two euro-denominated crypto futures contracts, noting that the products “will be listed on and subject to the rules of CME.”

Now live: euro-denominated Bitcoin and Ether futures. Efficiently manage bitcoin and ether exposure in the underlying currency of your choice. https://t.co/Mxfk4ajee9 pic.twitter.com/A5BZ53RAYL

— CME Group (@CMEGroup) August 29, 2022

Bitcoin Euro and Ether Euro futures contracts

As announced earlier this month, Bitcoin Euro will be sized at 5 BTC and the Ether Euro contract at 50 ether. The contracts are cash settled, and will be based on the CME CF Bitcoin-Euro Reference Rate as well as the CME CF Ether-Euro Reference Rate, the company noted in the announcement.

“Our new Bitcoin Euro and Ether Euro futures will provide institutional clients, both within and outside the US, with more precise and regulated tools to trade and hedge exposure to the two largest cryptocurrencies by market cap” said Tim McCourt, the Global Head of Equity and FX Products at CME Group.

He noted that the two contracts’ offering comes after a strong showing, both in terms of overall growth and liquidity, for the derivatives giant’s US dollar-denominated bitcoin and ether contracts.

CME Group is unveiling these futures products as the crypto market navigates a crypto winter that has decimated crypto prices. However, demand for properly regulated non-USD crypto derivatives remains high.

The provider also plans to launch an options contract on Ether (ETH) futures. The contract, sized at 50 ether, will be rolled out on 12 September, with this being subject to regulatory review.

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• Crypto winter has seen crypto prices fall to new cycle lows
• Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says its difficult to predict markets, but foresees the crypto market recovery taking a year or more.
• Armstrong hints at Coinbase being prepared for the down cycle after going through four such cycles before.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong believes recovery from the crypto bear market will take 12 to 18 months, but emphasised that the downturn as a whole is not a new phenomenon to the industry.

Armstrong was speaking to CNBC’s Kate Rooney in an interview published on Tuesday.

Crypto winter could last 12-18 months

Recent events, including the collapse of multiple crypto companies, means the industry remains in a bear cycle. For Coinbase, the downturn has impacted its shares and company revenue. But Armstrong is bullish on the sector and for the crypto exchange.

“Obviously we are in a bit of a down cycle here, but it’s nothing unusual for us,” he told Rooney, noting that what’s happening is what Coinbase has gone through before.

According to him, the company has seen four such down cycles in the past 10 years since its launch, with 2022 only different in the sense that the downturn has coincided with “the broader micro environment.”

The past few months have seen crypto markets brutalised, with leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin falling from its perch above $69,000 in November to below the previous bull market cycle high of $20,000. 

The broader crypto market, with Ethereum also losing most of the bull cycle gains, saw over $2 trillion in market cap value wiped off.

On how long he sees the down cycle lasting, he says it’s likely to be 12 to 18 months. However, although he foresees a recovery within this period, he warns that the market might have to “plan for it being longer than that.”

“That’s how we think about it, and we don’t try to get too cute predicting the future,” he added.

He also talked about his company’s plans to cut costs, further measures to the layoffs it undertook in June. As for shifting from dependence on trading fees, the company is looking to build its business around more subscription and service-based revenue generation.

The key is to have up to 50% of the revenue come from the above models, he said.

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