Kategorie: Crypto Markets

• Indonesia is planning to launch a national cryptocurrency exchange in 2023.

• The government will transfer regulatory powers over such assets to the Financial Services Authority soon.

• The country’s central bank is also working on launching its digital currency (CBDC).

Indonesia to launch a national crypto exchange

Indonesia plans to establish a national cryptocurrency exchange before the end of the year, according to a recent report by Bloomberg. 

Bloomberg revealed that the government would launch the cryptocurrency exchange before it shifts regulatory powers over such assets to the Financial Services Authority, from a commodities agency.

This latest cryptocurrency news would be a huge development for the crypto industry in Indonesia. At the moment, crypto assets in the country are traded alongside commodity contracts and are regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Regulatory Agency, known as Bappebti.

Bappebti acting head Didid Noordiatmoko revealed earlier today that as part of a broader financial sector reform, the FSA would be given regulatory power over the assets over the next two years, during which time the exchange would be established. 

Indonesia continues to support crypto growth

Indonesia is one of the countries in the world with a certain level of regulatory clarity in terms of cryptocurrency. 

The country’s apex bank issued a white paper discussing its digital currency. The central bank digital currency (CBDC) is currently in development. However, there is no timeline for its launch yet. 

Indonesia also passed a law recognising cryptocurrency and digital assets as regulated financial securities in the country. 

The positive stance regarding cryptocurrencies comes after the Bank of Indonesia banned the use of cryptos for payments in the country in 2021. 

At the moment, there are 383 cryptocurrencies and 10 local coins that can be traded in Indonesia. The Bappebti is also reviewing another 151 assets and 10 coins in a bid to make the assets available to local investors. 

The post Indonesia intends to launch its own cryptocurrency exchange appeared first on CoinJournal.

• Bonk is a meme coin launched on Solana on Christmas Day
• It has surged close to 2,500%
• Solana, meanwhile, has collapsed following associations with Bankman-Fried and top projects fleeing the blockchain
• Our Analyst writes that this is not the climate for memecoin hysteria

 

Woah, this is a throwback. Twitter is alive this week with talk of Bonk, a doggy token on the Solana blockchain. There is something a little nostalgic in talking about a good old-fashioned meme token. All we need is a COVID mask and some Elon Musk tweets, and we would be squarely back in 2020.

The Shiba-Inu themed token was issued on Christmas Day, and has risen close to 2,500% since. The price rise in the last hour as I write this is 150%.

Of course, the intriguing thing here is that the token has been launched on Solana, which has been struggling mightily over the last few months. I wrote a deep dive only yesterday analysing the demise of Solana, with multiple top projects fleeing the blockchain, repeated outages causing massive problems, and its ominous association with Sam Bankman-Fried pulling down the price.

But while it is still down hugely, Solana has bounced back a little in conjunction with this surge for Bonk. It jumped back above $13 Tuesday having dipped as low as $8 last week. Looking at Coinglass data, there has been close to $7 million of short positions liquidated, the largest amount since FTX collapsed in November.

The Layer 1 seems to be benefiting from the surge in interest for Bonk, which announced a large airdrop of 50% of its supply to drive up hype around the coin. It has worked – Bonk now has a market cap of $120 million and is following the meme coin playbook perfectly.

Why is Bonk rising?

Like any meme coin, it is difficult to ascertain how exactly bonk has pulled this off. It really comes down to marketing and luck. A number of Solana projects have even integrated Bonk as payment tokens, while $BONK has been trending incessantly on Twitter.

It all amounts to the same hysteria we saw over the last couple of years. As everybody knows by now, meme coins are nothing but a gamble. But what makes this so unusual is that the rise is occurring not only at a bearish juncture for Solana, but for the market as a whole.

The past year has seen interest rates hiked and liquidity pulled from the market, with risk assets collapsing. There is nothing further out on the risk spectrum than meme coins, and they have hence cratered as a result.

What next for Bonk?

All I will say to any investor (gambler) is that Bonk is a very dangerous game, like any meme coin. There is zero utility here and that means that in the long run, the coin is likely to drop to zero.

Of course, everybody knows that anyway, and these are memes we are talking about. But in the current tight monetary policy environment, the hysteria of the pandemic, where stimulus-cheque-wielding retail investors were pumping everything within sight, is long gone. This is not the climate for gambles like meme coins, and that is without even mentioning the carnage with Solana.  

The post Why is BONK going up? Be careful of doggy tokens, we have seen this movie before appeared first on CoinJournal.

• Lido has overtaken MakerDAO in TVL in DeFi by $0.05 billion.
• At press time, Lido had $5.96b DeFi TVL.
• Lido seems to be benefitting from Ethereum’s merge upgrade.

At press time, Lido which specializes in liquid staking had a total value staked of $5.96 billion which is $0.05 billion higher than MakerDAO’s TVL of $5.91 billion according to Defillama. MakerDao has had the largest DeFi TVL for many years and the overtaking means Lido is gaining ground despite the ongoing crypto winter.

Besides, the increasing staked digital assets, the price of LDO, Lido DAO’s native token, has been on a consistent rise having gained over 18% in the past 7 days. It had surged by 14.67% in the past 24 hours at press time.

The rise of interest in Lido among decentralized finance participants is highly thought to be due to the increased demand for Ether staking solutions since Ethereum shifted to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism after the merge upgrade in September 2022.

Digital assets staked on Lido

According to Lido Finance’s website as of January 2023, Ether (ETH) was the largest staked digital asset with over $5.86 billion worth of staked ETH tokens. Solana follows closely with over $26.087 million worth of staked SOL tokens.

The other notables tokens staked on Lido include Polygon’s MATIC with over $45.093 million worth of staked MATIC tokens, Polkadot’s DOT with over $11.395 million worth of staked DOT tokens, and Kusama’s KSM with over $2.238 million worth of staked KSM tokens.

No 32 ETH min. needed to stake Ether on Lido

Lido’s model allows users to access Ethereum staking without having to commit the traditional minimum of 32 ETH to be allowed to stake Ether. This has greatly increased the number of people choosing to stake ETH on Lido compared to other DeFi staking platforms.

According to Lido’s staking model, users stake any amount of tokens including Ether and access daily staking rewards. In addition to the daily staking rewards, the users also receive liquid stTokens that can be used across DeFi to compound more to the daily staked rewards.

The post Lido now has the highest TVL in DeFi after overtaking MakerDAO appeared first on CoinJournal.

• BitMEX and Kraken crypto exchanges received highest scores for their proof of reserves attestations.

• Binance ranked lower for its ‘incomplete’ PoR among other metrics.
• Nic Carter says the PoR momentum is good for crypto and a “silver lining” out of the FTX chaos.

BitMEX and Kraken score highly in an assessment of proof-of-reserves attestations by major crypto exchanges. 

That’s according Nic Carter, one of the most popular Bitcoin advocates out there.

In a Medium article highlighting the score list and rankings of some of the leading crypto trading platforms, Carter points out the latest PoR results and offers insight into why some of the exchanges just getting to publish their cryptographic proof of reserves may still have a lot of work to offer the assurances the market seeks.

While Kraken and BitMEX rank highest, the world’s largest crypto platform Binance posts a relatively low score. But according to the crypto analyst, the move to have PoRs is undeniably one in the right direction. He sees the momentum as a good signal for cryptocurrencies, terming it “a genuine silver lining from the FTX debacle.”

“We may well yet emerge from this crisis with a major step forward in exchange credibility,” he wrote in his ‘The Status of Proof of Reserve as of Year End 2022’.

BitMEX, Kraken rank higher on various metrics

Looking at crypto exchange reserves attestations via metrics such as assets for which the platform provided the attestation, estimates of deposits covered and disclosure of liabilities, BitMEX scored the highest with 5 out of 6.

Crypto platform Kraken was second, while Deribit, KuCoin and OKX ranked third to fifth in that order.

Exchange proof of reserves scores and ranking. Source: Nic Carter on MediumWhile some platforms scored highly Binance’s proof of reserves was mostly ‘incomplete’ and thus the exchange scored poorly.  In a comment on this, Carter wrote:

“Binance’s first PoR doesn’t grant strong assurances. It only covers Bitcoin, which only represents 16.5% of their client assets. It does allow individual users to verify their inclusion in the liability set but does not contain the entire liability list, making it hard for a third party to verify the procedure.”

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