It was another bullish week for the crypto market, mostly led by Ethereum (ether) as a major upgrade to the network was implemented with the London hard fork (BTC then followed in a late week rally). The Ethereum upgrade was designed to mostly fix issues related to network congestion and high transaction (gas) fees - in part by destroying or “burning” ether coins and changing the way transaction fees work so that they are more predictable. Ultimately the new burning mechanism will reduce the circulating supply of ether, increasing scarcity that should make the digital asset more valuable in the long run. As CNBC reported, “If you think of Ethereum like a highway, London is adding a few lanes to tamp down traffic and is standardizing toll prices.”
Another top cryptocurrency is also set to make a major network upgrade in the coming weeks - ADA (Cardano). The Alonzo hard fork will allow for the implementation of smart contracts and decentralized applications, which will most likely spark massive activity on the network in the DeFi space (decentralized finance). As one analyst noted, “[Cardano’s] upcoming smart contract update could become one of the most important developments [the crypto industry] has seen to date.” Now that’s a bullish statement!
Below are some of the other crypto news stories that Coinpad has been monitoring over the past week, followed by the coins that we have been eyeing or buying over the week. But first, our disclaimer needs to be noted: the information provided here, as well as on our website (coinpad.io), does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, trading advice, or any other sort of advice and you should not treat any of the content as such. Do your own research and invest at your own risk!
Weekly news wrap
It seems every week there are more and more stories about crypto adoption (an important trend to track in crypto as obviously this drives up demand). Here’s a select few from this past week, starting with an interesting one on adoption numbers:
Global Cryptocurrency Adoption Doubled Since January Reaching 221 Million Users
Paypal Hiring Over 100 Crypto Positions as Global Cryptocurrency Adoption Rises
Civic engagement and crypto: Miami unveils its own digital coin
New bill in Ukraine to allow payments in cryptocurrency
JPMorgan Grants Institutional Investors Access to Six Cryptocurrency Funds: Report
Ready to deploy? Amazon’s Bitcoin acceptance can prime a payments future
Here’s some more on Ethereum after the London hard fork:
Ethereum Estimated To Become Deflationary: Here's When And How Much
EIP-1559 in Motion: $10M ETH Destroyed Since London Launch
Here’s what traders expect now that Ethereum price is over $3,000
There’s been a lot happening on the regulatory and tax front in the United States, although the market appears to be shrugging it off as of late. Here is the latest:
White House supports only minor changes to crypto tax proposal
How cryptocurrency became a powerful force in Washington
And this last one is for our friends in Cambodia:
Coinpad’s plays:
Like last week, we have been accumulating Cardano (ADA) and Ergo (ERG). The latter we view as one of crypto’s most promising “hidden-gems”. Earlier this week it was listed on Kucoin, which resulted in a major spike of volume and certainly played a role in the coin’s 50% plus gain over the week. Ergo is a revolutionary UTXO-based blockchain protocol built to be an efficient and secure financial contracts platform with innovative new DeFi functionality. In our assessment, Ergo stands out as unique project trying to solve the many problems in Bitcoin's blockchain regarding security and scalability and creating an efficient and secure way to implement financial contracts. As we accumulate ERG, we are also earning over 80% APY in recent days by providing liquidity in the ERG-USDT liquidity pool on coinex.com. Normally the APY in this pool is between 30-40%, yet a huge spike in volume has resulted in tremendous APY spikes over the last few days (APY is based on trading volume).
We also started a small investment in C98, the native token of the new DeFi solutions platform Coin98. The developers are based in Vietnam and we feel this could gain a lot of traction in the booming DeFi market in this tech-savvy country, as well as elsewhere in Southeast Asia. We also like the passive income earning aspect of the coin as we are currently pooling it with BNB on a yield farm on PancakeSwap that is yielding around 100% APY.
While we focus our altcoin portfolio on high quality projects that we view as being undervalued and / or having great growth potential, we also dedicate a small amount of investment capital each week to some “moonshot” coins - high risk plays that we feel are worth putting some money into as the upside potential could be massive. This week’s moonshot play is pornrocket, the coin governing a decentralized adult social platform built on blockchain. The project aims to combine the likes of PornHub and OnlyFans onto a secure blockchain, free from the usual issues surrounding traditional online adult entertainment sites. We just love the sound of that.
That’s all for this week folks, if you found our information helpful and you have not already subscribed to our site, please head over to coinpad.io (registration is free) and / or follow us on Twitter @coinpadhome