It was another bullish week for the crypto market, particularly for a number of altcoins. The altcoin surge was led by Cardano (ADA) and XRP, both gaining over 50% for the week. For Cardano, the main catalyst driving price movement was the announcement that the much anticipated Alonzo hard fork (or network upgrade) will occur on September 12. This long-anticipated upgrade will allow for the implementation of smart contracts and decentralized applications, which will spark massive activity on the network in the DeFi space (decentralized finance). In other words, this upgrade will position Cardano as the number one competitor to Ethereum. Coinpad views the upcoming Cardano upgrade to be among the most influential event to happen in the crypto world this year.
Here is a video explaining the latest on Cardano developments by the project’s founder Charles Hoskinson (who was also a co-founder of Ethereum):
Below are some of the other top 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
There was a bold and intriguing hack on the DeFi protocol PolyNetwork in which the perpetrator(s) stole more than $600 million worth of investor’s crypto - easily making it the largest DeFi hack to date. This crypto doom story, however, has a rosy and intriguing twist: the hacker then began returning the funds and has since returned all but 33 million. The person claiming to be responsible for the hack says they never meant to keep the stolen proceeds and did it “for fun” and to expose a vulnerability (the hacker said this in messages embedded within Ethereum transactions sent from the account controlled by the hacker). Our favorite quote from this, however, is that in addition to doing the heist ‘for fun”, the hacker also said he did it “because cross-chain hacking is hot.” Who ever knew? Just another day in crypto-land…
For more on the story, see these links:
Nearly all of the $600 million stolen in a huge crypto heist has been returned — but there’s a catch
The $600M PolyNetwork Hack: What Exactly Happened and What Investors Should Be Aware of
Here are a couple of interesting stories on crypto adoption (an important trend to track in crypto as obviously this drives up demand).
These Are the Five Countries Paving the Way for Crypto Adoption, According to Binance
Nearly 30% of Canadians Are Cryptocurrency Investors: Survey
Vietnam leads crypto adoption in Finder's 27-country survey
55% of the world’s top 100 banks reportedly have crypto and blockchain exposure
Wealth managers gain exposure to Bitcoin via Grayscale, according to new SEC filings
And finally, The Infrastructure bill passes US Senate, without clarification on crypto
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” and is set to release a decentralized exchange called ErgoDEX, likely in the coming weeks. The DEX will be the first cross-chain DEX on top of Ergo and Cardano blockchains and could emerge as the Uniswap of Cardano. Another Cardano DEX play we are eyeing (and buying) is ADAX. We believe that any successful DEX on th Cardano network will be bound for big things, thus we are getting in early on several of them (i.e. buying the native tokens of the DEX’s, like ADAX and ERG for ErgoDex). For more on the ErgoDEX see this recent article and for more on ADAX check out this article.
In last week’s crypto weekly, we noted that we started a small investment in C98, the native token of the new DeFi solutions platform Coin98. The coin has been on a nice weekend run, shooting up over 30% since Friday. We’ve also been checking out their mobile wallet, which is sleek, easy to use, and allows you to store multi-chain assets.
The developers of Coin98 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 90% APY.
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