Ethereum News by Thebittimes.Com

AVAX price rallied after announcing news of an Amazon cloud integration, but does the news do anything to improve Avalanche’s fundamentals? Avalanche (AVAX) came into the spotlight early at the beginning of 2023 by adding its blockchain support to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. However, empirical and on-chain Analysis suggests that Avalanche’s price surge is likely due to a broader cryptocurrency market pump which will likely end with the rest of the market. Is Avalanche’s Amazon news exaggerated? While integration with the world’s largest blockchain service is a positive step for Avalanche, the hype around its implications might be exaggerated. The evidence lies in a similar move that Avalanche’s team made in December 2022. Avalanche’s team established a deal with Alibaba’s Cloud toward the end of 2022. The Asia-based cloud service commands a 6% share of the sector globally. Nevertheless, the blockchain’s validator count has remained consistent, implying that not many users of Al...

Source: Prokop.photo/Adobe Russia’s crypto mining legalization bill has hit a last-minute obstacle, and the draft law’s progress has now “stalled,” the nation’s Ministry of Finance conceded. Per Finmarket, the nation’s Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Moiseev told reporters on Wednesday that the long-awaited bill – which proposes legalizing and taxing industrial crypto mining – had hit yet another late roadblock. Lawmakers broadly agree with the bill. And they had hoped to speed its progress through the State Duma, Russia’s parliament, in December. Some had talked optimistically about the law coming into force as early as January 1. This was then pushed back to February 1. But while most MPs have backed the bill, which they think will help raise much-needed treasury funds, the Central Bank has been less eager to give its approval. Moiseev was quoted as stating: “We have stalled again. There are objections, now...

The rising interest rates in the US mean that the US government is now paying more in interest repayments on their debt than the entirety of their spending on their armed forces.  The current debt repayments are going to be a difficult burden for the US taxpayer to bear, particularly when one considers that we are also now in a cost of living crisis.  How would a US debt default affect crypto?  Many are wondering how a US debt default would affect the global markets, and some are wondering how this could damage the cryptocurrency industry. It is worth noting that the US government has never officially defaulted on their debts, but that they have instead opted for the more politically-viable option: inflate the problem away (such as in 1971, when Nixon took the country off the gold standard).  Analysts such as Dan Tubb explain that crashing the stock market and reducing the nation's credibility as a lender to zero isn't a viable option, and would d...

Members of Crypto Twitter were quick to mock Tucker Carlson, who provided no supporting evidence to back his claims. Controversial Fox news television host Tucker Carlson has proposed a curious conspiracy theory that seeks to link airline delays in the United States and Canada with a surge in the Bitcoin price. He suggested the computer outage behind the widespread delays may have been caused by ransomware and theorized the US Government may have bought a large amount of Bitcoin to pay the ransom. However he did not provide any evidence for his claims. Speaking on his “Tucker Carlson Tonight” segment of Fox News on Jan. 17, Carlson argued that the Bitcoin (BTC) price increased 20%+ soon after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed the disruption on Jan. 11: “Almost all ransoms like this are paid in Bitcoin. So if the US government was buying huge amounts of Bitcoin in order to pay a ransom, Bitcoin prices would surge, of course. So the question is has that happened? ...

Image Source: Bloomberg The founders of now-bankrupt crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and troubled crypto exchange CoinFlex have teamed up to create a new exchange focused on the claims of failed crypto projects. Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, the founders of collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC), in collaboration with Mark Lamb and Sudhu Arumugam, who founded CoinFlex, plan to launch GTX, a new crypto exchange focused on claims trading. Prominent crypto journalist Wu Blockchain first revealed the news in a Monday tweet, saying that the crypto executives are looking to raise $25 million for their new project. Su Zhu allegedly confirmed the news to the journalist, stating, “yes, no comment, just busy building it.” According to the pitch decks circulating on Twitter, the team behind GTX claims that the crypto claims market is worth $20 billion. They want to provide liquidity to claimants by allowing them to “sell them to crypto while u...

On Jan. 15, 2023, onchain researchers discovered that funds stolen during the Harmony bridge attack had been moved. The suspected thieves, who are allegedly associated with the North Korean hacking syndicate Lazarus Group, moved 41,000 ethereum, worth $63.2 million at current exchange rates. Onchain Researchers Track Stolen Ethereum From Harmony Bridge Attack and Help Major Exchanges Freeze Funds On June 23 of last year, the Harmony development team disclosed that $100 million in cryptocurrency funds had been stolen from the Horizon bridge. Reports indicated that the attacker had utilized a multi-signature wallet to gain control of the bridge. Onchain researcher Zachxbt discovered that funds related to the Horizon bridge loss began to move 206 days later, with 41,000 ETH (worth $63.2 million at current exchange rates) being transferred. “North Korea’s Lazarus Group had a very busy weekend moving $63.5 million (approximately 41,000 ETH) from the Harmony bridge hack throu...

Since The Merge, Ethereum’s onchain fees have been considerably lower. However, combined transaction volume on layer two (L2) chains Arbitrum and Optimism has outpaced Ethereum’s onchain transaction output. On Saturday, Jan. 14, 2023, Ethereum processed 1.10 million onchain transactions, while combined transactions on Arbitrum and Optimism reached 1.32 million for the same day. Rise of L2 Scaling Solutions Arbitrum and Optimism Onchain transaction fees have decreased significantly since the first week of Aug. 2022 and even more so since the blockchain transitioned from a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain to a proof-of-stake (PoS) network on Sept. 15, 2022. Data from etherscan.io’s gas tracker shows that the highest priority onchain ether transaction costs an estimated $0.75 or 23 gwei on Sunday afternoon at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time. According to Sunday, Jan. 15, 2023 data, the average Arbitrum transaction costs around $0.101 per transfer, while an Optimism transaction...