Among the most prominent news of the week is the announcement by the United States White House to assess the ecological impact of Bitcoin mining. The study will seek to find out what are the different points for and against the activity, from the environmental and energy aspects.
Meanwhile, the price of bitcoin (BTC) has sideways in a range from $29,000 to $31,500 and the week ended in the green. At the time of writing, bitcoin is trading at USD 31,455, as reflected in the market price of Latin America and Spain, according to the CriptoNoticias price calculator.
These are the most important news:
- In the United States, President Joe Biden is considering establishing a position on the environmental impact and energy consumption of Bitcoin mining. According to Costa Samaras, principal assistant in the energy section for the White House Office of Science and Technology Regulation, by August 2022 it could be release a full study or report. Meanwhile, in Europe, the annual inflation index closed the month of May at a record figure of 8.1% year-on-year. This percentage exceeds the 7.4% recorded last April, which already represented a new record in the Eurozone.
- The marked downward trend, along with uncertainty over the growth of inflation in the United States and the global economic outlook, seems to have influenced the wave of layoffs experienced by the technology and cryptocurrency sector. Major companies like Tesla, Coinbase, Gemini, and Bitmex have announced layoffs or communicated their decision to curb new job creation this year.
- The bear market has also affected Bitcoin miners. In order to survive, many of them had to sell their BTC holdings, despite the pain that caused them. According to Compass Mining mining analyst Mitch Klee, miners are selling their holdings “openly” in order to cover operating costs. In the midst of obstacles, the efficiency in the electrical consumption of the Bitcoin network is 17% better than a year ago and the global hashrate has not stopped growing since China banned mining in the region.
- Rostec State Corporation, a Russian state-owned company dedicated to the manufacture of innovative materials, reported the launch of a blockchain network called CELLS. This new platform includes a new system for making payments with digital currencies based on international agreements. Thus will be used as an alternative to the SWIFT financial transaction and payment system, from which several Russian banks were expelled. For its part, the Financial Planning Standards Board, an international body that deals with financial planning issues, believes that preventing fraud and scams will require regulators around the world to monitor and delimit the field of action of cryptocurrency influencers operating on social networks.
- The Terra case continues to generate news. This week a member of the Terra community warned that an unknown person, or a group of them, withdrew $90 million from the Mirror protocol in October last year and the situation went unnoticed for seven months. Now, the attackers have returned to extract funds from the decentralized finance (DeFi) project, exploiting another vulnerability to extract $2 million. It was also learned that, through a shell company, Terraform Labs would have irregularly moved assets for USD 4.8 million. This was the conclusion of the KBS television network in South Korea, after a journalistic investigation.
- On Ethereum, the difficulty bomb could be postponed again. It was scheduled for the first of July, but the developers agree that it is better to postpone it between 2 to 4 months, as all network players prepare for the merger (The Merge) with Ethereum 2.0. Meanwhile, the rollup Optimism launched its first airdrop with the goal of becoming a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Given the high interest in the event, the scaling solution achieved an all-time high in daily transactions and the airdrop was considered “turbulent” due to obvious lack of control on the part of users.
If you want to know the meaning of several words of the terminology of the crypto world, you can consult them in the extensive Glossary of CriptoNoticias. Here’s a little sneak peek with the word YTD.
YTD (Year to Date): in Spanish, “So far this year”. It can be used to ask, for example, how the price of a certain YTD cryptocurrency is doing: that way, if you are on October 1, 2019, the answer includes the period from January 1, 2019 to October 1, 2019.