Every bull market witnesses periodic pullbacks, where the weaker hands sell anticipating a top and the stronger hands accumulate for the long term. Data from Coinbase Pro shows two large Bitcoin (BTC) outflows this week, suggesting that institutions are likely continueing to buy the current dip. Comparing historical data, on-chain analytics resource Whalemap, recently said that previous macro tops in Bitcoin in 2017 and 2019 coincided with thousands of large Bitcoin transactions worth $5-7 million. However, the researchers believe there is “no such FOMO in sight for BTC.” JPMorgan strategists Joyce Chang and Amy Ho recently endorsed a 1% allocation …

Bison Trails, a blockchain infrastructure company that was recently acquired by Coinbase, has launched a new Polkadot API that could allow developers to build their applications much faster. Beginning Thursday, Bison Trails customers will be able to leverage Polkadot Indexer, a new protocol that allows users to retrieve and query all types of blockchain data much more efficiently. On a technical level, Polkadot Indexer allows users to pull data with significantly fewer requests to their nodes. Bison Trails claims that for very active accounts, the Indexer can save upward of a thousand requests. In practice, the Indexer is an API …

As Polkadot gets ready to launch parachain auctions, a combined fundraising and market interest discovery mechanism, the team is realizing that some core features may be ill-suited for the auction mechanism. Polkadot parachains are somewhat analogous to the sharding proposal for Ethereum 2.0. Each parachain is a largely independent blockchain built for a particular purpose. Many projects building on Polkadot — like Moonbeam, Equilibrium and Acala — are developing their own parachains where the project’s tokens would act as a native currency used to pay for transactions. The parachains are able to communicate with each other through the Relay Chain, …

Institutional investors continue to pour money into the crypto sector even with the current dip below $45,000. On Feb.24, business intelligence firm MicroStrategy announced that it had recently purchased over $1 billion worth of Bitcoin (BTC) at an average rate of $52,765 per coin. This takes the company’s total holding to 90,531 Bitcoin. Another company that bought Bitcoin during the current market correction is Square. The company said it had acquired roughly “3,318 Bitcoin at an aggregate purchase price of $170 million.” These purchases by institutional investors show they are bullish on the long-term prospects of Bitcoin and believe that …

Every uptrend witnesses periodic bouts of profit-booking as short-term traders tend to unwind positions either on adverse news or at critical technical resistance levels. This occurred with Bitcoin (BTC) today as the price momentarily dropped below $48,000 and traders scrambled to close or top up positions before being liquidated. Elon Musk’s tweet on Feb. 20 that said Bitcoin prices “seem high” and the U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s warning today on Bitcoin being “extremely inefficient” could have dampened short-term sentiment. Another possible factor that may have exacerbated the fall could have been the unwinding of excessively leveraged long positions. About …

The Proof-of-Stake model has been around since 2012, when it emerged as an alternative way to achieve consensus than Bitcoin’s computationally heavy Proof-of-Work. However, it’s taken until now for PoS to take off, spurred by the launch of staking on high-profile platforms including Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, and Cardano. Despite epic price rises since the start of the year and the fact that it’s the second-biggest cryptocurrency by total market capitalization, Eth2 lags behind competitors in the staking rankings. So, why isn’t Ether (ETH) the number one staking cryptocurrency? A brief history of proof-of-stake Back in 2012, Peercoin developers Sunny King …

In the early hours of Feb. 20 Polkadot (DOT) trading volume began to see a significant increase which helped propel the multichain protocol to a new all-time high of $42.28. Data from Cointelegraph Markets and TradingView shows that DOT hit a swing low at $29.36 on Feb.19 before experiencing a 44% breakout which took the price to a new 2021 high. Excitement continues to build in the Polkadot ecosystem ahead of the upcoming parachain auctions which will allow the Polkadot network to connect with other established networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. The mechanism by which data is transferred between different …

Bitcoin (BTC) price finally reached a $1 trillion market capitalization on Feb.19, which is an important milestone because as BTC gains size, the digital asset will continue to attract new institutional investors who will consider allocating a portion to their portfolios. Glassnode data suggests that high-net-worth individuals are continuing to pump money into Bitcoin. The number of Bitcoin addresses holding more than $1 million worth of Bitcoin has risen to 94,000. According to data from Whalemap, another positive sign is that the number of addresses holding between 1,000 to 10,000 BTC has been increasing throughout the current bull run, whereas …

Following its mainnet launch on Ethereum in mid-December 2020, The Graph has today announced that it will be supporting Polkadot, NEAR, Solana and Celo. As reported, The Graph is a protocol that enables programmers to build Application Programming Interfaces, which it calls subgraphs, that can query and index blockchain data. Envisaged as an open alternative to existing blockchain analytics tools, it offers an infrastructure for accessing on-chain data from multiple blockchains, with the wider aim of supporting collaboration and interoperability across the decentralized web. Eva Beylin, director at The Graph Foundation, has underscored the need to work toward making Web …

Bitcoin (BTC) is gradually gaining ground on gold, the traditional store of value. Data shows that one ounce of gold can only buy 0.0352 Bitcoin as of Feb. 17, the lowest amount of BTC ever. This shows that Bitcoin has been rewarding its investors much more than gold. Bitcoin has massively outperformed gold over various time frames. Even if the latest one-year data is considered, Bitcoin’s risk-adjusted return is 270%, while gold's is only 24% as of Dec. 28, 2020. The result further skews hugely in favor of Bitcoin if longer time frames of four years or eight years are …

Polkadot's DOT token is seeing an impressive 180% gain in 2021 so far, surpassing XRP for fourth place by market capitalization. Polkadot is a multichain protocol that has several "parachains," similar to Ethereum shards. DOT works on its proprietary technology called Substrate. The platform is fully interoperable between different blockchains while maintaining the ability to process thousands of transactions per second. Substrate 3.0, which will bring Ethereum compatibility, is expected to launch in the first half of 2021. Positive newsflow has been fueling the rally According to Polkadot creator Gavin Wood, the emergence of projects like Acala and Moonbeam, focusing …

Kusama's KSM price underwent a strong 70% breakout on Feb. 15 as excitement continues to build for the Kusama and Polkadot ecosystems ahead of the upcoming parachain auctions. Kusama price soars 70% Data from Cointelegraph Markets and TradingView shows that KSM rose from $134 to a peak at $236 in the early hours of Feb.16 before profit-selling pulled the price back to $194. Kusama is an experimental interoperable blockchain platform that is often referred to as a “Polkadot’s wild cousin” due to having a similar codebase. The protocol is built on Substrate, the developer kit/framework for the Polkadot blockchain, and …