In a recent blog post, popular cryptocurrency hardware wallet Ledger announced a new partnership with Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2) staking solution Lido Finance in a move that claims greater accessibility and liquidity for independent stakers in the market. Staking is a niche method of investing within the cryptocurrency ecosystem that allows users to independently or collectively stake their crypto assets while collecting passive income in return, as well as actively contributing to the sustainability of the blockchain network. Users attempting to stake their Ether (ETH) in the past have been met with daunting economic hurdles. The current cost to become an …

Mike Novogratz’s investment management firm Galaxy Digital has reportedly participated in a $50 million funding round for Figment, a crypto staking startup. According to Bloomberg on Monday, Galaxy Digital joined investors like Anchorage and Bonfire Ventures in a Series B funding round led by Senator Investment Group and Liberty City Ventures. The company is now reportedly worth about $500 million following the fresh injection of investment capital. Commenting on the funding round, Lorien Gabel, CEO of Figment, said that the funding marks a “new chapter” for the firm. The announcement also included a quote from Novogratz describing the yield generating …

Being bullish on Ether (ETH) has paid off recently because the token gained 60% in the last 30 days. The spectacular growth of decentralized finance (DeFi) applications likely fueled inflow from institutional investors, and the recent London hard fork implemented a fee burn mechanism that drastically reduced the daily net issuance. Although Ether is not yet a fully deflationary asset, the upgrade paved the way for Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2), and the network is expected to abandon traditional mining and enter the proof-of-stake consensus soon. Ether will then be slightly deflationary as long as fees remain above a certain threshold and …

The provisions aim to raise $28 billion for infrastructure funding through expanded digital asset taxation and will impose broad third-party reporting requirements on any crypto firm deemed to be a “broker.” On Monday, Jake Chervinsky, general counsel to Compound Labs, tweeted that the United States Senate had voted 68 in favor to 29 against ending the debate surrounding the provisions, halting discussions until Tuesday’s final vote. However, Chervinsky emphasized that the Senate could still pass an amendment to the bill by unanimous consent before the final vote. Senate talks over the controversial cryptocurrency tax provisions to the U.S. infrastructure bill …

The overall feel across the cryptocurrency landscape over the past week has been one of bubbling anticipation, with the Ethereum network finally undergoing its London hard fork, which includes reforms to the transaction fee market, thanks to EIP-1559. London is the latest in a series of upgrades that are part of Ethereum’s measured transition from its original proof-of-work consensus model to a proof-of-stake model dubbed Ethereum 2.0. On Eth2, tokenholders who hold at least 32 Ether (ETH) can operate a validator node and verify transactions on the network. With the current price of Ether trading near $2,700, that puts the …

The White House has formally backed the much more limited of two competing amendments to the infrastructure deal in a late Thursday statement. The statement by White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates says that “the Administration believes this provision will strengthen tax compliance in this emerging area of finance and ensure that high income taxpayers are contributing what they owe under the law.” He continued: “We are grateful to Chairman Wyden for his leadership in pushing the Senate to address this issue, however we believe that the alternative amendment put forward by Senators Warner, Portman, and Sinema strikes the …

Amid the looming Ethereum London hard fork, Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead predicted that the upcoming upgrade would likely help Ether (ETH) outpace Bitcoin (BTC) as the largest cryptocurrency. As a newer cryptocurrency, Ether has more potential than Bitcoin, Morehead said at the Reuters Global Markets Forum on Monday, noting that the latest Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 upgrade will help the digital token to trade more like a fixed asset. One of five EIPs in the Ethereum London upgrade, EIP-1559 is an anticipated update to Ethereum’s existing fee structure, introducing a minimum payment for sending Ethereum transactions and move …

The price of Ether (ETH) has been in a downward spiral ever since Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin presented at StartmeupHK Festival 2021. In a fireside chat session on May 27, Vitalik stated that several internal team conflicts caused the proof-of-stake migration to delay its launch. As reported by Cointelegraph, "Phase One," which introduces scalability through sharding, has been postponed to 2022. Furthermore, DeFi’s inherently decentralized nature might not be entirely beneficial because the sharding-style processing would need to run transactions through a relay chain. It’s impossible to pinpoint the reason behind Ether’s sharp fall from its all-time high, but the …

Large price jumps and 100x gains get a lot of attention from pundits and influencers in the cryptocurrency community because they offer the hope of overnight riches. In reality, these opportunities are few and far between. Not to mention, only a handful of traders actually manage to catch these waves and cash out in time to lock in life-changing money. Fortunately, catching a large price surge is far from being the only way for crypto investors to make a buck, and the recent rise of decentralized finance (DeFi), nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and the slow march of mainstream crypto adoption provides …

A formal Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) has been created for the network’s forthcoming chain merge, bringing Ethereum one step closer to realizing its highly anticipated proof-of-stake (PoS) transition. On Thursday, ConsenSys researcher Mikhail Kalinin created a pull-request for EIP-3675 on GitHub, formalizing the chain merge as an improvement proposal for the first time. The EIP has also been slated for discussion during Friday’s Ethereum Core Devs Meeting by developer Tim Beiko. Hard to overstate how valuable's @mkalinin2's work on The Merge has been, and it's finally being formalized in an EIP https://t.co/pNRerXFxVf — Tim Beiko | timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) July 22, …

A self-funded, community-driven decentralized blockchain wants to create a privacy coin ecosystem that doesn’t consume large amounts of energy. This platform, called BlackHat Coin, will use proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mining in addition to implementing its privacy layer on the zk-SNARK sapling protocol to provide fast, anonymous, and untraceable payments. “Today, it is not a secret to anyone that artificial intelligence-based systems for analyzing cryptocurrency transactions have been developed, terms of tokens use have been tightened, the interests of various centralized projects have been lobbied in every possible way,” the project said in its whitepaper. According to them, despite the fact …

Major American investment bank JPMorgan is upping its blockchain hiring spree by posting a series of new blockchain-related job openings. JPMorgan has opened multiple positions to pursue its global blockchain development efforts, including job postings targeting blockchain-focused software developers, engineers, marketers and auditors. According to the company’s open positions on LinkedIn, many of these new blockchain-related job postings were published in the last few days. The new job postings seek blockchain talent across several of JPMorgan’s branches worldwide, including the United States, Singapore, India, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and other countries. The company posted more than 30 such openings …