Archive for the ‘Cryptocurrency’ Category

Cryptocurrency Ethereum Classic Decreases More Than 3% Within 24 hours By Benzinga – Investing.com UK

Benzinga - by Benzinga Insights, Benzinga Staff Writer.

Ethereum Classic's (CRYPTO: ETC) price has decreased 3.65% over the past 24 hours to $30.98, continuing its downward trend over the past week of -3.0%, moving from $32.15 to its current price.

The chart below compares the price movement and volatility for Ethereum Classic over the past 24 hours (left) to its price movement over the past week (right). The gray bands are Bollinger Bands, measuring the volatility for both the daily and weekly price movements. The wider the bands are, or the larger the gray area is at any given moment, the larger the volatility.

The trading volume for the coin has fallen 57.0% over the past week which is opposite, directionally, with the overall circulating supply of the coin, which has increased 0.08%. This brings the circulating supply to 147.28 million, which makes up an estimated 69.9% of its max supply of 210.70 million. According to our data, the current market cap ranking for ETC is #29 at $4.57 billion.

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2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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Cryptocurrency Ethereum Classic Decreases More Than 3% Within 24 hours By Benzinga - Investing.com UK

Cryptocurrency Hedera Down More Than 3% Within 24 hours By Benzinga – Investing.com UK

Benzinga - by Benzinga Insights, Benzinga Staff Writer.

Hedera's (CRYPTO: HBAR) price has decreased 3.3% over the past 24 hours to $0.10, continuing its downward trend over the past week of -9.0%, moving from $0.11 to its current price.

The chart below compares the price movement and volatility for Hedera over the past 24 hours (left) to its price movement over the past week (right). The gray bands are Bollinger Bands, measuring the volatility for both the daily and weekly price movements. The wider the bands are, or the larger the gray area is at any given moment, the larger the volatility.

The trading volume for the coin has fallen 44.0% over the past week which is opposite, directionally, with the overall circulating supply of the coin, which has increased 0.09%. This brings the circulating supply to 35.75 billion, which makes up an estimated 71.5% of its max supply of 50.00 billion. According to our data, the current market cap ranking for HBAR is #33 at $3.72 billion.

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This article was generated by Benzinga's automated content engine and reviewed by an editor.

2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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Cryptocurrency Hedera Down More Than 3% Within 24 hours By Benzinga - Investing.com UK

Cryptocurrency in Online Gambling: Revolutionizing the Way We Bet – Blockchain News

Online gambling has become one of the most popular Internet entertainment forms globally. It is an industry that grows at an annual rate of 6.2%, en route to hitting a projected market volume of $136 billion in the next five years via an estimated worldwide gambler base of 281 million. The sphere got founded in 1994, thanks to Antiguas Free Trade and Processing Act, as this island nation was the first to recognize the potential of the World Wide Web regarding games of chance and how it could revolutionize this landscape by granting people the ability to bet from anywhere at any time.

Fifteen years after a country allowed companies to offer Internet gambling services, the digital realm saw another milestone that dramatically affected this arena. That was the emergence of Bitcoin. The worlds initial virtual currency popped up in 2009, and two years later, the first exchange appeared online, letting people trade fiat for digital coins. Quickly after this event, SatoshiDice, in April 2012, became the first operational crypto casino. In 2014, amidst a range of various simple sites providing straightforward provably fair gaming entertainment, Curacaos Antillephone decided to regulate crypto-accepting platforms, opening the door for Bitcoin slots and RNG tables.

Nowadays, the number of gambling hubs online allowing coin-based wagering on sports and casino-style products is immense. It seems like, every week, new ones are debuting, and more and more famed brands are keeping up with this trend, adopting cryptos and accepting that the industrys environment is changing. Below, we detail how cryptocurrencies have enhanced playing games of chance online.

It is vital to note that the current crypto casinos substantially differ from the original ones. The latter hubs were a novelty that materialized in the first half of the 2010s and captured the attention of a niche pool of gamblers. These were tech-savvy individuals who wanted to bet online anonymously, something that blockchain technology allowed them. At the start of the online casino industry, people could only wager on offered options using credit/debit cards and through bank transfers. In the early-2000s, e-wallets took center stage. But they still did not supply enough separation between a users bank account and his chosen operator to keep his gaming activity a secret.

Bitcoin permitted this because of its decentralized ledger system, where only wallet addresses exist. No names. So, privacy was a massive selling point for crypto gambling, as were lower transaction costs, global acceptance (no geo-restrictions), no regulatory oversight, and crypto casino instant withdrawal approvals. During the inception years, the cost of all this was the availability of only rudimentary games, such as dice, crash (Bustabit), mines, Plinko, and Limbo. All of these incorporated elementary rules and action, with some of their appeal also resting on the option for gamblers to verify the randomness of round outcomes manually. Hence, their name provably fair games.

Modern crypto casinos house a wide array of gaming genres as a consequence of them getting licensed by credible regulators, which gives these sites the option to work with renowned product suppliers. Still, many select to carry simple provably fair titles even now, given that these are making a comeback, and as a way to remind gamblers that this sphere has not forgotten its roots.

For the longest time, deposit matches and free spins were the backbone of casino sites, the lure that many game-of-chance lovers to register with online gambling hubs. As the years went by, it seemed like operators were content to offer these two promo types as their main promotional offers. Along with loyalty programs, of course. That is, until cryptos showed up. In recent times, the number of gamblers navigating over to the coin gaming sphere has been astounding, and this is happening for not just the reasons discussed above.

Crypto casinos now feature promotions not available at traditional fiat websites. They kicked things off on the promo front by introducing faucets or giving users small amounts of cryptos for completing basic tasks at different intervals. These funds helped players test out novel games with no deposit needed. Then came Chat Rain, a promotional feature that awards community participation, encouraging on-site interaction.

Post-2020, staking has become very in vogue. That entails gamblers staking/locking their coins within the casinos ecosystem in return for rewards in the form of dividends. The amount given usually depends on the sum staked and its staking period. This trend gave way to yield farming and liquidity pools, where hub gamblers aid in providing liquidity, earning a share of the platforms transaction fees in return. Much of this stems from casinos creating their tokens, digital assets that can get traded at notable exchanges like any other famous cryptocurrency.

Metaverses have been around for much longer than the general public knows. Most associate these virtual shared spaces with Facebooks/Metas announcement in 2021. Yet, one can say that the online multimedia platform Second Life, launched in 2003, encompassed many aspects of what we define as a metaverse. Something that those who have never been active in Second Life are unaware of is that this open-world-type game boasts several virtual casinos, such as the Helios Lounge. That is something that many modern metaverses have also implemented. The most noteworthy example is Decentraland, which made headlines with its Ice Poker venue and Tominoya Casino.

The Sandbox metaverse and CryptoVoxel have followed Decentralands footsteps, offering immersive gambling entertainment within their virtual worlds. The continuous advancements in VR tech will probably take the remote gambling experience to new levels inside these digital realms, where people can not only gamble but operate their casinos, establishments which they can sell as non-fungible tokens to the highest bidders. Even legendary video game company Atari has entered this space by building its Decentraland casino on a twenty-parcel estate in the platforms Vegas district and debuting its Atari X token as the basis for this entitys blockchain ecosystem.

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Bipartisan support of cryptocurrency is resurging in Congress. Here’s why – Fortune

Cryptocurrency is having a moment in Washington D.C. The Senate voted last week to overturn an SEC rule, Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 (SAB-121), that had imposed onerous accounting standards on cryptocurrency assets held by financial institutions. The Senate vote followed House approval of the same pro-crypto measure.

This week, the House will consider Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21), a bill that would establish a long-awaited U.S. regulatory regime for the crypto industry. And as of Monday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) appears to be leaning towards approval of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for the spot market for a type of cryptocurrency known as Ethereum. If approved, it would be the second type of crypto ETFs authorized by the SEC. The tide is shifting.

President Biden has said hell veto the Congressional action reversing SAB-121. We hope he listens to lawmakers in his own party, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Corey Booker of New Jersey, who were among those who voted 60-38 to repeal the SEC rule.

At the same time, spot ether ETF approval would be another giant step forward for the crypto industry on its inevitable road to broad-based mainstream adoption. In January, SEC-approved ETFs pegged to the spot market in Bitcoin began trading.

Crypto got a bad name with the spectacular implosion of Sam Bankman-Frieds fraudulent FTX empire, followed by the incarceration of Changpeng CZ Zhao, the former CEO of Binance, the largest global cryptocurrency exchange.

That stigma masked all the potential positive benefits of the blockchain technology that underpins cryptocurrency. More than 50 million Americans now hold cryptocurrencies. And the variety of exchange-traded funds pegged to Bitcoin that have sprung up this year have attracted $12 billion in inflows as of Mayone of the most successful ETF launches in history. No wonder Congress has taken notice.

The Congressional repeal effort was aimed at the SECs Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 (SAB-121), adopted in 2022. The rule required financial institutions that hold crypto accounts to treat them as liabilities, which made the safekeeping of digital assets simply uneconomical. A recent analysis by the bipartisan Congressional Research Service had observed that rules represents a shift from traditional custodial practices, could limit involvement of certain institutions, and may introduce new costs or risks.

At its heart, blockchain technology is here to stay, remains bipartisan, and its building momentum on a path to mainstream adoption as the country focuses on the November elections.

While agencies could have reduced ambiguity by working together to clearly and precisely define the boundaries of their respective jurisdictions, they have refused to do so. Instead, they have gone on campaigns of regulation by enforcement to assert their authority over the asset class and to suppress its adoption and growth.

This approach has been costly and expensive for those on the receiving end, although recent court rulings are giving the crypto industry some of the clarity it has been seeking. While this is not the preferred policy path, checks and balances are working, and this is unlocking pent-up demand for clearly regulated crypto products.

With the November U.S. elections looming, a sharply divided electorate has found common ground in their support of blockchain technology. For progressives, blockchain-powered finance eliminates gatekeepers. It makes finance more accessible and inclusive at a time when the crackdown on crypto alienates communities of color, who have embraced the asset class. Among conservatives, agency overreach violates fundamental principles of free markets and more limited government.

Regardless, leadership in innovation and technology remains a shared American value. In fact, 20% of voters in key battleground states identified crypto as a major issue in the 2024 election season according to a recent survey by Digital Currency Group. As seen by the success of pro-crypto candidates in recent primaries, candidates who choose to fight crypto do so at their own peril.

In a final act of desperation, anti-crypto crusaders have sought to garner bipartisan support by suggesting that crypto harms national security. But crypto is no bigger threat to national security than the internet itself. In fact, the transparency of blockchain has emerged as a key forensic tool to better track illicit finance.

The greater threat to national security could be the economic fallout of policies that thwart innovation and send entrepreneurs overseas. For example, it would be difficult to design a greater innovation for the U.S. dollar than stablecoins pegged one-to-one to the dollar. Stablecoins are already the 16th largest holder of Treasury bonds, represent 99% of internet money, and are set to preserve the dollar as the global reserve currency for decades to come.

The Senate and House votes to overturn SAB-121 are a milestone in bipartisan support for the cryptocurrency industry and show that Congress understands that blockchain technology is the future of the internet.

One reason the SEC has been able to attempt to apply antiquated thinking to the regulation of the new internet is that, so far, Congress has not passed nuanced legislation that defines regulatory parameters and encourages U.S. innovation. As a result, regulators have been left to rely upon decades-old dilapidating financial rules that do not reconcile with the realities of the new digital asset class.

Today, the House will consider the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21), a bill that would establish a long-awaited U.S. regulatory regime for the crypto industry. The bill has the support of the cryptocurrency industry because it will deliver customer protections and long-sought-after regulatory clarity.

We hope that Congresss bipartisan support for the crypto industry will continue to prevail. And we hope the President takes heed of the public sentiment.

As House lawmakers prepare for a floor vote on FIT21, the electorate will be watching. History will be watching, too.

Chris Perkins is the president of CoinFund, an asset management firm that champions the leaders of the new internet.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs ofFortune.

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Bipartisan support of cryptocurrency is resurging in Congress. Here's why - Fortune

He Trained Cops to Fight Crypto Crimeand Allegedly Ran a $100M Dark-Web Drug Market – WIRED

The message explained that Incognito was now essentially blackmailing its former users: It had stored their messages and transaction records, it said, and added that it would be creating a whitelist portal where users could pay a feewhich for some dealers would later be set as high as $20,000 dollarsto remove their data before all the incriminating information was leaked online at the end of this month. YES THIS IS AN EXTORTION!!! the message added.

In retrospect, Ormsby says that the site's apparent user-friendliness and its security features were perhaps a multiyear con laying the groundwork for its endgame, a kind of user extortion never seen before in dark-web drug markets. Maybe the whole thing was set up to create a false sense of security, Ormsby says. The extorting thing is completely new to me. But if you've lulled people into a sense of security, I guess it's easier to extort them.

In total, Incognito Market promised to leak more than half a million drug transaction records if buyers and sellers didn't pay to remove them from the data dump. It's still not clear whether the market's administratorLin, according to prosecutors, whom they accuse of personally carrying out the extortion campaignplanned to follow through on the threat: He appears to have been arrested before the deadline set for the victims of the Incognito blackmail.

At the same time the FBI says Lin was laying the groundwork for this double-cross, he also appears to have briefly tried engineering an entirely different scheme. In the summer of 2021, during Incognito Market's relatively quiet first year, Lin's alleged alter ego, Pharoah, launched a service called Antinalysis, a website designed to analyze blockchains and let users checkfor a feewhether their cryptocurrency could be connected to criminal transactions.

In a post to the dark-web market forum Dread, Pharoah made clear that Antinalysis was designed not to help anti-money-laundering investigators, but rather those who sought to evade thempresumably including his own dark-web market's users. Our goals do not lie in aiding the surveillance autocracy of state-sponsored agencies, Pharoah's post read. This service is dedicated to individuals that have the need to possess complete privacy on the blockchain, offering a perspective from the opponent's point of view in order for the user to comprehend the possibility of his/her funds getting flagged down under autocratic illegal charges.

After independent cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs wrote about the Antinalysis service in August of 2021, describing it as an anti anti-money laundering service for crooks, Pharoah posted another message complaining that Antinalysis had lost access to its blockchain data source, which Krebs had identified as the anti-money laundering tool AMLBot, and that it would be going offline. Stay posted and fuck LE," Pharoah wrote, using the abbreviation LE to mean law enforcement. Antinalysis eventually returned, however, and pivoted last year to acting instead as a service for swapping Bitcoin for Monero and vice versa.

Meanwhile, Lin appears to have maintained his obsession with cryptocurrency tracing and blockchain analysis: His final LinkedIn post last week before his arrest in New York announced that he had become a certified user of Reactor, the crypto tracing tool sold by blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. I'm excited to share that I've completed Chainalysis's new qualification: Chainalysis Reactor Certification (CRC)! Lin wrote in Mandarin. His last X post shows a Chainalysis diagram of money flows between dark-web markets and cryptocurrency exchanges.

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He Trained Cops to Fight Crypto Crimeand Allegedly Ran a $100M Dark-Web Drug Market - WIRED