Taproot is on its way. The long-awaited Bitcoin (BTC) upgrade has been confirmed, after it passed the minimum threshold of 90% miner approval in mid-June, meaning that it will be implemented in November.
While the core features of Taproot — increased privacy and enhanced wallet scripting — are fairly well-known, what will the upgrade's impact be on Bitcoin in a wider sense? Will it attract more adoption, take users away from privacy coins, or even incur the wrath of regulators?
The answers to these questions are fairly mixed, according to a range of Bitcoin developers. Because while Taproot’s features might attract greater use of Bitcoin, it may also take a while before applications and Bitcoin-based services make full use of them, with protocols having to be built on top of Bitcoin before cost-saving and privacy features have a significant impact.source

Bitcoin price continues its consolidation under $35K with strong support at $33K. However, whale addresses holding 1k-10k BTC have registered a sharp spike, indicating a significant spike.The top cryptocurrency also registered a 5% rise in price over the past 24-hours, rising from a daily low of $32,893 to a daily high of $34,748. BTC has moved in the price range of $30K-$40k for the majority of the past two months after seeing a massive sell-off in the second week of May.Bitcoin would need to break past $35K immediate resistance before any further move, it managed to do so last week but couldn’t hold onto the gains and fell below the immediate resistance again.Source

What do Elon Musk’s meme folder and Dogecoin have in common? Apparently, both of them have infinite supply. 
The Tesla boss has just taken to Twitter to post his version of the “Man Distracted By Laptop” meme, which shows a man looking at his laptop while three women around him are engaging in sexual activity. The image below—which shows what the man is actually distracted by—features a Dogecoin price chart clumsily photoshopped on to the screen. The meme coin is accompanied by Polytopia, the name of a popular turn-based civilization strategy game. pic.twitter.com/oGKHhHROQa
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 2, 2021
Musk’s innocuous tweet was able to instantly push the price of Dogecoin by over 3 percent in two minutes, proving that his market-moving powers are alive and well. However, the jump has proven to be rather short-lived.Source

Ethereum’s London hard fork launched on the Ropsten testnet on June 24 in preparation for the mainnet rollout in July.The upgrade will usher in the implementation of the highly anticipated EIP-1559 modification that will adjust the Ethereum transaction fee calculation mechanism.The next phase in the London hard fork rollout is deployment on the Goerli testnet which is scheduled for June 30. Following that, it will be launched on the Rinkeby testnet on July 7 and then mainnet later in the month.Part of the EIP-1559 mechanism, aside from changing the fee auction structure, is to burn the “base fee” which will make the Ethereum economy deflationary over time.A website called Watch The Burn has been set up to see this in action. At the time of press, 88,483 ETH had been burned on the testnet. This is equivalent to around $177 million at current prices.Ethereum software solutions firm ConsenSys estimates that the annual supply change will be minus 1.6 million ETH. At current prices, this equates to the burning of $3.2 billion in ETH which will reduce the annual supply rate by 1.4%.Source

While Ethereum investors line up at the job center and Bitcoin maximalists hold on for dear life, it’s a great day to be a Celo investor.The coin, which is listed (and widely promoted) on Coinbase, increased by about 46% in the past day to $3.9, according to metrics site CoinGecko, and 60% in the past week. Meanwhile, Bitcoin has fallen 5.6% in the past 24 hours and 11% in the past week; Ethereum fell by 3.9% and 19.1%, respectively. A couple of big moves may explain Celo’s good fortune. Yesterday, the crypto-friendly browser, Opera, added Celo stablecoins, as well as CELO itself, to its browser’s crypto wallet. This, by itself, isn’t terribly big news, since Opera's user count doesn’t even make it onto the same charts as Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari browser. Then again, Celo itself isn’t terribly big news. Its market cap is unclear but fairly small by all estimations: CoinMarketCap says it has a market cap of $3.2 billion, while Nomics cuts it to $860 million and CoinGecko to just $454 million.
More good news came yesterday from institutional crypto trading platform Anchorage Digital, which added support for Celo Euro. The euro stablecoin was also listed on KuCoin earlier this week. Also yesterday, Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto wing, A16z, selected a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom as a validator for the Celo network.Source

Sports fans can't follow a bat, ball, or puck these days without coming across a Bitcoin brand. Crypto companies have flooded into sports marketing, and none more aggressively than FTX, the sophisticated exchange led by bombastic 29-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried.
In April, FTX shelled out $135 million to plaster its name on the Miami Heat NBA arena for the next 19 years—even though the company is just two years old. The spend is n0t an issue; Bankman-Fried told me in an interview at the Ethereal Virtual Summit in May, "Without going into the details, it's been a pretty good year for us... frankly, we don't need to rely on the other 18 years to have the funds for this." (Mic drop.) Later in April, Blockfolio, the price index app FTX bought last August for $150 million, signed an endorsement deal with top NFL draft pick Trevor Lawrence. This month, Blockfolio paid YouTuber-turned-boxer Logan Paul to promote the app with a QR code on his t-shirt before his June 6 fight against Floyd Mayweather (who shilled EthereumMax). FTX also signed a 10-year, $210 million deal to sponsor esports team TSM and change its name to TSM FTX, and it signed a hard-to-get deal with Major League Baseball that will include FTX patches on every MLB umpire's uniform.Source

The hype is mounting over a long-awaited Ethereum upgrade that alters the transaction fee mechanism. However, will it actually result in any gas savings?
The EIP-1559 modification will ship with the Ethereum London hard fork. Notably, this fork is scheduled for July sometime after being launched on testnet this month.
Many have assumed that it will reduce gas fees for the network, relieving the pain for most of its users. In recent weeks, average transaction fees have skyrocketed to record highs of around $70 – even higher for complex smart contract interactions.
However, this may not be the case as Ethereum software solutions firm ConsenSys explained in a recent blog post.Source

A trader just learned the hard way that it’s pretty easy to lose $3 million in the volatile world of the crypto options market.
The ether put options seller took a large bet against a sharp drop in the cryptocurrency and ended up booking a massive loss on Tuesday as the token powering Ethereum’s blockchain tanked to a three-month low of $1,700.
“The market moved just enough to force the trader to take a loss by buying back 5,000 contracts of the December expiry $2,560 put option sold earlier this quarter,” Gregoire Magadini, CEO of options analytics platform Genesis Volatility, told CoinDesk in a Telegram chat. “The trade looks to have yielded a loss of over $3 million.”A put option gives owners the right to sell the underlying asset (in this case, ether) at a set price on a certain date. Holders of the option make money when the price falls below that “strike” price and are implicitly short the asset. Conversely, sellers of the option benefit only when the asset trades above the strike and are implicitly long. The ether options trader likely sold the $2,560 puts during the bull run, expecting a continued rally to last at least until the year-end and thus a steady drop in the option’s price.Source