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 Bitcoin closed the month above $13,000 for the first time since 2017

The monthly candle on the Bitcoin chart closed above $13,000 for the first time since December 2017. On some exchanges, Bitcoin had the highest monthly closure ever. For example, on Bitfinex, October closed at $13.788, while the last record from December 2017 was at $13,769. Last month, the first cryptocurrency rose 28%, and this became the best result since April this year. At the same time, on October 31, the price of bitcoin rose to a 33-month high at $14'090. At trading on Monday, BTC began to correct and at the moment has fallen in price to $13,350, having lost 2% in price over a day.

 ECB to survey Europeans about digital euro

Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank, has announced a public opinion survey on issuing the digital euro. The ECB is considering the possibility of using digital currency, including for payments and transfers between citizens of the European Union. People can take a survey on the Central bank’s website. “We've just launched a public consultation so that consumers and Europeans can actually express their preference and tell us whether they would be happy to use a digital euro just in the way they use a euro coin or a euro banknote knowing that it is central bank money that is available and that they can rely upon,” Lagarde said in the video posted on the ECB's Twitter account.

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 Ethereum 2.0 launch date announced

The zero phase of the Ethereum 2.0 network will be launched on December 1, but one condition must be met for this. The Ethereum Foundation announced on Wednesday the launch of the second version of the network's custody contract. Users need to deposit 32 ETH to participate in staking. If the contract collects 16,384 deposits in the amount of 524,288 ETH (about $200 million), then the network will be ready for the launch. The specified goal must be achieved at least seven days before the expected launch date, that is, by November 24. A few hours after the announcement, the number of ETH addresses with a balance of more than 32 coins reached a new high at 126,852. To launch Ethereum 2.0, 13% of these addresses must participate in staking.

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 Bill Miller: Every Investment Bank Will Want to Buy Bitcoin

Legendary investor Bill Miller stated that the risks of bitcoin price zeroing are "lower than ever before" and predicted an increase in institutional investment in cryptocurrency. “The bitcoin story is very easy, it's supply and demand. Bitcoin's supply is growing around 2.5% a year and the demand is growing faster than that,” he said. After MicroStrategy's $425 million purchase of bitcoin, Square's $50 million investment, and the integration of cryptocurrencies into the PayPal wallet, Miller believes every major investment bank and company will eventually want to own cryptocurrency. He added that Bitcoin has performed well over the past three-, five- and ten-year periods.

 Bitcoin surpasses Coca-Cola, Netflix and Disney in terms of capitalization

In early September, BTC's market capitalization was at $190 billion, when the price of the cryptocurrency was hovering around $10,000. However, over the past two months, the asset’s price has grown by more than 50% to the levels above $15,000, thanks to which the market capitalization has reached $280 billion. By this indicator, Bitcoin has surpassed most large US companies. In the rating of the capitalization of American public companies, Bitcoin would take the 18th place between Home Depot with $306 billion and Verizon with $242 billion. Companies that BTC has surpassed in recent months include such names as Netflix, PayPal, Coca-Cola, and Disney.

In 2020, the number of Bitcoin-ATMs has increased by 83%

The number of cryptocurrency ATMs has reached 11,665, CoinATMRadar portal reports. At the beginning of the year there were 6,372 of them, which indicates an increase of 83%. According to CoinATMRadar, an average of 23 new devices are installed per day, or almost one ATM per hour. More than 79% of exchangers are in the USA. At the same time, since 2019, their number has grown by 2.2 times: 4,213 in 2019 and 9,242 in 2020. The first bitcoin ATM appeared in 2013 - it was installed by Robocoin in a Vancouver coffee shop.

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 An unplanned hard fork might have occurred on the Ethereum network

Ethereum infrastructure providers Infura and Blockchair have reported outages, resulting in problems with exchanges and wallets. Initially thought to be an internal Infura issue, later independent node operators also reported malfunctions. The Binance exchange has suspended the withdrawal of funds, and its head Changpeng Zhao referred to a “possible chain split” as the culprit. Crashes were also reported by the MetaMask wallet, Bithumb, Upbit and Crypto.com marketplaces. After block 11'234'873 at 07:08 AM UTC, blockchain explorers Blockchair and Ehterscan began registering two different chains. “It seems that a minor hard fork occurred without anyone noticing it,” said Nikita Zhavoronkov, Blockchair development lead.

 Opinion: ETH 2.0 won’t handle DeFi’s growth

FTX exchange CEO Sam Bankman-Fried believes that the Ethereum network is not able to of handling decentralized finance’s (DeFi) growth. According to him, the ETH blockchain is limiting the development of DeFi, and the only way to solve the problem is to use other networks. Bankman-Fried said that whenever his team tried to create a new DeFi project, they "immediately exceeded the throughput of the Ethereum blockchain by orders of magnitude." The FTX CEO believes that one day the DeFi audience will surpass 1 billion people, which means that blockchains will need to significantly expand their scalability in order to maintain a ten-digit user base. Scaling improvements on the Ethereum 2.0 network won't be enough either, he points out.

 BTC price went over $16,000 for the first time since January 2018

The Bitcoin rate continues to grow - during trading on Thursday it rose above $16,150. Bitcoin last traded this high in January 2018. Over 10 days, the first cryptocurrency added more than 20% in price, and over a month it went up by 43%. At the same time, the capitalization of BTC has come close to the level of $300 billion, and the dominance of bitcoin in the cryptocurrency market is  64.70%. Since the beginning of the year, bitcoin has more than doubled in price - on January 1, the asset traded at $7,200.

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 Bitcoin Cash network again split into two

On November 15, a hard fork took place on the Bitcoin Cash network — the network split into Bitcoin Cash Node (BCHN) and Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA). Earlier, the BCHA developers proposed an updated version of the protocol, according to which 8% of miners' profits will go to finance the development of the network. The update was opposed by the BCHN community, which removed the "miner tax" from the source code of their network. As of the evening of November 15, the computing power of the BCHN blockchain was 1.12 EH/s, and BCHA - 0.094 EH/s, that is, 11 times lower. Most major exchanges have indicated they will support the longer chain, i.e. Bitcoin Cash Node.

 $2.3 billion in BTC was withdrawn from exchanges in a month

From October 15 to November 15, exchange reserves in bitcoins fell from 2.5 million to 2.355 million coins — the lowest level since August 2018. During this time, users withdrew about 145,000 BTC worth of $2.35 billion, according to the CryptoQuant portal. During the same period, miners mined about 27,000 BTC, which is 5 times less than the amount withdrawn from the exchanges. “This aggressive accumulation trend seen in the Bitcoin market shows that investors anticipate a prolonged post-halving uptrend,” said Cointelegraph analyst Joseph Young.

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 Ripple grows 60% in price in three days

XRP, the third-largest cryptocurrency in terms of capitalization, gained 63% in price in three days and came close to $0.5 per coin. On Sunday, the token price reached $0.49567, which was a record high since June 2019. XRP has more than doubled in price since early November. Other major cryptocurrencies are also in positive territory: Ethereum and Litecoin added 32% in value in 7 days, Cardano showed more than 50% growth, and Stellar - 37%. Altcoins are strengthening in price amid BTC rate approaching its historical maximum. The main cryptocurrency traded at $18,945 last Saturday, less than $1,000 below its all-time high of $19,891.

 Research: BTC price volatility is lower than that of many stocks

Investment management company Van Eck has published a study showing that bitcoin is less prone to fluctuations than a quarter of S&P 500 stocks. Since the beginning of the year, quotes of 29% of stocks have shown greater volatility than the first cryptocurrency, and 22% - over the past 90 days. Although Bitcoin is considered a “nascent and volatile asset outside of the traditional stock and capital markets” reality shows that it trades with volatility comparable to the world's largest stocks, analysts say.

 Grayscale: investors seek in Bitcoin protection against inflation

According to Michael Sonnenschein, managing director of Grayscale Investments, Bitcoin is no longer a temporary phenomenon. Investors no longer believe that BTC has failed as a currency as we don't use it to buy a cup of coffee. The coronavirus pandemic this year has become another key factor for the flow of funds into cryptocurrency, he said. “I think investors understand today that buying Bitcoin and putting it in their portfolio is meant to be a store of value, inflation hedge, a digital gold, a digital form of money that is much better suited to the digital world we live in today versus historical stores of value like gold which would have been certainly much more applicable to a world characterized by physical exchanges. They view it as one of the most important next steps in the evolution of money and what constitutes a store of value,” Sonnenschein said. Grayscale manages nearly $11 billion in cryptocurrency.

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 Bitcoin keeps dropping

The main cryptocurrency has continued to decline over the past couple of days. On November 27, BTC fell to $16,915. Bitcoin capitalization fell to $313 billion. Nevertheless, crypto experts advise not to panic because of the fall of BTC and a number of other popular crypto coins. NEXO co-founder Anthony Trenchev believes the pullback was needed due to the overheated market. But in the long term, nothing will prevent Bitcoin from repeating its record three years ago and reaching $20,000.

 OECD will present international cryptocurrency tax regulations in 2021

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is preparing to present general tax reporting rules for digital assets. This could happen as early as 2021. According to the head of the OECD Center for Tax Policy Pascal Saint-Amans, the innovations will be similar to the existing standards for combating tax criminals. The OECD hopes that the European Commission will pay attention to the solutions proposed by the organization, as they will meet the requirements of European regulators. Earlier, the European Commission initiated amendments to the EU legislation to combat financial offenses. Until December 21, the organization plans to collect proposals from experts on an initiative aimed, among other things, at tightening control over crypto operations.

 Deloitte: many financial institutions are ready to spend more on blockchain implementation

According to preliminary results of the Deloitte survey on the prospects for the industrialization of financial services, 27% of companies surveyed expect a "small increase in costs" on blockchain and distributed ledger. 14% of respondents intend to significantly increase the item of development costs. Another 33% of the survey participants said that investments will remain at the same level, and 27% intend to slightly cut costs. The survey was conducted among 800 top managers of banks, investment companies, hedge funds, payment services, and insurance companies. According to the survey, blockchain turned out to be the No. 2 technology in popularity among financial market players, the costs for which can be increased. Cloud solutions have become the most demanded direction for development.

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 Bitcoin has strengthened and again began its run for $20,000

Yesterday, the value of the main cryptocurrency reached its maximum in 3 years. BTC broke the $19,860 mark. OTC trading platforms noted a significant increase in trading volumes, mainly due to large investors. The Genesis platform reported a six-fold increase in volume compared to a record high in 2017. Investors have become active on specialized platforms, preferring them to messengers. The trading volume on the derivatives market on the Genesis platform reached $600 million in a week. The Galaxy Digital platform has seen similarly rapid growth.

 Ethereum 2.0 finally launched

After several years in the making, the genesis block of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain has finally seen the light of day. The upgrade to the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap was launched as planned, at just after 12 pm UTC on Dec. 1. The launch suffered no hiccups and immediately reached the required stake participation rate to finalize the blockchain. The biggest change is the introduction of a proof-of-stake consensus to the network, which has previously been purely based on the same proof-of-work consensus as Bitcoin. The transition to PoS paves the way for future planned upgrades to be implemented, such as sharding to improve scalability. The launch will be especially welcomed by those in the decentralized finance community. The explosion of DeFi during 2020 saw a huge increase in traffic and gas fees on the Ethereum network.

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 Trading activity related to cryptocurrencies is breaking records

Another rise of Bitcoin, as well as the recent launch of the zero phase of Ethereum 2.0, led to records of trading activity on the Binance crypto platform. This is stated in the report of the exchange. At the end of November, platform analysts stated a historical maximum of the trading volume within 24 hours. It was $ 37 billion. Binance's cumulative turnover reached $ 50 billion last month. Serious activity in the market was facilitated by the entry of the BTC value to the next historical maximum in the spot market. Over the past month, bitcoin has grown by almost 40%. Its capitalization has surpassed the $350 billion mark.

 ETH miners earned more in November than in October

Ethereum miners' profits increased significantly last month compared to October. It amounted to $262 million. However, this figure is still lower than the August and September levels. A significant portion of the profits for Ethereum miners came from transaction fees. The growth of this type of income is associated with the development of the direction of decentralized financing and the number of transactions. In November, miners earned $62 million thanks to transaction fees. In September, ETH miners earned $321 million. 50% of this amount is made up of transaction fees.

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 The largest software manufacturer intends to invest another $400 million in the purchase of BTC

MicroStrategy, a software manufacturer, wants to raise $400 million for investing in Bitcoin. Previously, the company invested $475 million to purchase the main cryptocurrency. The software manufacturer has released a statement about plans to issue convertible bonds. The maturity date for them is set until December 15, 2025. The securities will be available only to qualified institutional investors. In 2020, MicroStrategy bought BTC several times. In August, the manufacturer invested $ 50 million in the first crypto coin. The next month, the share of the company's crypto assets increased by another $175 million. In early December, Michael Taylor, the CEO of MicroStrategy, wrote on Twitter that the company acquired 2,574 bitcoins for $50 million. Currently, the software manufacturer owns 40,824 BTC.

 One of the Ripple creators sold almost 30 million XRP

Jed McCaleb, one of the founders of Ripple, sold another 29.5 million XRP. After leaving the Ripple project, the businessman received 9 billion XRP tokens. Six years ago, he announced that he plans to liquidate these crypto assets. After a lengthy conflict with Ripple Labs over this, McCaleb entered into an agreement with former partners. According to the document, the entrepreneur was able to sell XRP by tying them to the global trading volume. Under the terms of the agreement, McCaleb was entitled to sell up to 1.5% of the world's XRP trading volume daily. It is important to consider that XRP reached a new all-time high in November. Therefore, the speed with which an entrepreneur began to get rid of crypto assets could negatively affect the market. “After the radical increase in XRP volume (according to CMC) it only made sense that Jed would increase his sales, as per his deal with Ripple. Today 9.9 million XRP were sold, making it a new ATH of Jed sales. At this rate, Jed's 3.836B will run out after 387 days”, says cryptoexpert Leonidas Hadjiloizou, ”said Leonidas Hadzhiloizu. McCaleb owns about 3.7 billion tokens.

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 Bitcoin price correction continues, dashing hopes of $20K in 2020

Bitcoin will probably not reach $20,000 this year if a key technical price level isn't reclaimed soon. Bitcoin continues to be in correction mode with its price dropping below $17,600 on Dec. 11, the lowest level since November. Every beautiful rally comes to an end and gets followed by a corrective period. This correction seems to have started with the price currently down more than 10% since touching a new all-time high ten days ago. Meanwhile, some recent news namely the proposed crypto regulation in the United States is bringing fear to the otherwise euphoric market.

 SEC Commissioner: authorities must abandon excessive regulation of crypto market

Regulators need to find acceptable options in order to finally accept the principle of personal freedom of citizens, embodied in the very concept of digital currencies. Also, the authorities must abandon the idea of excessive control over the crypto industry, said SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce. In one of her recent speeches, she noted that the digital asset market and the sector of decentralized finance creates certain difficulties for the authorities. Regulators, however, should not restrict industry development with excessive regulatory requirements. “If we were instead to steamroll the technology’s liberty-enhancing features under the weight of regulation, we would lose a lot of the power of the new technology to afford opportunities to people whose autonomy has previously been curbed by, for example, limited access to the traditional financial system, geographic location, social standing, or subjection to a repressive government,” Peirce said.

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Estonia has revoked licenses from more than 1,000 crypto companies

The Estonian government revoked the licenses of more than 1,000 cryptocurrency companies. This happened amid increasing control over the digital asset industry and countering money laundering. As the representative of the State Commission on Combating Money Laundering noted, "monitoring and regulation" of crypto service operators "constantly needs increased attention." He said that in the past year, many projects have received licenses to work with crypto projects. And amendments to the country's legislation, which came into force in 2020, have tightened the licensing of operators of services related to digital assets. “In 2020, the Financial Intelligence Agency revoked more than 1000 licenses to operate from companies dealing with crypto assets. At the same time, there are still around 400 companies offering services in this area in Estonia. The connection of many of these companies with Estonia is minimal, and the clientele of some companies is from distant countries, ” the Ministry of Finance said.

Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) issues the first cryptocurrency license

Last November, the SFC unveiled new rules for regulating cryptocurrency exchanges in the region. Then OSL Digital Securities Ltd became the only company to apply for a license. On August 25, the SFC tentatively approved an application for a license of a digital asset trading platform operator, but the company had a number of undisclosed conditions to meet. And on December 15, a press release was issued by BC Technology Group, of which OSL is a member, which states that it has finally obtained a license that allows the company to conduct regulated brokerage and automated digital asset trading services. In addition to Hong Kong's licenses, OSL has also applied to the Monetary Authority of Singapore for a digital asset license under the Payment Services Act. First of all, the news is interesting because institutional investors will get access to trading Bitcoin, Ethereum and security tokens. This event is expected to generate interest from industry players to join the market.

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 Robinhood is accused of manipulating inexperienced Investors

The Massachusetts authorities have filed a lawsuit against the fintech company Robinhood, which has developed a popular securities trading application. The company was accused of prompting inexperienced users to take risky trades and failed to protect customers from technical glitches in the application. Robinhood, according to the US state, violated new local law. It obliges investment brokers to prioritize their activities in the interests of clients. However, Robinhood, according to the regulator, has provided hundreds of Massachusetts users with no investment experience the ability to trade options. They won approval despite the company's stated policy of screening clients for experience before allowing them to buy and sell options. The company now faces fines.

 American Express has invested in a crypto trading platform

The venture branch of American Express has invested in a crypto trading platform for institutional investors, FalconX. Since the end of the last investment round in May 2020, FalconX has grown by 350% in revenue. According to its own data, the company serves 250 institutional clients. The trading platform's transaction volumes reached about $3 billion per month. “We’re seeing growing interest from traditional asset managers who are adding cryptocurrencies as an inflationary hedge, catalyzed by recent macro-economic policies,” said FalconX CEO Raghu Yarlagadda. FalconX offers institutional clients the ability to access cryptocurrency markets through a single platform for trading, lending and clearing.

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 Not only COVID-19 year, but the most successful since crypto winter

The Coronavirus did not make any effort to prevent crypto enthusiasts from trading. According to Mass Media, 2020 turned out to stay quite successful in the context of assessing the size of investments in cryptocurrency projects. Crypto companies did their best to raise about $ 3.1 billion. All in all, it took near 800 transactions to reach the score. Despite serious downgrade of players activity during the first half a year, the situation has slightly changed by the end of 2020. For example, BAKKT finished trade round with 300 million dollars in total. The majority of funds came from M12, PayU system, CMT and The Boston Consulting Group.

 Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, Florida, declared BTC as a stable investment portfolio

If you have never heard about this man before, now it is high time. The official said: "Great insight into how Bitcoin has been a stable investment during and incredibly unstable year."  The mayor wrote that he learned about BTC from Tyler Winklevoss and Anthony Pompliano. And «Pomp» has declared Miami is on its way to become Bitcoin city, whatever it means. So, for now crypto educated politic states Miami truly can be the first crypto-friendly city across the whole country. No doubt that South Florida takes its leadership to proceed crypto industry, based on advanced technologies. Suarez also said that he was reading the book "Bitcoin Billionaires", which was authored by Tyler Winklevoss.

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 Analytics make predictions concerning trial SEC against Ripple

The regulator believes that the XRP company should be responsible for the unregistered issue of securities in the guise of tokens that the project has been selling for 7 years. To remind you, Ripple has raised about $1.3 billion. According to Adam Cochran, a partner of Cinneamhain Ventures, the trial court will take years, though Ripple Company does not have many chances, like EOS or kin do. While seeking the arguments Cochran says that Ripple is completely falling under the jurisdiction of the SEC. The defendants are Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and his companion Chris Larsen. Nonetheless, XRP assets are still trading on global markets. To remind you, the SEC recognized tokens as unregistered securities. Andrew Tugarin, leading partner of GMT Legal, has no doubt that the proceedings will most likely not be in favor of Ripple. «It seems that a large fine will be imposed on the project itself and its founders personally» - analytic said.

 An outside opinion: it is high time for market correction

The total share of TOP-1 BTC on the crypto market for the first time this year has reached 69.3%. Mikhail Karkhalev, the analyst of the crypto platform Currency.com believes that the key driver of BTC's market share growth was a decrease in Ripple's capitalization and its future trial. Over the past 7 days the token price has decreased by 54%. The fall comes amid SEC accusations against Ripple and the refusal of several companies to work with XRP at once. «In my opinion, there are no prerequisites for a decrease in the market share of BTC. The main cryptocurrency, in contrast to the same Ethereum (ETH), is held near the price maximum, while Ethereum has lost positions. The market is ready for a slight correction to $ 21-20 thousand for BTC. The price may reach these levels in the first half of January, after which it will move back to growth in search of new highs.