Bitcoin Price: US$ 29,186.01 (-1.75%)
Ethereum Price: US$ 1,839.90 (-1.79%)
Litecoin, a prominent blockchain often likened to “digital silver” in contrast to Bitcoin’s “digital gold,” has completed its third “halving” event, reducing miner rewards from 12.5 LTC to 6.25 LTC. This anticipated milestone, coded into Litecoin’s structure, maintains security while encouraging wider adoption. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs predicts rapid AI investment growth, potentially surpassing the impact of electricity’s discovery or personal computers, with estimated global investments of $200 billion by 2025, gradually leading to substantial productivity gains between 2025 and 2030. Despite a Fitch credit downgrade and concerns over Binance, Bitcoin struggles to recover, reflecting broader market downturns, marked by the Nasdaq’s 2.3% loss, and a rise in the 10-year Treasury yield to 4.08%. Fitch’s downgrade cites fiscal concerns, rising debt, and governance erosion, while the Binance report significantly affects Bitcoin’s price and trading volume.
Australia’s Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has taken legal action against eToro Aus Capital Limited, the Australian arm of the social investing platform eToro, alleging violations of regulatory obligations related to their leveraged derivative contract called contract for difference (CFD). ASIC claims that eToro’s targeting was overly broad, and its screening process was lenient, leading to around 20,000 clients losing money while trading CFDs between October 2021 and June 2023. In the context of increased scrutiny on crypto firms in Australia, this action follows ASIC’s recent crackdown on crypto-related activities, including Binance Australia. In Hong Kong, HashKey Exchange and OSL Digital Securities have secured the first crypto exchange licenses under a new framework that permits exchanges to serve retail customers, signaling a strategic shift towards catering to broader market demands. Meanwhile, Coinbase, the prominent US crypto exchange, has announced that its Base layer-2 blockchain, developed with Optimism’s OP Stack, is set to open to the public on August 9. This step follows a developer testing phase and coincides with Coinbase’s “Onchain Summer” initiative, designed to foster creative applications on the Base platform.
Binance, the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, has unveiled plans to enable bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) trading pairs with First Digital’s FDUSD stablecoin, initiating fee exemptions for BTC/FDUSD trades and 0% maker fees for ETH/FDUSD transactions. This strategic move aims to diversify stablecoin pairs following regulatory constraints on Binance USD (BUSD), with previous success witnessed in TrueUSD (TUSD) trading, which saw significant volume growth and a $3 billion market capitalisation for TUSD. MicroStrategy’s co-founder, Michael Saylor, asserts steadfast commitment to Bitcoin, affirming that the company will persist in its Bitcoin-centric strategy despite potential approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), emphasising unique differentiators in their approach. The company intends to augment its Bitcoin holdings, potentially utilising proceeds from a $750 million share offering. Additionally, Curve Finance, a lending protocol, has ceased governance token rewards for select liquidity pools affected by recent exploits, overseen by the Curve emergency decentralised autonomous organisation (Curve E-DAO), subject to potential future reversals through a comprehensive Curve DAO vote.
Source:
https://coindesk.com
https://cointelegraph.com
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