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blockchain

Alibaba ’s Alipay & Taobao Platform to Launch Digital Yuan Pay Functions

Alibaba

Alibaba-An affiliate of the Chinese tech giant Alibaba has claimed that it will allow customers to pay with the digital yuan on its Taobao e-commerce platform, in addition to the market-leading Alipay e-payments platform.

Per Sina Technology, the announcement was made by Li Chen, Chief Compliance Officer of the Ant Group – Alibaba’s fintech arm. Ant operates Alipay and Alibaba’s online banking arms. Li Chen was quoted as telling attendees at a digital trade forum in Zhejiang:

“Alipay has joined the digital yuan acceptance network. It is the first payment platform to support the digital yuan.”

Li Chen added that a digital yuan wallet “fast payment function” had been launched in Taobao – allowing customers to use digital yuan holdings at checkout.

The official added that a slew of digital yuan-related services would be “launched in batches” in the weeks and months ahead.

The new Alipay link means that digital yuan holders in the pilot zone can also use their coins to pay for goods and services on Alibaba subsidiaries, such as Tmall-Mart, the tech giant’s “smart” online supermarket, the Hema chain of grocery stores, and its Ele.me food delivery network.

The media outlet added that Alipay and Taobao app users could get started with digital CNY pay right away – by simply updating their apps. At checkout, they can find prompts that lead them to digital yuan wallet payment options.

Alipay officials also added that users could search for a new “paying with the digital yuan” section in the Alipay app to “learn how to use” the coin.

Why Does it Matter if Alipay & Taotao Embrace the Digital Yuan?

Taobao is China’s answer to Amazon and is arguably its most popular e-commerce website, alongside JD.com. The latter has been exceptionally active in the digital CNY sphere, and has pioneered a range of giveaways in pilot zone areas.

Alipay and its closest rival WeChat Pay have dominated the Chinese e-payments market in recent years – and have cornered some 15% of the total national payments market. WeChat Pay is the brainchild of the tech titan Tencent.

The government has repeatedly claimed that the digital yuan is not being positioned as an Alipay/WeChat Pay rival, although some believe that Beijing is planning to break up the tech giants’ duopoly.

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blockchain

Ethereum Turns Deflationary Amid Market Turmoil – Future of Money?

Ethereum

Ethereum ’s native token ETH is once again turning deflationary, as more tokens are burned than new ones issued, leading some proponents to point to ETH as a future sound money.

The latest deflationary turn for ETH happened during the crypto market crash over the past few days, as transaction fees on ETH spiked as traders rushed to send tokens to and from exchanges. And as Ethereum users know by now, the network initiated its new token burn mechanism with the EIP-1559 upgrade in August 2021. The upgrade created a system where a portion of transaction fees are burned, making the issuance of ETH – at times – deflationary.

As a result of this new burn mechanism, more tokens are burned as more ETH is transacted with and transaction fees paid.

According to data from ETH tracking website Ultrasound.money, the ETH supply has declined steadily since October 8, and turned negative on November 9. Since then, the supply has continued to fall at a faster rate, reaching an annual -1% supply growth at the time of writing.

Ethereum

Worth noting, however, is that the reduction in ETH supply has come as prices of the token have nosedived along with the broader crypto market. Over the past 7 days, the price of ETH was down by more than 16% over the past 7 days, although it still remained almost unchanged when looking at the month overall.

Ethereum

Ethereum-Not a new idea

The idea of ETH as ultra sound money was brought up as early as in March of 2021 by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake in an interview on the Bankless podcast:

However, others are of a very different view, with for instance Bitcoin (BTC) proponents often arguing that the predictable and unchangeable issuance of BTC is what makes that sound money, and that the same cannot be said about ETH.

Among those who have argued for this is the early bitcoiner Kyle Torpey, who last year wrote in an op-ed for Cryptonews.com that ETH is far from ultra sound money.

In other words, the issue of whether ETH is – or can ever become – ultra sound money is still up for debate, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future.

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blockchain

Coinbase Mistake Gave Traders the Opportunity to Sell Crypto for 100x Price

Coinbase Mistake

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Coinbase Mistake-Whenever some major problem occurs with a crypto exchange, we will be reading about it everywhere the next day.

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This is not a good face for crypto exchanges, so they are always trying to not let the news get out but usually, they fail to do so.

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So it is surprising that today we are not reading about the things that went down on August 30, on Coinbase.

2 Coinbase Mistake

First reported by investfox.com, on August 30, Coinbase had a major technical bug that gave traders the opportunity to sell their cryptocurrencies for 100 times the price. This technical error occurred for those who used GEL (Georgian national currency) as their account currency. Traders who had crypto prices and their account balances displayed in GEL saw that their balances were showing astronomical prices.

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So what exactly happened? Coinbase is a US-based crypto exchange that primarily uses USD as the currency on their exchange, but they also allow traders to display balances in different currencies for traders’ convenience. For this, they need to implement exchange rates of different currencies with USD, and that is where the problem occurred. On August 30, the average exchange rate of USD and GEL was 1 USD for 2.88 GEL, so if traders had 10 USDC in their accounts and wanted to sell it for GEL, they should have received 28.8 GEL following the exchange rate. But in fact, traders were able to sell 10 USDC for 2880 GEL. 

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Here we can easily see where the problem occurred. Coinbase had a technical error that caused the exchange rate of USD and GEL to be set as 1 USD for 288 GEL. This was not present for only USDC, but every single cryptocurrency on Coinbase was priced for 100 times more than the market price. 

Coinbase Mistake

Traders were able to take advantage of this mistake and sell huge quantities of cryptocurrencies on Coinbase for astronomical prices. Most of these traders transferred their cryptos from different exchanges to Coinbase and sold them there. It is not yet known how much money exactly has Coinbase lost following this technical error, as they still remain silent regarding the issue and no comments have been issued. 

On the traders’ side, things are also not as good as you might think. Following these huge deposits, most Georgian banks started flagging the transactions as suspicious activity and stopped accepting any more deposits from Coinbase. This response from banks was really fast and because of that, a lot of traders didn’t manage to withdraw funds from Coinbase. Shortly after this, banks started to freeze accounts that received payments from Coinbase. Reports suggest that this was initiated by banks themselves and not following the request from Coinbase. 

Following these developments, Georgian traders who managed to take advantage of this error became vocal and demanded that their accounts be unfrozen. The main problem here is that banks freeze accounts and not the funds received, so traders can not access other funds they had in their accounts. Another reason for this outrage from traders is that they believe that they have done nothing wrong and the money they made legally belongs to them, and they have quite good reasons for that. 

One reason is that this is a financial exchange, and they were offering to pay certain money for certain assets. Combine this with one of the most famous trading strategies, arbitrage trading, which is when you find price differences between two exchanges and take advantage of that difference to make profits, and we see where they are coming from. Georgian traders believe that they have not done anything wrong and just followed the legal and accepted trading strategy of arbitrage. 

So we still don’t know what awaits these traders. Will they keep the money they made, or will Coinbase manage to convince banks to refund transactions? All that is left for these traders to do is wait for further developments.

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虛擬貨幣

Cryptocurrencies risk undermining sanctions against Russia

Cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrencies risk undermining sanctions against Russia, allowing Putin and his cronies to evade economic pain.

U.S. financial regulators need to take this threat seriously and increase their scrutiny of digital assets.

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usdt

Cryptocurrencies-Trading in Cryptocurrencies -for Beginners

This is what would-be investors should know about cryptocurrencies and crypto trading. Cryptocurrencies have been altering the financial market for a few years now. More and more would-be investors, who were skeptical at the beginning, are now considering investing in digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple or Shiba Inu. But beginners should not have their

Cryptocurrencies

This is what would-be investors should know about cryptocurrencies and crypto trading.

Cryptocurrencies -have been altering the financial market for a few years now. More and more would-be investors, who were skeptical at the beginning, are now considering investing in digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple or Shiba Inu. But beginners should not have their rose-colored glasses on. It’s important to educate yourself on cryptocurrencies and on trading issues. This is what you definitely need to know before placing your first investment in cryptocurrencies.

What Is Cryptocurrency?

In order to understand why some cryptocurrencies have been skyrocketing since their launch, you need to understand what a cryptocurrency is. Digital currencies are connected to databases that are organized decentrally – the so-called blockchains. Every blockchain consists of and for a certain project. Investors support the blockchain and its project. The better a cryptocurrency and a blockchain technology perform, the more lucrative it is for investors.

Blockchain technology is said to be able to alter public life in the future by simplifying the processing and transfer of data. That’s why experts predict a bright future for digital currencies and their blockchains.

In Which Crypto Should You Invest?

The first investment is the hardest one, of course, as it can be a challenge to choose the right coin and trading platform. But if you´re well-prepared, demystifying Bitcoin and other famous cryptocurrencies isn’t hard.

Some investors claim that it’s best to invest in well-established coins like Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum. Others claim that you make the highest profits when purchasing modern meme coins like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu. Others believe that NFTs connected to video games – like Axie Unlimited – have the highest potential. It’s up to you to decide whether to bet on the safest card or on the most exciting one. Do make sure, though, to spread your capital on various assets so as to reduce the risk of loss.

What Crypto Trading Strategies Are There?

When investing in cryptocurrencies, it’s smart to leave personal fears and gut feelings aside. That’s why every investor should find a trading strategy to follow when it comes to buying and selling digital coins or tokens. These are the most common strategies that are easy enough to learn for beginners:

Day Trading:

Day trading is very popular with investors nowadays, and works well for crypto investments. As the digital currencies are very volatile, they sometimes underlie big fluctuations within a day. Day trading means buying and selling a certain asset within a day so as to exploit short-term fluctuations.

Hedging: Investors, who want to cancel out the risk of loss, can forego purchasing crypto coins and invest in CFDs instead. Doing so, the cryptocurrency acts as an underlying asset, and the investor bets on a future price. Hedging can be highly lucrative, but takes a lot of preparation, education and practice.

Hodling: Yes, the word is based on a typo, but is commonly used in the trading business, and means that investors hold their assets as long as possible in the prospect of stable growth that pays out in the long-run.

Trend Trading: Trend trading is possibly the most flexible trading strategy, as purchases and sales are based on how a specific asset is performing. Within trend trading, there are various subtypes, but they all have one thing in common: You have a close eye on the market and buy coins when their price is about to rise. Do you expect their price to fall, you get rid of them.

What Are the Risks of Cryptocurrency?

As mentioned before, cryptocurrencies are very prone to fluctuations. That means, it’s not only possible, but also likely to lose money with some investments. But losses only become a real thing, if you decide to sell the asset in a rush of panic.

Another thing you should have in mind is that the crypto market is not as well-regulated as the stock market, because digital currencies are not legally considered currencies. There have also been some cyber attacks on crypto markets.