Today in Crypto: Ethereum PoS Switch Date Set

Crypto hedge fund DeFiance Capital has reportedly been “significantly affected” and condemned when rival fund Three Arrows Capital was liquidated, DeFiance posted on Twitter Friday (July 15).

DeFiance CEO Arthur Cheong said there was “no visibility” regarding the Three Arrows’ accounts or terms, and the post said Cheong only learned of the problems when the news broke last month.

“Arthur Cheong is committed to taking all necessary steps to protect, preserve and recover all assets that are and were owned in connection with DC’s business,” the company said.

In other news, the crypto market has had a higher trend recently, with decentralized financial currencies (DeFi) leading the way with double-digit percentage growth, CoinDesk wrote on Friday.

The report noted that the rally for DeFi was not a sure thing for the long-term future, with the basics still not very strong.

“Sure, we see some rally in the DeFi coins so far, but fundamentally nothing has changed. The total value that has been locked has been destroyed,” said crypto-financial services firm Amber Group, according to the report.

Meanwhile, a previously named debtor to Celsius Network has been revealed to be EquitiesFirst, a specialist finance company known for lending cash to executives held against shares.

As the Financial Times noted, the money owned by EquitiesFirst is a large part of Celsius’ assets, which will be part of how customers try to get some of their savings back.

In other Celsius news, the difficult company’s customers still have a way to go when it comes to seeing if their money comes back, Reuters wrote on Friday.

Several lawyers told Reuters that customers should expect a rough ride now, as they are waiting for some kind of clarity about what happens to their money since Celsius froze withdrawals last month.

In addition, the Ethereum Foundation’s Tim Beiko has said that the merger, or the transition to a new Ethereum design, can take place in the week of 19 September.

This will see Ethereum change from the old energy-intensive Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) system, which will be more efficient and cut energy consumption by over 99%.

In other news, Bloomberg reported on Saturday (July 16) that the Swedish Minister of Energy Khashayar Farmanbar has said that the country may soon become less hospitable for bitcoin mining.

This comes when the country is looking at whether to provide electricity for things like steel mills, which can create jobs, or to add more energy to bitcoin mining. Farmanbar recently said that the country needed energy for “more useful things than bitcoin”.

Furthermore, the strategy of holding bitcoin overnight, once held up as triumphant, may not hold water.

The strategy involved buying bitcoin up close and selling at the next opening – which has usually received a large return, Bloomberg wrote on Sunday. Instead, the opposite has worked well – those who buy openly and sell at the close of the US market have done excellently, the report says.

Finally, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) has issued a warning about cryptocurrencies, citing the largely unregulated nature of them, according to a statement.

The message said that CBSL has not authorized any initial coin offering, mining or virtual currency exchange. CBSL also said that it will not allow any kind of electronic card to be used for virtual currency transactions.

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