Blockchain
Spike in digital land and NFT sales push Axie Infinity (AXS) price to new highs
Cointelegraph By Jordan Finneseth
The popularity and sale of NFTs have exploded over the past few months as many artists and collectors have been consistently selling entire NFT collections for millions of dollars.
One platform that has emerged as a fan favorite is Axie Infinity (AXS), a blockchain-based trading and battling game inspired by games like Pokémon and Tamagotchi. In the game, players collect, breed, raise, battle and trade token-based creatures known as Axies.
In the past two months, the market cap for AXS has increased 600% from $19.25 million to its current value of $115 million as users rush to the platform for a chance to win a rare and valuable Axie.
Data from Cointelegraph Markets and TradingView shows that the price of AXS has surged 74% over the past 24-hours, going from $1.78 on March 3 to a new all-time high of $3.10 on March 4 on the back of a 1,000% surge in the 24-hour trading volume.
While AXS has been in an uptrend for months, the altcoin really started to gain momentum at the beginning of February following the launch of Ronin, an Ethereum (ETH) network sidechain designed to help AXS users escape high transaction costs and network congestion on the Eethereum network.
Since Ronin’s launch on Feb. 1, the number of active users on the platform has skyrocketed as NFTs began to explode in popularity and mainstream news channels reported on record-setting sales for one-of-a-kind pieces of digital art.
Digital land in Lunancia, the player-controlled virtual realm of the Axie universe, is also attracting increased attention with one user recently spending a total of $1.5 million to purchase nine digital land plots.
Is this real life?!
Congrats to @Its_Falcon_Time and @seedphrase for making NFT History!
9 Genesis plots. 888.25 ETH!
$1,500,000
The. Largest. NFT. Sale. Ever
Why? pic.twitter.com/WcIbg6X1Z3
— Axie Infinity (@AxieInfinity) February 8, 2021
VORTECS™ data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro began to detect a bullish outlook for AXS on March 3, prior to the recent price rise.
The VORTECS™ score, exclusive to Cointelegraph, is an algorithmic comparison of historic and current market conditions derived from a combination of data points including market sentiment, trading volume, recent price movements and Twitter activity.
As seen in the chart above, the VORTECS™ score for AXS reached a high of 76 on March 3, just hours before the price began to rise from $1.84 to its new all-time high at $3.10.
Despite the recent pullbacks experienced in the wider cryptocurrency market, key on-chain metrics like Glassnode’s Reserve Risk indicator show that the Bitcoin rally is still in its early, suggesting that there is plenty of room for BTC to appreciate before it reaches the peaks seen in previous bull markets.
Continued strength for Bitcoin price is likely to translate into an increased interest in NFTs and as the nascent sector expands, projects like AXS could continue to rise in popularity.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.
Cointelegraph By Connor Sephton
Working with a licensed crypto company offers clients legal rights and helps ensure that they don’t run into regulatory trouble.
Financial regulators and international banking bodies around the world are cracking down harder and harder on crypto companies that do not follow regulations, and it’s not just securities law violations they’re looking for anymore. Most notably, any firm dealing with crypto could face serious consequences if it doesn’t have Know Your Customer and anti-money laundering standards in place.
One of the best ways to ensure that your cryptocurrency is in the hands of a company that won’t run into legal trouble is to choose one that is licensed by an internationally respected financial regulator. In addition, entrusting your crypto to a regulated entity can afford you some protections in the event that something goes wrong.
Holdnaut has been certified by the Singapore Fintech Association, an accreditation that in turn has been recognized by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Executives at the business are now seeking to become the first licensed and regulated entity within the crypto borrowing and lending space in Singapore.
The company has now been in operation for two years, and it has entered into a number of partnerships to enhance its offering further. A new collaboration with Jumio, which provides AI-powered, end-to-end identity verification and KYC solutions, ensures that Hodlnaut customers can quickly and easily get onboarded on the platform.
Hodling takes patience, nerves of steel, and discipline. Saving it safely can create a powerful incentive for staying on the rollercoaster.
Disclaimer. Cointelegraph does not endorse any content or product on this page. While we aim at providing you all important information that we could obtain, readers should do their own research before taking any actions related to the company and carry full responsibility for their decisions, nor this article can be considered as an investment advice.
Cointelegraph By Anirudh Tiwari
Dogecoin (DOGE) has been the talk of the crypto town in the month of April. On the first day of the month, it was trading in its usual $0.05 range. On April Fools’ day, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted about the coin yet again. His tweet read, “SpaceX is going to put a literal Dogecoin on the literal moon” — SpaceX being the aerospace company that Musk also founded. Although the tweet was intended as a joke, it set the Shiba Inu-themed meme token on a rally like no other.
Within two hours, the price rose by more than 35% to a peak of $0.07 before cooling off temporarily but still holding on to its gains. The next spike in price came on April 14, with the value of a single token doubling within a single day to break the $0.10 mark. This led Musk to again turn his attention toward the coin, tweeting a picture of the famous painting by Spanish artist Joan Miró, saying “Doge barking at the moon.” This tweet, along with the rising social sentiment, pushed the price to a high of $0.45 on April 16.
Kristin Boggiano, president and co-founder of CrossTower — a digital assets exchange — gave several reasons behind the surge in a conversation with Cointelegraph: “First, Coinbase listing has generated interest and buzz about crypto in general. Second, the popular Reddit forum ‘r/Wallstreetbets’ changed their rules for a day to allow discussion of crypto, which included DOGE.”
The price surge took Dogecoin all the way up to ranking fifth in the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. The market cap also briefly passed the $50-billion mark, which is a high figure for a coin that was conceived as a joke. At the time of writing, it has now slid down to rank seventh among the top 10, with a market capitalization of $36.45 billion. The price is also currently in correction trading at $0.28.
Eric Berman, senior legal editor, U.S. finance at Thomson Reuters, commented to Cointelegraph regarding Dogecoin’s retail demand: “The sentiment seems to be: Bitcoin is for the wealthy, Ethereum for the middle class, and Dogecoin is for the people.”
Doge Day marks a historical moment
Dogecoin fans celebrated April 20 as Doge Day with a symbolic push of the coin’s price to $0.420. It also wasn’t lost on the community that 4/20 was also associated with the marijuana day. Even though it was just for a brief moment, the community did seemingly come together to push the price of DOGE to its all-time high.
The rise in retail interest in Dogecoin even led to a system outage in Robinhood’s trading app due to the overload of orders. To make the coin more accessible to retail investors, on April 21, Robinhood even reduced the minimum order size of DOGE from 10 to 1. This entails that investors can now stack DOGE one coin at a time.
Joshua Frank, co-founder and CEO of The TIE — a social media analytics platform for cryptocurrencies — revealed that the social media sentiment for Dogecoin still holds strong, telling Cointelegraph:
“Long-term sentiment for DOGE went outside the standard deviation and posted a record 139 sentiment score on Jan. 28, 2021, after Redditors from r/SatoshiStreetBets discussed making Dogecoin the cryptocurrency equivalent of GameStop. Sentiment still holds strong at 72, and tweets from Elon Musk about Dogecoin on April 14 have helped fuel the surge.”
Since Dogecoin was founded in 2013, it’s essentially one of the older coins in the cryptosphere. The listing of the token on exchanges like Binance and OKEx has strengthened its presence in the cryptocurrency community with better access to liquidity, thus creating more stable trading flows and interest in coin accumulation.
OKCoin announced on Doge Day that the exchange would be listing the token in the last week of April. Speaking further about DOGE, Jason Lau, chief operating officer of OKCoin, told Cointelegraph:
“DOGE is relatively well suited for payments. It’s extremely fast and efficient — transactions cost less than a cent. Though it has less nodes than others, it is secured by proof-of-work and has never had any security issues.”
DOGE is currently used as a payment method for merchandise of NBA franchise Dallas Mavericks, which is owned by renowned investor Mark Cuban. He pointed out on Twitter that merchandise sales have grown 550% since the club announced that it would be accepting payments in Dogecoin. He also stated that the sports team will not be selling any of its accumulated Dogecoin from the sales and will be hodling it for the long term.
However, the sustainability of this rise in adoption is yet to be seen. Lau further said: “It’s important to point out that the Dogecoin codebase has not had any update in years and is not actively maintained.”
Boggiano further said that for some traders, the fact that Dogecoin was created as a joke becomes a fun experiment to see if they can gamble against other traders and come out ahead, thus essentially being used as a competitive tool:
“It may also be the crypto community ‘reclaiming’ their story. For people in the crypto community, we know that DOGE was created as a joke. It was created to mock Bitcoin. However, it’s turning out that Bitcoin is a legitimate asset class. Therefore, this could be a means to redefine the dialogue and understanding of cryptocurrencies in general.”
Could this be yet another pump and dump?
Dogecoin has been an instrument for pump and dump schemes in the past, so could this instance be yet another example of such activity? DOGE is a hugely inflationary coin by design without a decided maximum supply, which entails that there are 5 billion new coins entering the circulating supply each year. Due to the high supply, there is always an endless downward pressure on the token.
On the possibilities of this being another instance of a pump-and-dump scenario, Frank further stated that the rally has been controlled by a single entity that has accumulated at least “$1.3 billion worth of Dogecoin and abused the futures market by baiting shorts into creating a negative funding cycle that led to a derivatives blowout in excess of $760 million of liquidations.”
According to Twitter user Lightcrypto, the player marked up the price of the token many times while feeding into the social media narrative surrounding the meme token. Apparently, the player liquidated their spot holdings, creating over $760 million worth of liquidations in the derivatives market. On the contrary, Berman opined further on the surge in interest:
“The Dogecoin phenomenon seems little bit reminiscent of the Reddit/GameStop conversation from a couple of weeks back. While its popularity could be attributable in part to the recent Coinbase IPO, most cryptos would be experiencing a similar bounce. […] People [who] may feel like they missed out on the upside of Bitcoin are thinking that perhaps this is their shot.”
Although the price of Dogecoin is currently in a decline in what could be seen as a market-wide correction, it’s becoming clear that the token has found a use beyond the meme-coin status and is now seeing real growth within the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
At its height, its market capitalization even went past long-existing multi-national companies such as Barclays and Ford. Speaking on the sustainability of the coin, Lau further stated: “I would not underestimate DOGE’s staying power. For many, it was the first crypto they owned or the first one they heard of. Plus, it’s one of the few tokens that have deeply penetrated beyond the crypto community.”
Cointelegraph By Samuel Haig
While the agricultural industry stands to reap enormous efficiency savings through the adoption of distributed ledger technologies, many farmers lack the digital infrastructure to support the integration of blockchain solutions.
Speaking as part of Australian Blockchain Week on April 21, Bridie Ohlsson, the CEO of digital agricultural infrastructure provider Geora, discussed the challenges associated with fostering DLT adoption within primary industries.
“In ag tech, it’s been a problem of not having enough infrastructure, not there not being a use case,” she said. “As long as we have farmers calling up and saying, ‘Hey, your product looks great, but I don’t have internet on-farm’, that’s an infrastructure problem. And so we definitely need to be investing more in simply access to technologies.”
“In 2016, when we started piloting some of the applications of blockchain for [agriculture], we were moving people off pen and paper, and our biggest competitor was Excel.”
Ohlsson also argued that agriculture has failed to realize the promise of blockchain technology as a force for democratization so far, with the majority of DLT pilots being executed by large corporate entities:
“Blockchain has been a world of multimillion dollar pilots for vertically integrated companies. It hasn’t held true to its promise necessarily of democratizing access to technology, and it’s been too technical and too expensive for 570 million farmers globally to access.”
However, Ohlsson believes this is now changing, asserting the technology can now be offered at an affordable price, “rather than starting with a huge pilot agreement, a whole lot of legals, and hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank.”
“I think that it’s shifting, and I think that puts us in a good position now to capitalize on what we haven’t been able to deliver previously,” she added.
With Australia losing billions annually to food and wine products fraudulently claiming Australian origin in the global markets, an increasing number of firms are trying to use blockchain to certify provenance and drive savings across the agricultural supply chain. BeefChain, AgChain and VeChain are just some of the providers offering solutions.
Last year, Mastercard, Visa, and AliPay were revealed to be involved in the newly launched APAC Provenance Council, which focused on supply chain tracing pilots in the Asia Pacific region.
In 2018, Australia’s National Transport Insurance announced a trial in partnership with BeefLedger to bolster the supply chain integrity of beef exports.
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