Solo miner bags entire block reward with just 1PH of power
An astoundingly lucky solo miner solved block number 803,821 late Friday night and won the entire 6.25 bitcoin block reward, worth approximately $162,000.
Con Kolivas, the admin of Solo CKPool, announced the unlikely news on X, formerly Twitter, saying that this particular miner had only 1 petahash of computing power, yet still came out on top. “A miner of this size would only solve a block solo on average once every 7 years at current [difficulty],” Kolivas wrote. The miner kept nearly all the bitcoin (BTC) he won, aside from a 2% fee that went to Solo CKPool for its upkeep.
Source: Blockworks
Here's a chart comparing bitcoin liquidations on Thursday versus the FTX collapse in November 2022.
This feels like yet another sign of the drying #liquidity markets we have seen over the last few weeks. Source: The Kobeissi Letter
Coinbase Lands Regulatory Approval to Offer Crypto Futures Trading in US
Coinbase Financial Markets, Inc. announced this Wednesday that it has secured approvals from both the National Futures Association (NFA) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). That means that the firm can now operate as a Futures Commission Merchant (FCM), and will therefore be able to offer investments in crypto futures to eligible customers in the United States.
Coinbase is now poised to be the pioneer in offering U.S. clients both traditional spot crypto trading and regulated crypto futures.
Source: Decrypt
Nvidia ($NVDA) was the big loser, down over 8% on the week (its biggest weekly loss since Sept 2022...)
Will the stock repeat a similar de-bubbling process than the one which took place after the crypto/mining boom? (at the time, Nvidia chips were seeing growing demand from the crypto miners but the buzz faded when crypto crashed) Let's keep in mind that Nvida is now a much BIGGER WEIGHT in the key US equity indices than it used to be at the time... Source: Bloomberg, www.zerohedge.com
Ethereum gas fees? Charge it, please! Visa proposes to let you pay with card
Visa has wrapped up testing a way for users to pay on-chain gas fees directly in fiat with a credit or debit card, the payments giant said on Thursday. The experiment, which was conducted on the Ethereum Goerli testnet, uses a paymaster contract to sponsor gas fees on behalf of users, according to a statement.
It means users can send blockchain transactions without having to worry about maintaining a balance of ether. Visa believes the contract could make transactions more accessible to a wider range of users.
“Our experiment aims to offer a promising approach to substantially addressing the challenges of blockchain-based transactions,” Visa’s technical team wrote. “By leveraging the innovative concept of a paymaster, in conjunction with account abstraction and the ERC-4337 standard, we explored the potential for a process that could redefine blockchain-based transactions.”
Source: Blockworks
Bitstamp joins eToro, Binance.US in suspending trade for SEC-flagged tokens
Luxembourg-based Bitstamp is halting trade in the US for seven cryptos classified as securities by the SEC. From Aug. 29 onwards, the platform will discontinue trading for AXS, CHZ, MANA, MATIC, NEAR, SAND and SOL. In legal actions against Binance and Coinbase, the SEC asserted that these tokens, among others, met the standards of a security. Offering alleged securities on a crypto exchange brings about issues such as heightened regulatory oversight, potential legal liabilities, and regulatory complexities.
Bitstamp said in an announcement on Tuesday that new trades won’t be allowed with these assets from later this month, and any current trades will be halted.Users were prompted to complete any buy or sell transactions they wanted with the impacted assets before the deadline.
Source: Blockworks
OpenAI to Unleash New Web Crawler to Devour More of the Open Web
OpenAI has released a new web crawling bot, GPTBot, to expand its dataset for training its next generation of AI systems—and the next iteration apparently has an official name. The company trademarked the term "GPT-5," hinting at an upcoming release, while giving web publishers a heads up on how to keep their content out of its massive corpus.
The web crawler will collect publicly available data from websites, while avoiding paywalled, sensitive, and prohibited content, according to OpenAI. Similar to other search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex, however, the system is opt out—by default, GPTBot will assume accessible information is fair game. In order to prevent the OpenAI web crawler from ingesting a website, its owner must add a "disallow" rule to a standard file on the server.
Source: Decrypt
PayPal launches stablecoin tied to the US dollar, issued on Ethereum
PayPal is rolling out a new dollar-backed stablecoin.
The stablecoin, issued by Paxos Trust Co, was detailed in a statement published Monday morning by the American payments giant.
PayPal announced that customers who purchase PayPal USD will be able to transfer the stablecoin between “compatible external wallets” and PayPal. They will also be able to fund purchases with PayPal USD.
The stablecoin will be available starting Monday, and PayPal customers will be able to purchase, send, convert and fund purchases in the “coming weeks.”
The announcement marks the first time that a major US financial company has created a stablecoin. PayPal’s leadership confirmed the existence of the project in early 2022. PayPal began integrating crypto services in early 2021, allowing users to buy, sell and hold major digital assets like bitcoin and ether.
Source: Blockworks