Cryptocurrency
One of the most popular innovations of crypto and blockchain technology is decentralized finance, or DeFi. DeFi offers users a complete range of financial services, from loans to lending to insurance, all governed by automated smart contracts. https://simplenotch.com/ This means no involvement required from legacy institutional providers, even for high-value transactions where participants don’t know each other. Most DeFi protocols issue their own cryptocurrencies, generally known as DeFi tokens, which provide holders access to these services on their network. Some examples of DeFi tokens include DAI, UNI and LINK.
Tokens are digital assets that people build and operate on existing blockchain technologies. Unlike coins, tokens do not have their own blockchain. Instead, tokens are built on blockchain technology, utilizing smart contracts to facilitate business transactions, such as an investor funding a new project and receiving stake in it.
You probably remember NFT mania from 2021 when CryptoPunks and Bored Apes were all the rage on social media. But the underlying technology behind non-fungible tokens has many valid use cases. By “minting” an NFT, a digital file is imbued with a unique fingerprint (hash), a token name and a symbol. This newly created, one-of-a-kind asset can then be stored on the blockchain, traded or sold at the owner’s discretion. The true and rightful owner will always be determinable by the permanent record on the blockchain. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, NFTs are “non-fungible”, meaning they can’t be exchanged 1 for 1.
The original meme coin that started it all is Dogecoin (DOGE), branded around the “doge” Shiba Inu dog meme. But what began as a joke became a verifiable cult asset as users flocked to the asset. As a result, more meme coins began to crop up.
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TRON was founded in 2017, and TRX was initially valued at $0.0019 per token. At its peak in 2018, TRX spiked as high as $0.2245, for a gain of 11,715% in a matter of months. TRX is currently valued around $0.18.
Terra’s LUNA token also hit new all-time highs as the layer 1 blockchain surpassed Binance Smart Chain to become the second-largest DeFi ecosystem. The price of LUNA increased nearly 140 times, spurred by demand for the project’s TerraUSD stablecoin, which reached a landmark market capitalization of $10 billion this week.
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TRON was founded in 2017, and TRX was initially valued at $0.0019 per token. At its peak in 2018, TRX spiked as high as $0.2245, for a gain of 11,715% in a matter of months. TRX is currently valued around $0.18.
Terra’s LUNA token also hit new all-time highs as the layer 1 blockchain surpassed Binance Smart Chain to become the second-largest DeFi ecosystem. The price of LUNA increased nearly 140 times, spurred by demand for the project’s TerraUSD stablecoin, which reached a landmark market capitalization of $10 billion this week.
Cryptocurrency price
MicroStrategy has by far the largest Bitcoin portfolio held by any publicly-traded company. The business analytics platform has adopted Bitcoin as its primary reserve asset, aggressively buying the cryptocurrency through 2021 and 2022. As of August 30, 2022, the company had 129,699 Bitcoin in its reserve, equivalent to just over $2.5 billion.
Another point that Bitcoin proponents make is that the energy usage required by Bitcoin is all-inclusive such that it encompasess the process of creating, securing, using and transporting Bitcoin. Whereas with other financial sectors, this is not the case. For example, when calculating the carbon footprint of a payment processing system like Visa, they fail to calculate the energy required to print money or power ATMs, or smartphones, bank branches, security vehicles, among other components in the payment processing and banking supply chain.
As compensation for spending their computational resources, the miners receive rewards for every block that they successfully add to the blockchain. At the moment of Bitcoin’s launch, the reward was 50 bitcoins per block: this number gets halved with every 210,000 new blocks mined — which takes the network roughly four years. As of 2020, the block reward has been halved three times and comprises 6.25 bitcoins.
One of the biggest winners is Axie Infinity — a Pokémon-inspired game where players collect Axies (NFTs of digital pets), breed and battle them against other players to earn Smooth Love Potion (SLP) — the in-game reward token. This game was extremely popular in developing countries like The Philippines, due to the level of income they could earn. Players in the Philippines can check the price of SLP to PHP today directly on CoinMarketCap.