☕️The Morning Cup: Ethereum’s Shanghai Upgrade is all but upon us, and it’s reigniting the debate around Bitcoin mining
Good morning, good day, and good evening. Welcome back to The Morning Cup. It’s your weekly recap of the latest in crypto news and your start to the week, no matter where you are. Don’t worry, we’ve selected just what you need to stay up-to-date, so you won’t spend time pouring through the news you don’t need, only the news you care about.
📈📉 Market Watch!
BTC passes $30K early in the week even as many await March’s Consumer Price Index report
Just today, BTC’s price showed enormous strength as it broke into $30K. This came after it traded sideways for the rest of last week as the market holds its breath. Although hitting $30K, many traders are waiting for the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to release the Consumer Price Index report for March in order to better understand where inflation is headed. Bitcoin has shown some defiance towards the trends of US-based ‘risk-on’ asset classes recently as it has outperformed assets like stocks. However a “decoupling”, as many enthusiasts like to point to, remains to be seen.
The top gainers for the last 24 hours on Poloniex are WBTC/USDT, BTC/USDT, RAM/USDT, POOLX/USDT, and SWISE/USDT.
🗞️ So, what happened?
💥The big story
Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade releases in 2 days, and it’s reignited the debate around bitcoin mining
Shanghai, the next Ethereum hard fork, is due to hit the mainnet on April 12 at 22:27:35 +UTC, bringing with it the ability to withdraw staked ETH. Nearly 18 million ETH is currently staked, the majority of it via intermediaries like Lido, a liquid staking platform. The upgrade will bring the ability for blocks on Ethereum to process withdrawal requests, both of the entirety of a validator’s stake or a partial withdrawal.
Not only will validators be able to withdraw staked ETH, they will also be able to withdraw rewards. Withdrawal of one’s rewards, which would be any ETH in excess of the requisite 32ETH to run a validator, is referred to as the aforementioned ‘partial withdrawal’.
Meanwhile, this latest step in Ethereum’s shift to a Proof of Stake consensus system has people relitigating the question of Bitcoin mining and its sustainability. According to an article by Wired, in 2022 BTC miners consumed an equivalent amount of energy to the Netherlands, “of which only just over a quarter came from renewable sources”.
In recent years, global regulatory shifts have led to the US becoming the global leader in Bitcoin mining operations, and according to investigative reporting by the New York Times, although these operations tout their use of renewable energy, fossil fuels like coal and petrol end up covering around 85% of the miners’ needs. This fact in addition to the fact that mining operations are often paid millions to shut their power off during times of need as well as reselling their electricity to the public at a significant markup is raising eyebrows.
According to several Bitcoin mining companies however, stats like the ‘85%’ mentioned above are pointed to to hold them to an unfairly high standard, and claim that they are no different from other companies that use a lot of power. In response to the New York Times, experts like Daniel Batton, who is a Bitcoin ESG (Environmental, social and governance) analyst, have accused the legacy publication of cherry-picking data and neglecting facts about mining’s increasing use of renewable energy.
Wired, The New York Times, Cointelegraph
Etherscan releases feature meant to counteract recent spate of ‘address poisoning’ attacks
A recent uptick in what are called ‘address poisoning’ scams has caused block explorer and analytics platform Etherscan to act. Address poisoning refers to a scam wherein scammers send a small/negligible amount of crypto to a victim with an address that has the same first and last couple of characters as the victim’s most recent send address. What happens then is less wary users copy that address and mistakenly send their crypto to the scammer instead of their intended recipient. And although this doesn’t mean that a user’s private keys or assets are vulnerable, a significant amount of funds have been lost because of the recent phishing method.
Etherscan’s response to this was to release a feature that hides zero-value token transfers by default. While this will be automatically applied to accounts, those that wish to can turn the new feature off in their settings.
Famed digital/NFT artist Beeple to be featured in new NFT collection
Everydays artist Beeple, who you may remember sold his art for a whopping $69million in 2021, is back again as a part of a new NFT collection by NFT collective Proof. The Moonbirds: Diamond Exhibition is an exclusive collection of 10,000 NFTs for Moonbirds holders and is composed of artists like Beeple, Mindzeye, and Terrell Jones. In a Twitter thread detailing some of the artists, Moonbirds, which is the project issuing the collection and that is built by Proof, said that the collection is meant to celebrate its dedicated members. The rest of the artists featured in the collection will be announced alongside a live event at this year’s NFT.NYC.
Just two months ago, Proof had signed on to be represented by United Talent Agency, one of the big three talent agencies in Hollywood, California. UTA has been putting an increasing amount of resources into Web3 talent, having signed the NFT project CryptoPunks as well.
Fortune debuts the “Fortune Crypto 40”
Fortune, the publication famous for its “Fortune 500” ranking of the world’s 500 biggest companies by revenue, recently debuted a new list: the Fortune Crypto 40". In partnership with crypto analytical firms and polling firm ResearchGate, Fortune’s new list seeks to give readers a comprehensive look at the 5 best crypto projects across 8 categories. Fortune, in its announcement of the new list, said that it was produced in part because “while there are plenty of lists, nearly all of them reflect the subjective preference of a handful of editors, and most focus on personalities rather than companies.”
The different categories are as follows: TradFi, CeFi, NFTs, venture capital, data & analytic companies, infrastructure firms, blockchain protocols, and DeFi. The reason for splitting the list into 8 categories, Fortune says, is to reflect the breadth and diversity of companies and their unique use cases within the broader industry. Some interesting results to come out of this were Ethereum taking the #1 spot for protocols ahead of Bitcoin and following this, the fact that all 5 DeFi protocols that made the list are based on Ethereum.
In its announcement, Fortune did acknowledge that although this list is meant to be as objective as possible, certain biases like the favoring of incumbents based on their influence and achievements will be present. However, the publication has also promised to pay mind to disruptive startups that will inevitably come down the line.
🔍 DYOR before trading
Polopedia
We released two articles to fill you in on the major upcoming upgrade to Ethereum, so check ’em out🤓:
🔶 Ethereum’s Shanghai and Capella upgrades: Differences and Dates
🔶 Shanghai gets a date of release! What you can look forward to and how to prepare.
Crypto Glossary
Capella refers to the upgrade to Ethereum’s consensus layer that will allow for unstaking staked ETH. To explain further, when Ethereum underwent its shift to PoS, it “merged” its consensus and execution layers. So with the upcoming upgrade, these two layers have their own names for it all. For the execution layer, it is the oft-mentioned Shanghai upgrade. For the consensus layer, it’s Capella. Because they are happening simultaneously, developers have begun referring to the whole upgrade as ‘Shapella’.
What’s happening here at Poloniex?
This is what Poloniex’s week looked like
Highlights for the week
Campaigns
Our recap of ongoing campaigns that YOU can get involved in!
Try Out Futures Copy Trading for a Share of 5,000 USDT
$75,000 BRISE Airdrop to Celebrate the Listing of Bitgert (BRISE)
And that about covers it for this week! Curious about our campaigns or upcoming events? Give us a shout in our Telegram channel- https://t.me/PoloniexEnglish
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Thanks for spending some time with us as we went over what’s going on. And wherever you are, from the team here at Poloniex, good morning, good day, and good evening!
