The XBO Weekly #12 – Crypto News
Crypto market remains resilient to fears of contagion
Major crypto coins performed rather well in the week following the FTX meltdown, with most blue chips showing gains. Despite initially sinking to its lowest point in two years, Bitcoin (BTC) rose 1% over the week, while Ether (ETH) gained 4.5%, suggesting that the aftershocks and concerns about market contagion are subsiding. Dogecoin (DOGE) managed to steal the show in terms of trading interest after crypto podcaster and media firm founder David Gokhshtein predicted that Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Twitter owner Elon Musk would join forces and begin working together to enhance Dogecoin. The second largest proof-of work coin concluded the week up 28% at 99.8 cents, still a long way from its all-time high of 74 cents in May 2021.
Uniswap collects user data "to improve user experience"
The largest decentralised exchange app built on Ethereum that allows anyone to swap Ethereum-based tokens without requiring a sign-up process, shocked decentralisation supporters by announcing it collects certain data from its users in order "to make data-driven decisions that improve user experience." Purchases, transactions, wallet transfers, and interactions with smart contracts are among the public blockchain information it gathers, while off-chain data includes the user's device type, browser, and operating system, which may be connected to a wallet and its activities. Uniswap (UNI), whose coin saw a boost in price following the failure of major centralised exchanges, ensures that no names or IP addresses are collected.
MetaMask has begun recording user addresses
Another event this week that enraged the crypto community was the revision of MetaMask's privacy policy agreement, which states that the non-custodial crypto wallet (and gateway to blockchain apps) will begin collecting their users' IP and Ethereum wallet addresses during on-chain transactions executed with the default remote procedure call provider (RPC) Infura. RPC is a protocol for obtaining data and information from a programme running on a third-party computer server. Users can avoid this financial data harvesting by using their own Ethereum node or a third-party RPC provider, such as Alchemy or QuickNode, according to Consensys, the developers behind metaMask and Infura.
XBO featured Coin of the Week – Litecoin (LTC)
Litecoin, which debuted in 2011, was one of the first successful altcoins, seen as the silver equivalent to Bitcoin's gold. Litecoin (LTC) is similar to Bitcoin (BTC) in that it employs mining to authenticate transactions and create new coins. It was designed as a fork of Bitcoin, but with four times the supply and four times the speed for adding blocks of transactions, with the goal of making it more appealing to merchants. In 2017, Litecoin implemented "Segregated Witness," a method that allows cryptocurrencies to contain more transactions per block, and executed Lightning transactions, demonstrating its capacity to use a layered network architecture.
Litecoin's current price of $73 is approximately 80% lower than its all-time peak in May 2021 and 80% higher than its cycle low in June 2022. It is the 13th most valuable cryptocurrency, with a market valuation of $5.2 billion.
Buy, Sell, or Swap LTC - Simply and securely, with XBO.
Disclaimer: The above does not constitute financial advice. It is only intended for informational and educational purposes.
