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A surge in price has pushed Dogecoin, the meme-themed cryptocurrency, to the fifth-largest market capitalization. In a matter of three days, DOGe has seen a price increase of more than 400%.

On April 13, DOGE sat at $0.07 apiece. At the time of publication, DOGE is trading at about $0.34. 

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Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer created the Litecoin-forked cryptocurrency in 2013. The coin began as a joke, modeling the name and logo on the Shiba Inu from the popular doge meme. A cult following sprung up around the projects in places like Reddit and Twitter, though those early days were marred by scam activity within the small community.

Recently that following has grown to include investors like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and meat snack maker Slim Jim. Some are attributing this most recent price bump to a new campaign by the meat product company. Over the past few months, it’s been engaging in Doge and Dogecoin content in an effort to boost sales and its social following.

On April 13, just before the new price run began, Slim Jim announced it would begin selling a Doge x Slim Jim product on April 20, another meme nod, to benefit World Central Kitchen. It features the classic meat stick in a rocket-branded tube aimed at a moon-like cap.

DOGE’s social following also includes names like Musk and other, less tech-focused celebrities like musician Gene Simmons and celebrity chef Guy Fieri. Celebrity interest in DOGE followed the start of the craze in 2020 when investing in the cryptocurrency became a trend on the social media platform TikTok. The campaign sought to get DOGE to one U.S. dollar.

Musk and others jumped on board, tweeting that they had bought hefty sums of the coin and touting its promise with rocket ship emojis, placing DOGE in their bios and proclaiming “Dogecoin to the moon.” Even adult entertainment site Pornhub began accepting payments in DOGE.

The Dogecoin momentum is somewhat intertwined with the community behind the meteoric rise of GameStop and other so-called “meme stocks.” As the popularity of meme stocks skyrocketed, so did DOGE, hitting a new high of $0.02 on Jan. 28 of this year. It remains one of only seven cryptocurrencies offered on Robinhood, the popular brokerage app.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The governor of the Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, has laid out a tentative timeframe for the e-krona, its planned digital currency.

On April 15, Bloomberg reported that Riksbank governor Stefan Ingves said that five years “is a reasonable target” for the Swedish central bank to have an operational digital currency. While this is the first time that the bank has put out such an estimate, earlier optimism for the e-krona means this timeline is not quite as rapid as some might have predicted.

A member of the European Union, Sweden has long elected to remain outside of the eurozone in favor of its national currency, the krona. Sweden’s digital payments ecosystem is extremely active, with cash usage in the country among the lowest in the world.

Many consider Sweden a frontrunner within Europe to release a functional central bank digital currency, or CBDC, because it is free of the need to appease the wide range of national interests that any digital euro will need to address. 

The Riksbank itself has always been fairly conservative in its estimates of timing for a CBDC launch.

At the end of last year, a leading official in Sweden announced the launch of a review of an e-krona’s practicality that is not scheduled to end until November 2022. 

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

On April 14, the Central Bank of Russia released a comprehensive strategy for the next three years of payments development in the country.

Prominent among the CBR’s strategy is an emphasis on its digital ruble. Staff at the central bank had presented some of these objectives last week. The recent report highlights much broader ambitions.

In addition to repeating previous statements that any potential digital ruble will need to have the “properties of cash and non-cash,” the CBR is planning for open APIs that will allow the digital ruble to integrate with any other private payment platform. Initial pilots are scheduled for 2022.

The new report also highlighted the successes of Russia’s “Faster Payments System.” Launched in 2019, the FPS had more than doubled in both number and the total value of transactions between Q3 and Q4 of 2020, reaching over 67 million transactions worth 459 billion rubles ($6 billion).

Another repeated theme in the CBR’s report is “sovereignty.” Two critical ways of reading this are the unique situation of Russia’s financial system domestically and internationally.

Domestically, Russia is the largest country in the world. East of the Urals, it is also one of the least densely populated and has historically been plagued with limited access to networks, from roads to the internet and, indeed, payments. Consequently, priorities for the national payments system are an integration of all of the Russian Federation.

Internationally, Russia faces ever-widening sanctions from the US and EU. On Thursday, President Biden announced a fresh escalation of sanctions on actors in Russia’s tech and industry, as well as the central bank itself. The Russian government has indicated an interest in blockchain as a means of getting around such sanctions in the past. This week’s sanctions targeted entities that provided Russian government media operatives with fake KYC documents that those operatives used to access cryptocurrency services. 

Relative to many other central banks, the CBR has shown less concern over KYC when it comes to proposals for its digital currency.

Meanwhile, the Russian Ministry of Finance last week publicized work on a bill that would effectively mandate that local financial institutions serve clients who have fallen under US sanctions.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Cathie Wood’s ARK funds purchased more Coinbase shares on Thursday, worth over $110 million.

Specifically, ARK Investment Management bought a total of 341,186 Coinbase shares, Reuters reported Friday. ARK purchased the shares across three funds — ARK Innovation ETF, ARK Fintech Innovation ETF, and ARK Next Generation Internet ETF — valued at over $110 million at Thursday’s close price of $322.75.

The latest purchase brings ARK’s total Coinbase shareholding at worth over $350 million. On Wednesday, i.e., when Coinbase listed on Nasdaq, ARK bought 749,205 shares for $246 million.

In terms of the total number of shares, ARK now owns over 1 million shares of Coinbase.

Coinbase is trading slightly down in pre-market hours from its Thursday close, at about $319 per share, according to data from Google Finance.

Coinbase listed at $381 on Wednesday and hit a high of nearly $430 before closing down at around $328 on that day.

Based on Thursday’s close, Coinbase’s valuation stands at around $84 billion, for its fully diluted capitalization of 261.3 million shares.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Quick Take

• Upcoming DEX updates will lead to an increased userbase and capital efficiency.
• A small part of Uniswap’s volume was generated as a result of wash trading.
• Retail users still create most of the trading volumes on Uniswap.
• SushiSwap is very capital ineffective in its current implementation.
• Bots are already starting to play the leading role in SushiSwap’s trading volumes.

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Cryptology Asset Group, the Malta-based crypto investment firm, has raised €32 million through a share issue. The money will be used to invest in crypto and blockchain startups.

The company announced on April 15 that it had successfully issued 128,375 new shares and sold 31,625 treasury shares to institutional investors. Cryptology trades on several German exchanges including Börse Düsseldorf, Gettex and Tradegate.

Cryptology is now exploring options for further capital raising, which include potentially issuing a convertible note or bond structure. The company has hired ICF Bank AG to assist with the process.

Additionally, the firm has announced that it is “exploring the possible acquisition of crypto assets,” such as bitcoin, for its corporate treasury.

Cryptology was founded by German financier Christian Angermayer’s family office Apeiron Investment Group.

“Cryptology is benefiting significantly from the substantial increase in the adoption of crypto assets – and we are still only at the beginning here. There is no question that bitcoin will establish itself permanently as digital gold and a digital store of value,” said Angermayer.

Cryptology recently led a €30 million investment in Cologne-based neo-broker Nextmarkets, alongside British billionaire Alan Howard. The firm also counts Galaxy Investment Partners CEO Mike Novogratz as an adviser.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Crypto exchange Binance announced Friday that it has burned over 1 million BNB tokens, worth about $595 million, in its latest quarterly burn.

This 15th quarterly BNB burn is the highest one ever carried out by the exchange in dollar terms. This is because the price of BNB jumped more than 16 times during the quarter, from around $35 to around $600.

“Burning” refers to the process of permanently removing a crypto token from circulation. When Binance launched BNB in 2017, it committed to burning a total of 100 million BNB, which is half of its supply.

Reduced supply of a thing tends to increase its price and benefits its owners. In this case, Binance and BNB holders.

To date, Binance has burned 15.3% of its total BNB supply of 200 million tokens, according to The Block Research. About 35% of tokens are yet to be burned in the coming quarters and years.

Binance burns BNB each quarter based on its trading volumes of the previous quarter.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Beijing-based crypto mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain is launching a new mining model on the Ethereum network.

The firm announced on Friday that its AntMiner E9 is coming soon, which will be an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miner that runs on the Ethash algorithm. 

This move comes amid surging mining revenues on Ethereum, which has already driven up prices for both general purposed graphics processing unit (GPU) as well as ASIC mining equipment.

But Bitmain has yet to release the prices and tech specifications for E9, which builds on its AntMiner E3 that was launched in 2018.

It’s not clear how soon Bitmain will be able to launch the model to the market with shipment details as the world is going through a chip shortage at a global scale.

The most widely used Ethereum ASIC miner on the market is the A10 Pro made by Wuhan-based manufacturer InnoSilicon, which has a computing power of between 500 to 750 megahashes per second (MH/s), depending on the exact versions.

Quotes posted by Chinese mining hardware resellers show that even second-hand A10 Pro with a 500 MH/s of hashing power could change hands at over 70,000 yuan, or nearly $11,000 per unit.

An A10 Pro with a 500 MH/s of computing power is able to produce $55.91 on Ethereum mining revenue with a 98% gross profit margin, data from F2Pool’s miner profitability index shows. 

According to The Block’s data dashboard, Ethereum’s monthly mining revenue has been going up since October and reached $1.38 billion in March.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey has banned the use of cryptocurrencies for payments.

Announcing the news on Friday, the central bank said crypto-assets cannot be used directly or indirectly for payments, and no firm can provide such services.

“Payment service providers cannot develop business models in a way that crypto assets are used directly or indirectly in the provision of payment services and electronic money issuance, and cannot provide any services related to such business models,” said the central bank.

Cryptocurrencies pose significant risks, according to the central bank. They are not regulated by a central authority, are volatile, their transactions are irrevocable, and could be used for illegal activities due to their anonymous structure, said the central bank.

“Recently, some initiatives have emerged regarding the use of these assets in payments. It is considered that their use in payments may cause non-recoverable losses for the parties to the transactions due to the above-listed factors and they include elements that may undermine the confidence in methods and instruments used currently in payments,” said the central bank.

The regulation comes into force on April 30.

Bitcoin is currently trading down by around 3% at about $61,600, according to tracker TradingView.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Recent security incidents in several coal mines in China appear to have had a ripple effect on bitcoin’s mining hash rate.

Over the past two weeks, there have been three security accidents in coal mines in China’s Shanxi, Guizhou and Xinjiang provinces due to gas explosion and flooding, according to Chinese state media Xinhua.

The most recent ones that happened within the last two days in Xinjiang and Guizhou have already caused 12 deaths as well as 21 people trapped. The seriousness of the incidents has drawn high-level attention from relevant authorities, the report added. 

As a precaution, coal-based power stations in these regions have also started conducting self -inspection over security measures and have subsequently cut off power for big data centers in the area.

While most of the bitcoin mining farms in China operate on hydropower during the rainy summer, a majority of them would migrate to the Northern provinces of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia during the dry-season, which spans from October to May the next year.

The founder of Chinese bitcoin exchange AEX, who only goes by 37 Degrees on Weibo and also owns bitcoin mining farms in China, said on the social media that “big data centers in Xinjiang have basically all been shut down to conduct safety drills.” 

Although bitcoin mining farms in the region don’t have security issues themselves, the major coal mine incident in Xinjiang’s Hutubi County has caused power suspension at least for the time being. 

“It’s estimated that [data center] operations should resume in about a week from now,” he added. 

Indeed, the 24-hour hash rate on major Chinese bitcoin mining pools including F2Pool, Poolin, BTC.com, Antpool and Binance Pool all have had a notable decline in percentage terms that ranges from 10% to 35%, data from BTC.com shows.

© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.