FreeCryptoCurrency.Me

More than 1.1 million ether — worth $2 billion — in accrued validator rewards will be available to be claimed, according to on-chain estimates, following Ethereum’s Shapella upgrade set to take place today.

Shapella will finally allow users and validators to access their staked ETH, which has been inaccessible since Ethereum introduced its staking layer, the beacon chain, in December 2020. The upgrade will enable regular depositors, independent validators and those utilizing staking service providers to access rewards accumulated over the past two years. These rewards will be paid out in “partial rewards” representing 6% of the total 18 million ETH currently staked on the network.

Two withdrawal options will be available through the Shapella upgrade: partial and full. Partial withdrawals will be distributed to validators automatically, maintaining their validator balance at 32 ETH. In contrast, full withdrawals involve closing the validator and recovering the entire staked balance.

Ethereum validator rewards would be paid out as partial withdrawals

With each Ethereum block, partial withdrawals will automatically be sent to up to 16 validators every 12 seconds. However, not all rewards will be claimed immediately. Only validators with a “0x01” withdrawal credential will participate in the automatic process when receiving the said rewards.

Only 44% have registered to claim these partial rewards, according to a report by crypto analytics firm Glassnode. This suggests that the remaining validators will not automatically receive these rewards unless they change their credentials after the upgrade goes live. In a hypothetical scenario where all validators sign up to receive these rewards, the process would take around five days for the current 562,000 validator entities, Glassnode estimated.

Also, the impact of the above partial withdrawals is separate from full withdrawals. Regarding full withdrawals or exits after Shapella, Ethereum will permit a daily limit of 1,800 validators to completely un-stake, allowing up to 57,600 ETH ($109 million) in full withdrawals per day. This equates to a maximum of 288,000 ETH in the first five days. This 1,800 limit is enforced due to a churn rate that is intended to prevent excessive un-staking since only eight validators per epoch can request to exit the network and close their stake.

Considering both partial and full withdrawals, around 1.4 million ETH ($2.6 billion) will be accessible or liquid within the first five days after Shapella. However, this figure represents the maximum liquid ether that could theoretically be withdrawn, and the actual amount of withdrawn and potentially sold ether will be determined at the time.

Glassnode estimated that 170,000 ETH ($317 million) may be sold by validators in the week following Shapella, which it believes could have an “acceptable impact” on the price of ether.

© 2023 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 firm said FTX Europe AG, the holding company of its European business, filed a petition for a Swiss moratorium proceeding, which was granted on Tuesday.

It’s wrong for a handful of billionaires to decide what’s good and safe for the world – even well-intentioned AI leaders. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Bitcoin rose/fell to $XX,XXX in the minutes following the report.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao — commonly known by his initials, “CZ” — said crypto regulation, rather than unclarity is a better option. However, he said that regulation by enforcement is bad.

“Having no regulatory clarity is the worst. Having bad restrictive regulations are better than that,” Zhao said at the Hong Kong Web3 Festival on Wednesday. “And then having unclear ones and then chasing people by enforcement is really, really bad.”

Zhao’s comments come after he and Binance were sued by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission last month for allegedly operating an “illegal” exchange and a “sham” compliance program. Zhao, at the time, called the suit “unexpected and disappointing.”

Actively engaging with crypto regulators

At today’s event, Zhao said there’s a “very natural tendency” for regulators to borrow guidelines from the traditional financial industry and apply them to crypto — but crypto is different and a nascent industry. It should be allowed to grow, and then there are “always nefarious players, scammers, etc.,” so “we need to find ways to limit those guys.”

Zhao said that most regulators don’t have crypto industry experience, like how traditional financial regulators have previously worked for banks and understand that industry better.

“So it’s really important to very actively engage with regulators,” he said. “We can’t just say, hey, look, this is decentralized. We are nowhere.”

There has been a drastic change in his tone in the last two years regarding regulations. Previously, Zhao had said Binance is a decentralized company with no headquarters. Over the last couple of years, Binance has hired several compliance executives, registered its entities with several regulators, and applied for licenses with others.

Zhao today said many regulators are “very acceptive,” while some are “still skeptical,” but “that’s fine,” adding: “We need to have conversations and we also need to have patience.”

Regulators may be helping crypto adoption

Governments trying to control crypto may, in fact, help grow its adoption, according to Zhao.

“They are trying to control crypto by shutting down banks, shutting down fiat access, putting more restrictions in the traditional financial markets, which actually pushes more people into crypto, which is doing the reverse of what they want to do.”

If they want to keep people in the traditional financial markets, they will need to help lower fees, make transactions easier and improve the user experience, Zhao said.

The lack of improvements in the traditional financial sectors is helping and will continue to support crypto adoption, he added.

© 2023 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.

Ether has underperformed bitcoin in the lead up to the Shapella upgrade, resulting in a 13.7% year-to-date decline in the ETH/BTC ratio.

Twitter will be added as a defendant in the class action lawsuit that alleges dogecoin is a Ponzi scheme being manipulated by Elon Musk, if the plaintiffs get their way, a lawyer in the case told The Block.

Lawyers for Tesla, the Dogecoin Foundation, and Musk asked a U.S. federal district court in New York to dismiss the case against them on March 31. The case was brought by investors who lost money when the price of dogecoin collapsed between 2019 and 2021, after Musk appeared to stop supporting the memecoin. During that period, Musk made many supportive tweets of the coin. But in May 2021, he appeared on Saturday Night Live and called dogecoin “a hustle”.

The dogecoin price plummeted, wiping out $86 billion in value as a result, the suit claims.

Although Musk had been named personally as a defendant Twitter itself has not yet been sued. But in October, Musk acquired Twitter and named himself as chief executive officer. In early April, he changed Twitter’s logo for that of a shiba inu dog — the icon of dogecoin. The price of DOGE rallied 30% before collapsing again a few days later when Musk reverted the logo back to the blue bird.

The Block asked lawyers on both sides if Musk’s recent antics would complicate the pre-existing lawsuit. Lawyers for Musk and Tesla did not respond.

Twitter’s logo change

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Evan Spencer, who represents the investors who claim they lost money on dogecoin due to Musk’s manipulation of its price, said he believed Musk’s logo change could drag Twitter into the case.

“After reviewing Defendants motions to dismiss we are more confident than ever that we will prevail in this case,” he told the Block. “Our opposition brief will be filed within 60 days. After the court rules in our favor, we will be filing a motion to add Twitter as a Defendant.”

He declined further comment.

Related stories:

• Twitter’s Dogecoin rally: One trader made $1.1 million in 30 minutes
• Elon Musk’s Dogecoin hype draws attention to mysterious wallet that once held $24 billion
• Dogecoin skyrockets as Crypto Twitter wonders what Elon is doing with logo
• Tesla CEO Elon Musk accused of dogecoin Ponzi scheme in new class action lawsuit

© 2023 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 prices of major governance tokens for Ethereum liquid staking protocols have dropped ahead of the network’s upgrade slated for later today.

The three biggest governance tokens for liquid staking protocols have dropped between 4.6% and 9% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko — cementing losses of 7% to 13.7% over the last week. These tokens are lido DAO, rocket pool and frax share.

These losses are worse than ether, which has only lost 2.4% of its value in the last 24 hours and 2% over the last week.

Arkham Intelligence noted that wallets it has tagged as belonging to prominent anonymous crypto trader Sisyphus sold $400,000 of lido DAO over the last few days. 

Liquid staking protocols allow people to stake their ether and receive a derivative token that represents the locked cryptocurrency. This derivative is able to be used across various crypto markets, effectively making the locked coins liquid. The governance tokens are used to manage how the protocols develop and are typically associated with its success.

The Shapella upgrade — a portmanteau of two upgrades called Shanghai and Shapella — will take place at epoch 620,9536, expected at 6:27 p.m. EDT on April 12. It will allow ether stakers to unstake their ether and withdraw their coins. 

© 2023 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.

Their thinking is contrary to other market observers, who believe a mass-sell-off following the “hard fork” will send prices downward.

Two major Ethereum network upgrades that are expected to occur simultaneously on April 12 will allow investors to withdraw their ether staked on the Ethereum blockchain.