As blockchain technology increasingly becomes part of the mainstream conversation, its integration with today’s most used technologies is bound to increase. This means that it’s only a matter of time before video streaming, digital music and social media see gradual blockchain integrations take place.
Audius (AUDIO) is one project that is chasing the first-mover advantage in the music streaming sector. The music-sharing and streaming protocol facilitates transactions between creators and listeners, making it relatively effortless for users to distribute and monetize audio content.
The project has received increasing attention for its approach to decentralizing the music industry and on March 2 the team celebrated reaching 3 million monthly active users.
Data from Cointelegraph Markets and TradingView shows that the price of AUDIO surged 108% since the start of March from a low of $0.38 to a new all-time high of $0.79 on March 4 as the altcoin’s trading volume spiked from $3 million to a record $55 million.
AUDIO/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView
Staking incentives drive user adoption
The first major increase in users followed the project’s October 2020 launch and the activation of staking on the Audius platform in December. This enabled AUDIO holders to earn a 7% yield for tokens that were staked on the network while they listening to music and interacted with the protocol.
By the end of January, the platform had 1.8 million active users and a total of 122 million AUDIO tokens staked on the network. These figures have since increased to 3 million users and a total of 182.5 million staked AUDIO as the platform continues to integrate new features that incentivize community involvement.
VORTECS™ data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro began to detect a bullish outlook for AUDIO on Feb. 28, prior to the recent price rise.
The VORTECS™ score, exclusive to Cointelegraph, is an algorithmic comparison of historic and current market conditions derived from a combination of data points including market sentiment, trading volume, recent price movements and Twitter activity.
VORTECS™ Score (green) vs. AUDIO price. Source: Cointelegraph Markets Pro
As seen in the chart above, the VORTECS™ score for AUDIO hit a peak of 69 on Feb. 28, just before the start of a prolonged uptrend in price which was further identified by a VORTECS™ score of 80 on March 1. After pulling back over the next 3 days the score again spiked to 70, just hours before a significant rise in the price of AUDIO.
On March 5, the project revealed its plans to integrate non-fungible tokens (NFT) into the protocol as part of its effort to offer a full-service decentralized platform and expand its user base.
NFTs have become a hot topic in the cryptocurrency sector in recent months, and their integration into the AUDIO platform is likely to bring a renewed wave of interaction from users.
As blockchain technology continues to become more prominent in mainstream society, Audius appears well-positioned to become a leader in the streaming music space thanks to a rapidly expanding user base and a growing list of incentives that entice users to stay active on the platform.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.
DOGE out of control? Social media and whales sway Dogecoin price action
Published
23 mins ago
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April 22, 2021
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Dogecoin (DOGE) has been the talk of the crypto town in the month of April. On the first day of the month, it was trading in its usual $0.05 range. On April Fools’ day, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted about the coin yet again. His tweet read, “SpaceX is going to put a literal Dogecoin on the literal moon” — SpaceX being the aerospace company that Musk also founded. Although the tweet was intended as a joke, it set the Shiba Inu-themed meme token on a rally like no other.
Within two hours, the price rose by more than 35% to a peak of $0.07 before cooling off temporarily but still holding on to its gains. The next spike in price came on April 14, with the value of a single token doubling within a single day to break the $0.10 mark. This led Musk to again turn his attention toward the coin, tweeting a picture of the famous painting by Spanish artist Joan Miró, saying “Doge barking at the moon.” This tweet, along with the rising social sentiment, pushed the price to a high of $0.45 on April 16.
Kristin Boggiano, president and co-founder of CrossTower — a digital assets exchange — gave several reasons behind the surge in a conversation with Cointelegraph: “First, Coinbase listing has generated interest and buzz about crypto in general. Second, the popular Reddit forum ‘r/Wallstreetbets’ changed their rules for a day to allow discussion of crypto, which included DOGE.”
The price surge took Dogecoin all the way up to ranking fifth in the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. The market cap also briefly passed the $50-billion mark, which is a high figure for a coin that was conceived as a joke. At the time of writing, it has now slid down to rank seventh among the top 10, with a market capitalization of $36.45 billion. The price is also currently in correction trading at $0.28.
Eric Berman, senior legal editor, U.S. finance at Thomson Reuters, commented to Cointelegraph regarding Dogecoin’s retail demand: “The sentiment seems to be: Bitcoin is for the wealthy, Ethereum for the middle class, and Dogecoin is for the people.”
Doge Day marks a historical moment
Dogecoin fans celebrated April 20 as Doge Day with a symbolic push of the coin’s price to $0.420. It also wasn’t lost on the community that 4/20 was also associated with the marijuana day. Even though it was just for a brief moment, the community did seemingly come together to push the price of DOGE to its all-time high.
The rise in retail interest in Dogecoin even led to a system outage in Robinhood’s trading app due to the overload of orders. To make the coin more accessible to retail investors, on April 21, Robinhood even reduced the minimum order size of DOGE from 10 to 1. This entails that investors can now stack DOGE one coin at a time.
Joshua Frank, co-founder and CEO of The TIE — a social media analytics platform for cryptocurrencies — revealed that the social media sentiment for Dogecoin still holds strong, telling Cointelegraph:
“Long-term sentiment for DOGE went outside the standard deviation and posted a record 139 sentiment score on Jan. 28, 2021, after Redditors from r/SatoshiStreetBets discussed making Dogecoin the cryptocurrency equivalent of GameStop. Sentiment still holds strong at 72, and tweets from Elon Musk about Dogecoin on April 14 have helped fuel the surge.”
Since Dogecoin was founded in 2013, it’s essentially one of the older coins in the cryptosphere. The listing of the token on exchanges like Binance and OKEx has strengthened its presence in the cryptocurrency community with better access to liquidity, thus creating more stable trading flows and interest in coin accumulation.
OKCoin announced on Doge Day that the exchange would be listing the token in the last week of April. Speaking further about DOGE, Jason Lau, CEO of OKCoin, told Cointelegraph:
“DOGE is relatively well suited for payments. It’s extremely fast and efficient — transactions cost less than a cent. Though it has less nodes than others, it is secured by proof-of-work and has never had any security issues.”
DOGE is currently used as a payment method for merchandise of NBA franchise Dallas Mavericks, which is owned by renowned investor Mark Cuban. He pointed out on Twitter that merchandise sales have grown 550% since the club announced that it would be accepting payments in Dogecoin. He also stated that the sports team will not be selling any of its accumulated Dogecoin from the sales and will be hodling it for the long term.
However, the sustainability of this rise in adoption is yet to be seen. Lau further said: “It’s important to point out that the Dogecoin codebase has not had any update in years and is not actively maintained.”
Boggiano further said that for some traders, the fact that Dogecoin was created as a joke becomes a fun experiment to see if they can gamble against other traders and come out ahead, thus essentially being used as a competitive tool:
“It may also be the crypto community ‘reclaiming’ their story. For people in the crypto community, we know that DOGE was created as a joke. It was created to mock Bitcoin. However, it’s turning out that Bitcoin is a legitimate asset class. Therefore, this could be a means to redefine the dialogue and understanding of cryptocurrencies in general.”
Could this be yet another pump and dump?
Dogecoin has been an instrument for pump and dump schemes in the past, so could this instance be yet another example of such activity? DOGE is a hugely inflationary coin by design without a decided maximum supply, which entails that there are 5 billion new coins entering the circulating supply each year. Due to the high supply, there is always an endless downward pressure on the token.
On the possibilities of this being another instance of a pump-and-dump scenario, Frank further stated that the rally has been controlled by a single entity that has accumulated at least “$1.3 billion worth of Dogecoin and abused the futures market by baiting shorts into creating a negative funding cycle that led to a derivatives blowout in excess of $760 million of liquidations.”
According to Twitter user Lightcrypto, the player marked up the price of the token many times while feeding into the social media narrative surrounding the meme token. Apparently, the player liquidated their spot holdings, creating over $760 million worth of liquidations in the derivatives market. On the contrary, Berman opined further on the surge in interest:
“The Dogecoin phenomenon seems little bit reminiscent of the Reddit/GameStop conversation from a couple of weeks back. While its popularity could be attributable in part to the recent Coinbase IPO, most cryptos would be experiencing a similar bounce. […] People [who] may feel like they missed out on the upside of Bitcoin are thinking that perhaps this is their shot.”
Although the price of Dogecoin is currently in a decline in what could be seen as a market-wide correction, it’s becoming clear that the token has found a use beyond the meme-coin status and is now seeing real growth within the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
At its height, its market capitalization even went past long-existing multi-national companies such as Barclays and Ford. Speaking on the sustainability of the coin, Lau further stated: “I would not underestimate DOGE’s staying power. For many, it was the first crypto they owned or the first one they heard of. Plus, it’s one of the few tokens that have deeply penetrated beyond the crypto community.”
Reef Finance to Launch Its Reef Chain Mainnet by May 2021
Published
1 hour ago
on
April 22, 2021
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Following the launch of the Reef Chain Mainnet, DeFi users can gain a smart decentralized finance exposure with interoperability features across multiple chains including Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, Avalanche, and the Binance Smart Chain amongst others.
The Reef Finance team is set to launch its Reef Chain Mainnet by May following the completion of the final checks on the current Maldives testnet. As contained in a press release shared with Coinspeaker, the exact date of the mainnet launch is dependent on the outcome of the ongoing tests being conducted at this time. Despite the intense checks, the Reef Finance team is optimistic they will be completed before the launch.
The Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem of today has been gaining massive traction which puts a strain on existing blockchain infrastructures supporting smart contracts. The Ethereum blockchain now has so much congestion that leads to an increase in transaction or gas fees. A relatively newer blockchain network, the Binance Smart Chain which entered the space with a promising solution is now crumbling due to its inability to scale properly.
Reef Finance is a Substrate-based blockchain network that makes DeFi easy. It was designed to address the woes of the existing chains supporting decentralized finance infrastructures. As contained in the press release, the launch of Reef Chain is aimed at enabling DeFi developers to make use of a highly scalable and fully EVM-compatible blockchain that is integrated into the Polkadot ecosystem. Reef Chain is set to be initially floated as a standalone blockchain based on the Substrate framework, a feature that will make it easy to plug into the Polkadot parachain ecosystem.
“Demand for DeFi is insatiable,” said Denko Mancheski, CEO at Reef Finance. “First it was Ethereum and skyrocketing gas fees, now we are seeing that even others like BSC are starting to have issues with performance. Reef Chain’s launch couldn’t have come at a better time.”
As a way to see to a successful network ecosystem, Reef Finance says it has the right model to support developers who wish to build on the Reef Chain. Through the robust community of users, investors, and media partners amongst others, DeFi product creators can find true success with Reef Finance.
“We know the struggles of up and coming developers all too well, and a lot of the time, technical skills are only a part of the equation,” added Mancheski. “By tapping into Reef’s business network, DeFi builders will multiply their chances of success.”
Reef Chain Mainnet Launch and the Interoperability Advantage
Following the launch of the Reef Chain Mainnet, DeFi users can gain a smart decentralized finance exposure with interoperability features across multiple chains including Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, Avalanche, and the Binance Smart Chain amongst others.
The Reef Chain will be governed using the REEF tokens which can be used for staking and community governance. Through the advanced interoperability features of the chain, a liquidity bridge will be launched to wrap existing DeFi assets and transfer liquidity from Ethereum to the Reef chain.
The advantage the Reef Chain aims to introduce will cut across all DeFi stakeholders ranging from users to developers as a whole.
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Benjamin Godfrey is a blockchain enthusiast and journalists who relish writing about the real life applications of blockchain technology and innovations to drive general acceptance and worldwide integration of the emerging technology. His desires to educate people about cryptocurrencies inspires his contributions to renowned blockchain based media and sites. Benjamin Godfrey is a lover of sports and agriculture.
Not so safe? SafeMoon’s parabolic rally isn’t sustainable, traders warn
Published
2 hours ago
on
April 22, 2021
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SafeMoon, the token on Binance Smart Chain widely recognized as the Tiktok meme coin, is seeing massive volatility after its massive gains in the past week.
According to the data from Dex.Guru, which tracks alternative cryptocurrencies on various blockchains, the price of SafeMoon dropped by nearly 50% in the last two days from $0.0000074 to $0.0000045.
Does the SafeMoon rally have any strength?
SafeMoon is a cryptocurrency on Binance Smart Chain that started out at a low market cap at around $50,000. The price and market capitalization of Safemoon went parabolic after growing popularity on TikTok.
On Dex.Guru, the price of SafeMoon rose from $0.00000029 to $0.0000074, by more than 2,200% in merely three weeks.
Safemoon 1-day candle chart. Source: Tradingview
Whether there is any substance or fundamental catalysts behind the SafeMoon rally remains to be seen.
On April 22, the SafeMoon team announced that the cryptocurrency is being flooded with listing offers from large Asian exchanges.
The team said one exchange in Asia that is currently in talks with SafeMoon is the 36th biggest in the world.
“#SAFEMOON is currently inundated with exchange offers, a large Asian exchange is imminently being announced… this will allow Asian communities to acquire Safemoon, the exchange has $857 MILLION 24 hour trading volume and is the 36th LARGEST in the world.”
Nevertheless, traders emphasized the massive volatility of SafeMoon despite its relatively high liquidity compared to other tokens that are not listed on major exchanges.
Cantering Clark, a derivatives trader, said that the correction of SafeMoon restores balance in the universe, implying that the rally was not sustainable.
Luke Martin, a well known cryptocurrency trader, also described the price trend of SafeMoon as “unSAFEMOON” after it dropped 65% in a short period on April 22.
SafeMoon rallied strongly within a period of a few weeks, surging from near zero to $5 billion in valuation at its peak.
Cryptocurrency researcher Larry Cermak noted that the SafeMoon livestream had 50,000 live viewers.
But Cermak also pointed out that if the interest around Binance Smart Chain persists, BSC could struggle to meet the surging user demand, which then could lead to higher fees that may drive away users.
“DeBank is saying that PancakeSwap had 700k unique addresses today and the SafeMoon livestream had 50k live viewers. Wtf is going on. I am very sure about one thing though – BSC won’t be able to handle the current activity for much longer and will eventually be unusable. When ponzis start consistently losing money, people will lose interest too. Only question is what happens after that.”
As Cointelegraph reported, PancakeSwap, the biggest automated market maker on Binance Smart Chain, overtook Ethereum’s user activity as the demand skyrocketed at the peak of the SafeMoon rally.