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May 31, 2023
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News for Crypto World – AllCrypto.biz portal, your one-stop destination for the latest news, analysis, and insights from the world of cryptocurrency.

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Popular News

1

Synthetix (SNX) trading volume overtakes GMX, but is the DEX token rally sustainable?

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2

Bitcoin nears $27K despite ‘hot’ PCE data sparking June rate hike bets

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3

Bitcoin ‘buys the rumor’ on US debt ceiling as BTC price nears $27.5K

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4

2 more rate hikes? Bitcoin analyst counts down to ‘huge’ volatility

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5

Bitcoin dips 5% to key support in ‘moment of truth’ for crypto market

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6

Ethereum is ‘woefully undervalued’ but growing more powerful: DeFi Dad, Hall of Flame

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7

Longing for liquidity — 5 things to know in Bitcoin this week

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8

These 4 altcoins could be ready for an up-move if Bitcoin rallies above $27,500

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9

$160K at next halving? Model counts down to new Bitcoin all-time high

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10

Bitcoin price capitulation below $26K possible as Friday’s BTC options expiry looms

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11

Bitcoin flips volatile at $27K as Fed’s Powell teases end to rate hikes

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12

Ordinals turned Bitcoin into a worse version of Ethereum: Can we fix it?

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13

How much is Bitcoin worth today?

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14

Sink or swim at $27K? 5 things to know in Bitcoin this week

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15

Bitcoin price retests key support as Fed rate hike fears steal $27K

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16

‘One of the greatest’ Bitcoin metrics says BTC price bull run is here

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17

Bitcoin offers ‘good signs’ as analysts retain $40K BTC price target

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18

3 reasons why Ethereum price could struggle at the $1.9K level

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19

BTC price bounces at $25.8K lows amid warning over low whale interest

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20

Bitcoin price hits $27.2K, but new analysis warns more losses ‘likely’

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21

‘Don’t short when it’s dark green’ — How to trade the 2024 Bitcoin halving

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22

The Ethereum Foundation just sold $30M in Ether — But will ETH price fall this time?

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23

Coinbase screws up, Florida bans CBDCs, and Ordinals face controversy: Hodler’s Digest, May 7-13

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24

BTC price risks $27K loss as Bitcoin trend lines brew ‘bullish cross’

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25

Bitcoin bears need BTC price to go below $27K ahead of Friday's $900M options expiry

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26

Ethereum derivatives flirting with bearishness: Mind the $1,820 support

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27

Alameda’s $38B IRS bill, Do Kwon kicked in the assets, Milady frenzy: Asia Express

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28

Joe Lubin: The truth about ETH founders split and ‘Crypto Google’

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29

Does Bitcoin price risk losing $28K with BTC futures premium at 2-month lows?

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30

3 signs PEPE token is about to trap bulls after 2,000% price rally

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31

Bitcoin miners have earned $50B from BTC block rewards, fees since 2010

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32

Bitcoin eyes liquidity above $30K as gold hits new all-time high

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33

Bitcoin trader eyes $63K BTC price for new Bollinger Bands ‘breakout’

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34

Ethereum price outlook weakens, but ETH derivatives suggest $1.6K is unlikely

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35

Bitcoin limps into FOMC as flagging volume adds to BTC price hurdles

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36

Bitcoin drops with stocks as analyst warns of banking crisis ‘endgame’

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37

BTC price may need a $24.4K dip as Bitcoin speculators stay in profit

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38

Bitcoin sell-off next? Binance BTC balance shoots up $1.5B in 1 month

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39

Bitcoin miners earned $50B from BTC block rewards, fees since 2010

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40

Will $28K Bitcoin price hold? Two indicators remain solid despite 5% pullback

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41

China’s wave of ChatGPT rivals, Alibaba goes multichain: Asia Express

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42

‘Good luck bears’ — Bitcoin traders closely watch April close with BTC price at $29K

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43

Shirtless shitposting and hunting SBF on the meme streets: Gabriel Haines, Hall of Flame

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44

Got liquidated with Bitcoin futures? Get 3.5x leverage using this options strategy

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45

Bitcoin ignores US jobs data as BTC price dip puts $28K support at risk

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46

Whatever happened to EOS? Community shoots for unlikely comeback

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47

Dogecoin soared 23,000% in 2021 — Is history starting to repeat for DOGE price?

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48

Bitcoin price struggles to hold above $30K amid regulatory uncertainty

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49

Ether price struggles to maintain support as regulatory challenges and network issues weigh

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50

Bitcoin price can ‘easily’ hit $20K in next 4 months — Philip Swift

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51

Bitcoin price holding $27K could open buying opportunities in BNB, ADA, XMR and TON

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52

Ethereum price lower highs vs. Bitcoin hint at more downside in April

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53

Dogecoin price limps below a key support after Dogeday turns into a sell-the-news event

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54

BTC price dives 3% in minutes as ‘deep correction’ grips crypto market

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55

Bitcoin at key point with BTC price at $28.8K — Bollinger Bands creator

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56

From SNL and The Tonight Show to Sotheby’s:  NFT Creator Bryan Brinkman

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57

Bitcoin on-chain data highlights the steps BTC is taking to exit the bear market

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58

Ethereum on-chain data forecasts the withdrawal of 1.4M ETH over the next few days

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59

Bitcoin price spikes above $31K as Ethereum gains spark ‘altseason’ calls

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60

Can Ethereum crack $2K? ETH price inches closer despite new unlocked supply

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61

What Bitcoin bear market? BTC price closely copying old halving cycles

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62

Ronin (RON) bags a 500% gain as the gaming-focused project approaches a major upgrade

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63

3 signs Arbitrum price is poised for a new record high in Q2

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64

Bitcoin derivatives data shows bulls positioning for further BTC price upside

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65

Bitcoin glory on Chinese TikTok, 30M mainland users, Justin Sun saga: Asia Express

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66

BTC price targets see $33K next as Bitcoin eyes key resistance flip

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67

Ethereum price metrics hint that ETH might not sell-off after the Shapella hard fork

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68

Bitcoin price sets up for an explosive move as ADA, XLM, AAVE and CFX turn bullish

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69

‘Pop or drop?’ Bitcoin analysts decide if BTC price will beat $30K

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70

Bitcoin whales push ‘choreographed’ BTC price as Ether nears $2K

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71

NFT Creator, The Sarah Show: Analog childhood meets dizzying digital future

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72

Bitcoin rests at $28K as US jobs data boosts new Fed rate hike bets

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73

BTC white paper hidden on macOS, Binance loses AUS license and DOGE news: Hodler’s Digest, April 2-8

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74

XRP price eyes 30% upside after key resistance area breaks

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75

3 key Ethereum price metrics cast doubt on the strength of ETH’s recent rally

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76

Bitcoin traders expect ‘big move’ next as BTC price flatlines at $28K

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77

Bitcoin ‘faces headwinds’ as US money supply drops most since 1950s

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78

Ethereum price turns bullish ahead of next week’s Shanghai and Capella upgrades

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79

Arbitrum FUD spooks the market, but on-chain data shows whales accumulating ARB

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80

Zhu Su’s exchange did $13.64 in volume akshually, Huobi in crisis: Asia Express

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81

Crypto security audits and bug bounties are broken: Here’s how to fix them

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82

Trader Joe joins top 5 DEX list as Liquidity Book model thrives on Arbitrum

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83

Crypto market momentum stalls as traders await the results of recent regulatory actions

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84

Bitcoin price turns $28K to support, opening the door for ETH, MATIC, HBAR and EOS to breakout

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85

Binance-CFTC FUD puts BNB price at risk of dropping toward $200

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86

XRP price: 'sell the news' moment nears after crypto-leading 20% weekly gain

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87

XRP price tags 10-month high — Can a 35% pullback be avoided?

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88

Solana overcomes FTX fiasco — SOL price gains 100% in Q1

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89

Why did 12K Bitcoin margin longs close at Bitfinex, and why didn’t it impact BTC price?

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90

Analysts debate the ETH price outcomes of Ethereum’s upcoming Shapella upgrade

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91

Bitcoin price holds its ground in the wake of CFTC case against Binance

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92

Bitcoin spikes above $29K as ‘fakeout’ fuels BTC price strength doubts

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93

ARB price to $2? Ethereum L2 rival Arbitrum will double in April, fractal suggests

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94

Elon Musk slams ‘heavy-handed’ Fed as ex-BitMEX CEO sees $1M BTC price

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95

Crypto market rally stalls at the $1.2T level, but bulls are getting positioned

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96

Bitcoin price will hit this key level before $30K, survey says

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97

Why is Cardano price up today?

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98

Bitcoin erases Fed losses as traders eye $40K BTC price target

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99

Bitcoin is 1 week away from 'confirming' new bull market — analyst

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100

Bitcoin liquidations vanish as trader hopes $30K will hit before dip

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101

Ethereum faces 6-month lows versus Bitcoin — Will ETH price rebound?

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102

Arbitrum’s ARB token signifies the start of airdrop season — Here are 5 to look out for

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103

Bitcoin bulls remain bullish, but macro and crypto-specific hurdles have BTC pinned below $30K

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104

Ethereum price at $1.4K was a bargain, and a rally toward $2K looks like the next step

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105

Bitcoin rejects at $25K as US PPI data meets Credit Suisse meltdown

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106

Speculators flock to Arbitrum IOU tokens ahead of this week’s ARB airdrop

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107

Investors shelter in short-term Treasurys, reducing Bitcoin’s chance of rallying to $30K

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108

Will the Fed stop rate hikes? 5 things to know in Bitcoin this week

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109

Bitcoin levels to watch as BTC price eyes highest weekly close in 9 months

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110

Bitcoin price hits $27K in new 9-month high as Fed injects $300B

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111

Bitcoin market cap grows 60% in 2023 as top Wall Street banks lose $100B

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112

Ethereum price reaches lowest level relative to Bitcoin in 5 months

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113

Bitcoin dominance nears 50% as research hails ‘bullish’ narrative flip

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114

4 signs the Bitcoin price rally could top out at $26K for now

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115

Lark Davis on fighting social media storms, and why he’s an ETH bull: Hall of Flame

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116

Why is Ethereum (ETH) price down today?

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117

US bank bloodbath: Bitcoin hits $23.7K as BTC price analyst calls SVB dip ‘bear trap’

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118

Dogecoin hits 4-month lows vs. Bitcoin — 50% DOGE price rebound now in play

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119

Bitcoin price spikes to ‘$26K’ in USDC terms — How high can the BTC short squeeze go?

  • Markets
120

Fed starts ‘stealth QE’ — 5 things to know in Bitcoin this week

  • Markets
121

Why is XRP price up today?

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122

Why is Ethereum (ETH) price up today?

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123

Bitcoin battles $20K as trader calls bank chaos ‘2008 all over again’

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124

Cathie Wood’s ARK ignores Silvergate, buys Coinbase stock for 6th straight month

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125

Ethereum price action and derivatives data confirm bears are currently in control

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126

$920B is the number to watch now that crypto’s trillion-dollar total market cap is gone

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127

Warning sign for ETH price? Ethereum volume profile is down 90% since March 2020

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128

Bitcoin keeps liquidating longs as BTC price action gives up $22K support

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129

Bitcoin price levels to watch as trader says ‘lights out’ below $21.6K

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130

Bitcoin price would retest $25K without Silvergate saga — analysis

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131

Bitcoin price faces ‘last stand’ as weekly close threatens $22K retest

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132

Ethereum eyes 25% correction in March, but ETH price bulls have a silver lining

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133

Bitcoin price stumbles amid investors’ aversion to risk assets, but there is a silver lining

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134

Ethereum price resistance at $1,750 could reflect traders’ anxiety over the Shanghai upgrade

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135

Fears over Silvergate, $8B hole at FTX, senators seek Binance’s numbers: Hodler’s Digest, Feb. 26 – March 4

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136

$3M OKX airdrop, 1-hour due diligence on 3AC, Binance AI — Asia Express

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137

Bitcoin’s least volatile month ever? BTC price ends February up 0.03%

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138

Bitcoin on-chain data highlights key similarities between the 2019 and 2023 BTC price rally

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139

Bitcoin ‘millionaires’ increased 140% as BTC price crossed $20K — data

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140

Here’s why STX, CFX, SSV, AGIX and GRT are the top performing assets in February

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141

Bitcoin may only need 4 weeks to hit $30K as key monthly close looms

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142

SBF’s new charges, Shapella’s fork date and emojis as financial advice: Hodler’s Digest, Feb. 19-25

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143

THETA, LIDO, KLAY and EGLD flash bullish signs as Bitcoin recaptures $23K

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144

Bitcoin price eyes $24K retest as US dollar dives into monthly close

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145

BTC whale population shrinks to early 2020 levels — 5 things to know in Bitcoin this week

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146

How Fantom and Optimism’s DeFi and DApp development directly affects FTM and OP price action

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147

Bitcoin price tumbles to 10-day lows as ‘Notorious B.I.D.’ keeps support at $22.5K

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148

Bitcoin price stays under $24K as PCE data helps US dollar to near 7-week highs

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149

Bitcoin regains $25K amid hope record China easing will boost BTC price

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150

Why is Bitcoin price down today?

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151

Ethereum derivatives data suggests $1,700 might not remain a resistance level for long

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152

Bitcoin sees fresh $25K rejection as pre-Wall Street volatility returns

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153

'Stupid money' Ether investor loses over $2M in six months — 3 lessons to learn

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154

Bitcoin price continues to fall, but derivatives data hints at a short-term rally to $25K

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155

Bitcoin bears attempt to pin BTC price under $23K ahead of this month’s options expiry

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156

A ‘snap back’ to $20K? 5 things to know in Bitcoin this week

  • Markets
157

Bitcoin must leverage $1T central bank liquidity to beat sellers — Research

  • Markets
158

Bitcoin can hit $40K before BTC price sees ‘harsh correction’ — Analyst

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159

Bitcoin Lightning Network growth is organic, coming from real-world adoption

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160

Bitcoin bulls aim to hold this week’s BTC gains leading into Friday’s $675M options expiry

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161

Bitcoin metric prints ‘mother of all BTC bullish signals’ for 4th time ever

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162

China’s only public blockchain, Conflux, sees CFX price skyrocket 1,300% in 2023

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163

Polygon ecosystem development and upcoming zkEVM launch add to MATIC’s bullish momentum

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164

BTC price cools on latest US data as Bitcoin liquidates $80M in shorts

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165

Bitcoin levels to watch as BTC price rejects at key $25K trendline

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166

First weekly death cross ever — 5 things to know in Bitcoin this week

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167

Bitcoin eyeing ‘next big move’ which could see $19K retest — analyst

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168

ApeCoin leads in NFT and metaverse market share, but are APE’s hefty staking rewards sustainable?

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169

Bitcoin flirts with bid liquidity as BTC price nears new 3-week lows

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170

Ethereum price prints ‘death cross’ after losing 13% versus Bitcoin from 2023 peak

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171

Bitcoin price derivatives look a bit overheated, but data suggests bears are outnumbered

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172

Bitcoin price rally to $25K followed by total crypto market cap retest of the $1.13T resistance

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173

NFT marketplace tokens soar in 2023, and Blurs recent airdrop may extend the trend

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174

Bitcoin price targets range from $19K to $25K as CPI day dawns

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175

Bitcoin bulls aim to hold this weeks BTC gains leading into Fridays $675M options expiry

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176

Tether market cap nears $70B as SEC crypto crackdown hurts stablecoin rivals

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177

MATIC, HBAR, LDO and BIT gather strength as Bitcoin price rebounds

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178

Bitcoiner Simon Dixon on bankruptcies and Elon Musk: Hall of Flame

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179

3 reasons why Binances BNB token risks sliding further by March

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180

Ethereum on-chain data suggests ETH sell pressure could be a non-event after the Shanghai upgrade

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181

SEC enforcement action creates a silver lining for GMX, Lido (LDO) and Maker (MKR) price

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182

Ethereums $1.5K support weakens as ETH traders turn slightly bearish

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183

Bitcoin price eyes $22K rebound with BTC market structure not yet broken

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184

Bitcoin price clings to $22K as investors digest the recent SEC actions and CPI report

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185

Why is Bitcoin price up today?

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186

Krakens staking down, FTX post-bankruptcy hell and Binance news: Hodlers Digest, Feb. 5-11

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Joe Lubin: The truth about ETH founders split and ‘Crypto Google’

3 weeks ago32 mins


There’s a narrative that’s grown up around Ethereum’s two most important co-founders, Joe Lubin and Vitalik Buterin, to explain how they went in different directions almost a decade ago.

It suggests the pair fell out over the blockchain’s future direction, with the idealistic 20-year-old Buterin determined to turn Ethereum into a nonprofit foundation, while Lubin and others wanted to commercialize the technology via a for-profit company.

“That wasn’t really what happened,” the billionaire founder of Ethereum infrastructure and software firm ConsenSys tells Magazine during an in-depth interview in Tel Aviv.

“What happened was people were looking for a way to explain why these two people were bumped out of the project. And that was a convenient way to label it. But that wasn’t the reason they were moved.”

Lubin’s referring to Ethereum’s infamous “Red Wedding” in 2014 when the eight co-founders and the team gathered to incorporate Ethereum as a company.

Hoskinson
Former Ethereum CEO Charles Hoskinson (right) with creator Vitalik Buterin (left) from back in the day. (Flickr)

The meeting descended into bickering and infighting over internal politics that saw a devastated CEO Charles Hoskinson pushed out of the team, along with underperforming co-founder Amir Chetrit.

“I think it’s true that I and several people on the team — like maybe everybody else — believed that you need to draw businesses in, you needed economic, commercial validation in order to build better things, even open-source software,” the 58-year-old says in his slow, measured tones.

“But that wasn’t the root of why I started ConsenSys or why two people were bumped off the project.”

Red Wedding and Crypto Google

As documented in Camilla Russo’s history of Ethereum, The Infinite Machine, the co-founders had gathered in Zug, Switzerland on June 7, 2014, to sign a document transforming Ethereum into a for-profit company. But instead of signing the contract, tensions boiled over Hoskinson’s management style and personality, Chetrit’s contribution to the project, Ethereum’s future direction and other internal political issues.



After much back and forth, the decisions were all left to the gangly 20-year-old math genius who’d created the project in the first place. After some time alone on the terrace, he returned to say Hoskinson and Chetrit were out, and Ethereum would become a nonprofit foundation instead of a company.

“Vitalik wrote an amazing white paper — it was right place, right time, incredible vision — and it attracted lots of people of disparate backgrounds, and we worked together well for chunks of time,” Lubin says by way of context.

Joe Lubin
Joe Lubin in conversation with Magazine in Tel Aviv.

“We had differences of opinion, at times, those differences of opinion boiled over famously… infamously. And there was a moment where two people were bumped out of leadership, and up to that point, we were having discussions about whether we were going to be purely nonprofit, or whether we were going to pursue a nonprofit track, put it under a foundation, and then the same group of people who worked so nicely together would build Crypto Google together.

“And it became apparent to all of us that we probably weren’t going to build Crypto Google. But it was also clear to all of us that nobody was even close to being able to build Crypto Google and that we’re just building the foundation and the platform for a long time.”

Lubin was already planning his own for-profit company to build out Ethereum’s application layer when the decision was made, and it spun into life not long afterward.

While other co-founders, such as Gavin Wood (Polkadot), contributed more to the early protocol itself, arguably none of them, apart from Buterin, has since contributed as much as Lubin to what Ethereum is today. While ConsenSys didn’t turn into Crypto Google, its infrastructure and apps are as important to Ethereum now as Google is to the web.

“ConsenSys wasn’t formed to commercialize it. It was formed to continue the vision and the mission of the Ethereum platform,” Lubin explains.

Related: The Vitalik I know — Dmitry Buterin

Who is Joe Lubin?

Born in Toronto in 1964, Lubin studied electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton in the mid-1980s, where his roommate was another future crypto billionaire, Mike Novogratz of Galaxy Digital. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was in the same faculty, though Lubin tells Magazine they never met. 

Lubin
Joe Lubin was almost 50 before he jumped on board the Ethereum train and made his first billion.

Lubin has had a surprisingly diverse career, working in AI, robotics and autonomous music creation for a number of different employers. He founded a hedge fund and was the vice president of private wealth management at Goldman Sachs, but nothing world-changing, according to Novogratz, as quoted in the Financial Times in 2021.

“Joe was one of the brightest among us, a forward thinker, but by 45 hadn’t done anything to stand out,” Novogratz recalled. “I don’t think any of our gang would have guessed how things would turn out.”

Related: Here’s how Ethereum’s ZK-rollups can become interoperable

The combination of his near-front-row seat to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and then the global financial crisis shook him to his core. He said at the ConsenSys Ethereal Summit in May 2017 that the events had made him feel as though “we were living in a global society and economy that was figuratively, literally and morally bankrupt.”

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He believed a slow, cascading financial collapse was taking place, which made him receptive to the ideas in the Bitcoin white paper, which he read in 2011. The following year he moved to Jamaica with his girlfriend, who was trying to forge a career in dancehall music, and he became a music producer while investing in Bitcoin and waiting for the collapse.

During a trip home to Toronto in late 2013, he attended a Bitcoin meetup alongside another co-founder, Anthony Di Iorio, and encountered a kid named Vitalik Buterin, who was touting his just-written white paper for an improved version of Bitcoin called Ethereum. Lubin was “blown away,” and he became an official co-founder in early 2014.

Early Ethereum 2014
The core early Ethereum team at the house rented for Bitcoin Miami 2014, including Joe Lubin in the back row, second from right. (yanislav.medium.com)

Approaching 50, he was an odd fit with a bunch of anti-establishment 20-something-year-old coders, but his Jamaican music production background gave him just enough cachet with the team to get by. And, of course, Lubin and Di Iorio personally bankrolled around $500,000 to $800,000 of the funding necessary to get Ethereum off the ground.

Lubin’s experience also helped the team avoid potential pitfalls and roadblocks, and he insisted on early meetings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and hiring high-priced lawyers to minimize the extraordinary legal risks.

ConsenSys arises!

ConsenSys was founded in Switzerland in October 2014 for legal reasons, which subsequently led to a nasty ongoing court battle between employees and shareholders who claim they weren’t properly compensated when the assets were transferred to an American entity. 

Related: ‘Account abstraction’ supercharges Ethereum wallets: Dummies guide

But it actually operated from a graffiti-covered warehouse in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The aim was to build out applications and infrastructure for Ethereum by investing in startups, incubating projects and consulting with firms like JPMorgan and BHP Billiton on how to incorporate this new technology. It spawned more than 50 businesses early on, including a poker site, a prediction market and a healthcare records firm. But by all accounts, its early years were pretty slapdash, with no real corporate structure.

MetaMask co-founder Dan Finlay spoke about the early days on the Epicenter podcast.

“ConsenSys was this wonderful, just kind of chaotic incubator at the early stages. I don’t know, there must have been hundreds of different experiments getting validated and tried out there. And there was a really exciting energy,” he says, adding that a lot of projects got built before Ethereum could support them:

“Back then, it was very normal to just kind of build your application as if the blockchain was going to scale or did scale already.”

In 2018, a Forbes investigation suggested that pretty much all of ConsenSys’ projects were in the red, and the company was burning $100 million a year on non-profitable projects, including an asteroid mining company.

Forbes took aim at ConsenSys in a 2018 investigation. (Forbes) 

Not long after, Lubin axed a bunch of underperforming projects, culled the 1,200-strong headcount and reset the company into ConsenSys 2.0 with a much more corporate and accountable culture.

Despite being worth $7 billion after its most recent $450-million fundraising round in 2022, ConsenSys let go of another 11% of its staff in January of this year. Lubin tells Magazine it was readying itself to survive bad conditions as “macroeconomic and geopolitical” storm clouds gathered.

“We wanted to ensure that we had significant runway so that we can stay strong and build,” he says, revealing it was eyeing a number of acquisitions that “if we’re able to bring some on board that will add really valuable pieces.”

Centralization vs. decentralization

Anyone who’s listened to Lubin speak will know that he’s genuinely committed to, and a proponent of, the benefits of decentralization.

So, is there tension between running a centralized company like ConsenSys that provides the crucial infrastructure to a decentralized blockchain? 

“I don’t think there’s a tension,” he says.

“It’s all about progressive decentralization. There’s nothing wrong with having an entity that is organized in one way that is trying to build something that is organized in a different way.” 

Lubin explains that the products ConsenSys is building need to achieve “product-market fit; otherwise, they’re kind of useless, and so bringing something forth, wholly and perfectly decentralized, is very difficult — it may be impossible.”

ConsenSys
ConsenSys plays a big role in the Ethereum ecosystem.

ConsenSys’ most crucial infrastructure is called Infura, which offers Ethereum nodes as a service, making it easier for developers and users to connect to the network. It’s basically an intermediary service between decentralized apps (DApps) and the blockchain that projects rely on to stay up and running. 

Infura probably works a little too well, as much of the Ethereum ecosystem is dependent on it. That means if Infura goes down, so too do half the network’s projects, including Uniswap, Compound, MetaMask and Aave. 

It’s also a weak point for censorship and was criticized by some for complying with the Tornado Cash sanctions.

Decentralizing Infura

ConsenSys has been working on a plan for some time now to “decentralize Infura.” This will take the form of a marketplace of competing infrastructure providers that offer similar services, of which Infura itself would be one.

Lubin believes it’s “extremely important” to make this happen.

“I’ve been a proponent of decentralizing Infura since the start but more actively since five years ago,” he says.

“What we’ve run into is that our ecosystem keeps having these wicked growth spurts,” he continues, adding, “It was a sub-priority to keep things going rather than to start a parallel project to parallelize and decentralize — and that’s going pretty well right now.”

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The protocol will either be called XFura or the Decentralized Infura Network Protocol.

“The idea is that we believe now that we can take a high-performance product and federate the protocol, initially do a lot of hand-holding with other providers and then we situate Infura on the protocol,” he says.

“It’s pretty close. There are a bunch of very sophisticated partners that are working closely with EG [Galano], the lead of the project. I can’t give you a date.”

Although Infura researcher Patrick McCorry went out of his way in an interview with Cointelegraph to say censorship resistance was not the point of decentralizing Infura, that’s certainly one of the benefits.

A decentralized network would enable DApps to pick and choose providers, allowing them potentially to get around censored protocols or addresses like Tornado Cash.

“I like the idea that there’s optionality,” says Lubin, carefully noting that different providers would operate in different nation-states and jurisdictions.

“I think that works well if there’s a lot of them and if there’s real choice, so you can always go to an uncensored service and be sure that they’ve got enough validating power so that you’re gonna get your transaction processed fairly rapidly.”

However, he adds it’s equally possible that future aspects of the protocol are obfuscated so that no one actually knows what’s in a packet or a transaction. He says he knows of people already “working on protocol enhancements” who will make this happen, and the explosion of layer 2s and layer 3s makes it even more likely.

“If they’re already glommed in and impossible to read, then it’s hard to imagine that regulators will either care that much or have the ability to do anything,” he says.

“I’m sure [there is] lots of criminal activity that flows through AWS and Azure and every mail server everywhere. So, there’s a level of infrastructure that you just can’t halt because it’s doing mostly useful activity.”

The other core bit of infrastructure provided by ConsenSys that underpins the entire Ethereum ecosystem is its ubiquitous browser wallet MetaMask. It’s also being sort of decentralized by crowdsourcing the development of new features and the addition of new blockchains.

Called MetaMask Snaps, it’ll turn the browser wallet into a permissionless platform for others to build on — one proof-of-concept Snap enables MetaMask to act as a Bitcoin wallet.

Lubin
Joe Lubin has arguably made a bigger contribution to Ethereum than any other co-founder apart from Vitalik Buterin.

“The MetaMask Grants DAO [decentralized autonomous organization] will get increasingly decentralized and will incentivize people to build cool things, to start companies that permissionlessly innovate that we have nothing to do with,” says Lubin.

He explains that over the years, MetaMask was approached by numerous blockchains looking for support, but after they’d crunched the numbers, there wasn’t enough activity to justify splitting its focus from Ethereum. Snaps, though, will open the doors to everyone.

Crypto regulations

Lubin is unconcerned about the possibility of Ethereum being declared a security, saying, “It’s as likely and would have the same impact as if Uber was made illegal.”

“There would be tremendous outcry from not just the crypto community but different politicians, certain regulators.”

There’s a sense of frustration from Lubin that this ground even needs to be covered again, saying that ConsenSys has been through all of this in discussions with the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission over many years.

“We went in there on a voluntary basis five years ago or something like that, when they’re just trying to wrap their heads around what tokens were,” he says.

“They thought back then that everything was a security; we think [we] helped them significantly understand that lots of tokens are not securities and then they went away, and Gary and his team now think almost everything’s a security.”

But he believes that the renewed focus on regulations in the wake of the FTX and stablecoin collapses will ultimately be a good thing.

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“We now have the world’s attention, and smart people who care will prevail because it just makes sense,” he says.

“And sure, there will be people with agendas who don’t want to see it that way. Maybe the banking lobby will help them not see it that way. But in terms of finally paying a lot of attention to trying to regulate an important space, I do believe that clear heads will think through this and that people will start to understand the benefits of decentralization and make good regulation for CeFi [centralized finance] and no regulation for tech, crypto.”

Crisis equals opportunity

In fact, Lubin is remarkably philosophical and sanguine about all the regulatory, game theory and technological challenges facing Ethereum. For example, he concedes centralization of staking on platforms like Lido could become a concern, but because progressive decentralization is baked into the nature of the ecosystem, it won’t be a problem for long.

“Things don’t start very decentralized,” he says. “These are still pretty new innovations, and our ecosystem is pretty exacting. If you want to be in the Ethereum ecosystem proper, then you’re not going to want to try to dominate something, you’re not going to want to operate centralized for very long. The ecosystem will identify that as problematic and come up with solutions for it, which is great.”

In Lubin’s world view, problems are just short-term issues you deal with as part of the process of making the project better.

“I see things as processes. I hope we run into lots of complications in the near term, and all the way through, because every complication just points out how we can build a more robust platform and a more decentralized platform. Yes, hopefully, we’ll run into lots of difficult problems.”

“Lots of smart people have good solutions that are being built.”

Also read: Ethereum is eating the world — ‘You only need one internet’

The future of Ethereum

The big question is, where does he see Ethereum heading? Does he believe the world’s entire financial system could end up running on Ethereum using ZK-Rollups?

Lubin says the founding conception of Ethereum was that it would become a “world computer,” and he suggests that was still in the cards.

“I think several of us thought early on that we were building the Star Trek computer essentially,” he says, explaining it handled pretty much anything and everything.

“And so, I think that decentralized protocols will be the underlying trust foundation for lots of heterogeneous architectures. So, it’s possible that Ethereum will scale sufficiently so that we can have one trust foundation and then build lots of layer 2s and layer 3s and up.”

“There have been many computer revolutions for the last 200 and something years and this is another one.”

“So, the answer’s yes. And the answer will take time to unfold. It would be impossible to rearchitect the global economy or global financial system in a short period of time.”

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Andrew Fenton

Andrew Fenton

Based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a national entertainment writer for News Corp Australia, on SA Weekend as a film journalist, and at The Melbourne Weekly.

Follow the author @andrewfenton

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