Decentral Block Post

Ethereum is plagued with criticisms of its less than optimal scaling capabilities and high gas prices. There have been talks about increasing the scaling capacity of the Ethereum mainnet for a while now. 

However, the Ethereum ecosystem needs a solution for scaling right now, and if Ethereum is not able to give these new applications a platform with enough scaling capabilities, they can seek alternatives like the BNB Chain or Cardano. Optimism rollout was created to solve exactly the scalability problem of Ethereum.

Optimism Rollup network is one of the several solutions trying to address Ethereum’s congestion problem. The Ethereum network is often congested to the almost maximum capacity, and until upgrades to the main blockchain are made, scaling solutions like Optimism allow Ethereum’s transactional abilities to remain usable without shelling out a fortune on gas fees.

In short, Optimism uses advanced data compression techniques to speed up and cut the costs of Ethereum transactions. They do so by a technique known as called Optimistic Rollups, where multiple transactions are “rolled up” into one transaction and settled on another cheaper blockchain. The verified transactions are then fed back to the main Ethereum blockchain. The biggest advantage of Optimistic Rollups is the fact that they do not compute by default, which theoretically leads to scalability gains. Estimates say Optimistic Rollups can offer 10-100x improvements to scalability. On the downside, however, is the existence of a “challenge period,” which is a time window in which anyone can challenge assertion and increase withdrawal time.

Battle of the rollups

Now, a natural question arises: How is this different from widely used zero-knowledge (zk) Rollups? 

Usually, bear markets bring about a feeling of uncertainty in any investor. Even more so for a newcomer, for whom it can feel like the end of the world. It may even be common knowledge that during bull cycles, investors are sure of making gains. Whereas in bear markets such as this, an unimaginable amount of pessimism sets in.

The co-founder and strategic lead at the Kylin Network, Dylan Dewdney, told Cointelegraph that the two major mistakes that investors make while feeling anxious are “One, over-investing and two, not investing with conviction.”

“You need to find the sweetspot where you have enough conviction in your investments while managing the resources devoted to them such that you are 100% comfortable with being patient for a long time. Lastly, bear markets are where the magic really happens — buying Ether at $90 in December 2019, for example,” Dewdney said.

According to data from blockchain analysis firm Glassnode, traders made almost 43,000 transactions buying and selling requests on crypto exchanges in early May. This accounted for a whopping $3.1 billion worth of Bitcoin. But, the panic that caused those requests came from the crash of Terra, which saw the market dip even further.

Bear markets occur when there is a general dip in the prices of assets, of at least 20%, from their most recent highs. For example, the current bear market has Bitcoin (BTC) down by more than 55% from its November record high of $68,000. Bitcoin is now trading below the $25,000 mark at the time of writing.

The ongoing crisis of Celsius’s native token has nothing to do with the stablecoin provider Tether and will not impact its USDT reserves, according to the company.

Tether issued a statement on Monday regarding the major cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius halting withdrawals due to its rumored liquidity crisis.

According to the statement, Tether’s lending activity with Celsius has “always been overcollateralized” as with any other borrower and “has no impact” on the company’s reserves.

The announcement also described the ongoing issues with Celsius as an “unfortunate result of market volatility and extreme market conditions.”

The Tether company is the issuer of USDT, the largest stablecoin pegged to the United States dollar based on a 1:1 ratio. At the time of writing, USDT’s market capitalization amounts to $72 billion, significantly exceeding the market value of its major competitor, the Circle-backed USD coin (USDC).

While the market has not yet fully recovered from the onslaught caused by the TerraUSD (UST) depeg, another stablecoin project shows signs of distress, causing fears and speculation within the community. 

Stablecoin protocol USDD’s price dipped to $0.97 on major crypto trading platforms on Monday. Because of this, the market started to keep an eye on the project with fears that the project will follow the footsteps of Terra (LUNA), now officially Luna Classic (LUNC). CurveSwaps, a bot that monitors large asset transfers flagged that $1 million USDD was recently swapped to 997,339 Tether (USDT).

On the other hand, blockchain analytics platform Nansen has also detected that one of the funds that capitalized on the UST depeg has started actively transferring larger amounts of USDD and other stablecoins. Nansen_intern tweeted:

Looking at data regarding USDD's collateralization, researcher Resdegen argued that looking at the stablecoin's backing, USDD is only 92% collateralized. Without considering Tron (TRX), the ratio falls down to 73%.

In response to the “extreme market conditions,” the Tron DAO Reserve recently announced that it received 700 million USD Coin (USDC) to defend the USDD peg. With this in play, the team behind the stablecoin explained that the collateralization ratio of USDD is now boosted to 300%.

Bitcoin (BTC) faced continued selling pressure before the June 13 Wall Street open as Ether (ETH) revisited multiyear lows.

Bitcoin battles for $24,000

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD eclipsing its 10-month lows set in mid-May.

The largest cryptocurrency faced bearish triggers on multiple fronts, these coming from both within and beyond the crypto sphere.

Fintech protocol Celsius appeared on the brink of meltdown after operations were halted, turning billions of dollars in collateral into new risk for crypto markets. In an event ironically similar to that which caused the May rout, Bitcoin and altcoins kept falling as fresh uncertainty filled the air.

Macro conditions were hardly better, with Asian markets selling off and Wall Street futures looking set to continue the downtrend that set in last week.

Crypto exchange Binance announced it is ending support for Litecoin (LTC) transactions sent through the latest MimbleWimble (MWEB) upgrade.

Binance warned that any transaction sent through the MWEB function would be lost since the crypto exchange can’t verify the sender’s address. The crypto exchange didn’t respond to Cointelegraph’s request for comments at the time of publishing.

The announcement comes just days after major South Korean crypto exchanges delisted LTC due to the latest upgrade, which makes transaction information confidential. The delisting came just weeks after five crypto exchanges issued warnings similar to Binance. However, the delisting didn’t come as a surprise, as South Korea is known for its strict privacy laws, which prohibit anonymous transactions on crypto exchanges.

The MWEB upgrade on LTC is one of the critical updates that went live earlier this year, nearly two and half years after it was first proposed. The upgrade added several privacy features and made the LTC blockchain more scalable.

Gate.io, another popular crypto trading platform, also ended support for MWEB Litecoin transactions, claiming anonymous transactions are not supported on the platform.

Bitcoin (BTC) is threatening to drop to its worst weekly close since December of 2020. The crypto markets are in are held firmly in a vice grip, and the selling accelerated following a higher-than-expected inflation report from the United States on June 10. 

It is not only the crypto markets that are facing the brunt, even United States equities markets finished the week ending June 10 with sharp losses. Risky assets may remain volatile in the near term as traders await the outcome of the U.S. Federal Open Market Committee meeting on June 14 and June 15.

Bloomberg Intelligence senior commodities strategist Mike McGlone warned that if the stock markets continue to drop, then it will signal that most assets may have seen their peak exuberance in the past two years.

Could Bitcoin find support at lower levels and will that attract buying in select altcoins? Let’s study the charts of the top-5 cryptocurrencies that are likely to move up if the sentiment improves.

BTC/USDT

Bitcoin broke below the trendline on June 10, which negated the developing ascending triangle pattern. The bears maintained their selling pressure and pulled the price below the strong support of $28,630 on June 11.

Bitcoin (BTC) saw further losses on June 12 as thin weekend trading volumes fueled an ongoing sell-off.

Analyst likens risk asset 'pump' to 1929

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView showed BTC/USD hitting lows of $27,150 on its sixth straight day of downside.

With hours to go until the weekly close, the pair was in danger of resuming the losing streak, which had previously seen a record nine weeks of red candles in a row.

To avoid that outcome and put in a second “green” close, BTC/USD needed to gain over $2,000 from the current spot price, which at the time of writing was $27,400.

With support levels failing to change the mood thanks to the thinner liquidity during the weekend’s “out-of-hours” trading, analysts feared that a retest of May’s ten-month lows was due.

The spectacular implosion of the Terra ecosystem in mid-May left the crypto industry scarred. Though there were some brave critics who understood just how thin the razor’s edge was for TerraUSD (UST) — now TerraUSD Classic (USTC) — I think it’s safe to say that most people didn’t expect Terra to fail so fast, so dramatically and so completely irrevocably.

I’m writing this as the Terra community is voting on a plan to restart some kind of Terra 2.0 — a plan to salvage the layer-1 ecosystem without the UST stablecoin. The old Terra, now to be known as Terra Classic, is completely dead. An ill-fated attempt to backstop UST holders printed trillions of LUNA tokens, destroying their value and ultimately jeopardizing the safety of the network itself.

The complete wipeout of $50 billion in value seems to have made people decide once and for all that algorithmic stablecoins cannot work. But I think it’s important to have a more nuanced understanding of why the original LUNA failed and how others can learn from its lessons.

Related: Terra 2.0: A crypto project built on the ruins of $40 billion in investors’ money

Stablecoins: New name for an age-old concept

The term stablecoin mostly evokes United States dollar-pegged currencies that aim to maintain a $1 value. But it’s important to remember that this is mostly a matter of convenience. The same mechanisms underpinning today’s USD stablecoins can be used to create coins that are pegged to the euro, gold, even Bitcoin (BTC), Nasdaq futures, or some specific stock, such as Tesla (TSLA).

Do Kwon, the CEO and co-founder of the infamous Terra (LUNA) and TerraUSD (UST) ecosystems, refuted the claims of cashing out $80 million every month for nearly three years. 

Numerous unconfirmed reports surfaced on Saturday, claiming Kwon’s participation in draining liquidity out of Luna Classic (LUNC) and TerraUSD Classic (USTC), before the crash to purchase United States dollar-pegged stablecoin such as Tether (USDT).

Rumors about Kwon cashing out LUNA and UST reserves surfaced after a Twitter thread by FatManTerra shared the alleged details on how Kwon, along with Terra influencers, managed to drain funds while artificially maintaining the liquidity.

However, the entrepreneur advised the crypto community to steer away from fueling the rumor until it was proven true:

“This should be obvious, but the claim that I cashed out $2.7B from anything is categorically false.”