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Solana developers share 3 key mitigation steps to make the network robust

Developers have suggested changing Solana’s current data transfer protocol UDP to QUIC, stake-weighted transaction processing and a fee-based transaction priority.

The Solana network faced its seventh outage on Saturday, resulting in a downtime of over seven hours. The developer team has released an outage report, along with three key mitigation steps to make the network more stable.

The network outage on Solana was caused by a significant surge in the number of transactions due to nonfungible token (NFT) minting bots. The bots used Candy Machine, a popular application used by Solana NFT projects to launch collections.

The transaction volume reached six million per second, overflowing individual nodes with 100 Gbps data. As a result, validators ran out of data memory, leading to a loss of consensus among them.

The developers ruled out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and blamed NFT minting bots for the congestion. The network came online at 3:30 am UTC on Sunday.

The official report highlighted three key mitigation steps that are in work to make the Solana network more resilient against such congestion issues. The first major step is to move from its current data transfer protocol called user datagram protocol (UDP) to Google-developed quick UDP internet connection (QUIC). QUIC offers fast asynchronous communication like UDP, but with sessions and flow control like transmission control protocol.

The second key step is the integration of stake-weighted transaction processing instead of its current first-come-first-serve basis. The developers claimed a stake-weighted transaction processing along with QUIC would be more robust.

The third mitigation step is to introduce “fee-based execution priority,” where users would have the option to add an additional fee on top of the base fee. The fee prioritization is set for the v1.11 release.

Related: Solana DAOs can now bug you to vote with phone calls and texts

Apart from the Solana network outage, an even bigger controversy was the beta cluster restart instructions, reportedly issued by validator operators. The said instructions asked validators to block NFT minting bots manually at the layer-1 layer.

Solana Beta Cluster Restart Instructions Souce: Twitter

However, Solana’s head of communication Austin Federa said that the majority of validators kept their distance from censoring and a new update is being introduced on the Candy Machine with additional anti-bot features.

US Bitcoin strategic reserve divides opinion at World Economic Forum

Telegram Users Can Send and Receive Toncoin Within Messenger Chats

Telegram Users Can Send and Receive Toncoin Within Messenger ChatsTelegram users can now send and receive toncoin directly within the application’s chats, according to a tweet by The Open Network (TON) Foundation. In addition to the toncoin support, users can also purchase bitcoin via the software’s bot system. TON Foundation Reveals Telegram Toncoin Support, Users Can Purchase Bitcoin via Bot The ability to send […]

US Bitcoin strategic reserve divides opinion at World Economic Forum

Thailand Adopts Rules Restricting Cryptocurrency Payments From April

Thailand Adopts Rules Restricting Cryptocurrency Payments From AprilRegulators in Thailand have decided to limit the use of cryptocurrencies as a means of payment. The authorities consider the country’s current payment system efficient and insist cryptos would only bring risks for the financial system, economy, people and businesses. Thailand SEC Issues Regulations Limiting Use of Digital Assets for Payments Financial regulators in Thailand […]

US Bitcoin strategic reserve divides opinion at World Economic Forum

$1 million rock NFT sells for a penny in all ore nothing error

A simple mistake led one crypto user to sell his precious rock NFT for 444 WEI instead of 444 ETH, a tenth of a penny rather than $1.2 million.

It's a hard rock life for one crypto user. A clumsy keystroke and the actions of a sniper bot caused a million-dollar mistake on March 10.

A rock valued at 444 ether (ETH), or $1.2 million, sold for 444 Wei ($0.0012) to a bot as the seller, DinoDealer confused WEI and ETH. In a tweet, the seller said “in one click my entire net worth of ~$1 million dollars, gone.”

The "bot sniped" refers to bot snipers, which initially came into usage on auction site eBay. Buyers looking to time their bid to the last second would use the tools, however, they are now prolific on NFT listings. The popular freelance website Upwork now lists bot sniping tools for the NFT platform OpenSea from as little as $200. 

Once the bot snaps up the NFT or digital receipt, there’s no going back. Blockchains are constructed to be immutable so simple mistakes, such as confusing ETH and WEI, can be extremely costly.

Indeed, human error abounds in the crypto world. An unfortunate Bitcoin (BTC) user recently lost $10,000 (0.25 BTC) in a mistake that could have been avoided had they double-checked the receiver wallet address.

The seller, DinoDealer, seems to have come to terms with the loss, publicly sharing the address of the rock’s bot snipe. They made light of the situation by uploading a new Twitter profile picture and adding a crying emoji after their Twitter handle. Their avatar stands next to the precious rock, crossed out in red.

DinoDealer's new Twitter picture with sad rocks and cancelled rocks in the background. Source: Twitter

More jokes came from DinoDealer's futile attempt to reach out to the “crypto customer service.” Their attempts to speak to members of the crypto community were met with replies from suspicious users purporting to help, offering email addresses and WhatsApp numbers. 

Screenshots of the conversations DinoDealer had with "crypto customer service." Source: Twitter

Do not reach out to these numbers or email addresses.

The past month has been tumultuous for seemingly minor errors with potentially dire consequences. In some cases, a simple mistake can wipe millions of dollars of market value increasingly common.

Related: Rare Bears Discord phishing attack nabs $800K in NFTs

A Coinbase white hacker discovered a mistake in the Coinbase Pro code which could have nuked the market, while frantic bot trading behaviors drained the WTF token launch of 58 ETH. “Poor liquidity pool management” left the launch exposed.

In better days for DinoDealer, other crypto rock enthusiasts have come to his aid, one user sending the geologist salesman a picture of the rock with glasses and headphones, signed “mfer rocks.”

Rock bottom consolation for one million dollars.  Source: Etherscan

US Bitcoin strategic reserve divides opinion at World Economic Forum

Hodl, don’t trade, says the AI Bitcoin trading bot

An AI trading bot that learns how to time the market and accumulate Bitcoin quickly learned that the best way is to simply ”hodl.”

“Hodling” really is the way when it comes to accumulating Bitcoin (BTC). At least, that’s the conclusion made by an artificial intelligence (AI) trading bot coded up by a Portuguese software developer.

Bitcoiner Tiago Vasconcelos is the man behind the trading experiment. Vasconcelos built an AI trading bot that would help him accumulate more Bitcoin and test his coding skills. Almost inconceivably, instead of trading, the bot quickly concluded that the best way to trade Bitcoin is to buy and hold onto it.

Vasconcelos is the lead founder of Aceita Bitcoin, a Portuguese organization promoting the adoption, education and sharing of information about Bitcoin. A keen Bitcoiner, he also dabbles in Bitcoin-related side projects.

He told Cointelegraph, “It was a reinforcement learning AI experiment, where I went and got a truckload of historical data from BTC/USDT.” The code sourced and scraped the daily price action from 2014 to 2021.

Vasconcelos then “trained it, or told him [the bot] the rules, here are the candles, you can either buy, sell, or do nothing.”

For every profitable trade, the bot would be rewarded with one point. The bot loses one point as a “punishment” for lost trades. Finally, a reward is granted to the bot for the total amount of Bitcoin the bot finishes with:

“The goal is for the bot to get the highest score possible and the exercise is that he makes thousands/millions of tries on that set of data, making a ‘mental’ path of when is best to buy, best to sell, etc.”
Screenshots of the “figuring out that less trades work best!”

The beauty of AI is that the bot begins to observe “patterns” and what Vasconcelos describes as “moves” that the bot makes to maximize its trading score. 

“Eventually, the bot concludes the best move is to buy as soon as possible and never sell!”

There you have it, now it’s not just popular talking heads and even banks in the Bitcoin space that are crying “Hodl.” Even the robots are hodlers.

Related: Bitcoin inactive supply nears record as over 60% of BTC stays unspent for at least 1 year

Hodl is a popular meme in the Bitcoin space, originating from a Bitcointalk forum post in 2013 by an inebriated contributor who misspelled hold. The reason why the original commenter, GameKyuubi decided to hodl is “because I’m a bad trader and I KNOW I’M A BAD TRADER.”

Turns out, he might have been just as smart as artificial intelligence all along.

US Bitcoin strategic reserve divides opinion at World Economic Forum

Trader builds Bitcoin ‘buy the dip’ bot, outperforms DCA

A Redditor has created an automated dip-buying bot that beats dollar-cost averaging into Bitcoin by roughly 10%.

While a bullish backdrop emerges in February, spare a thought for the traders trying to time the market. One savvy trader by the name of u/Samjhill on Reddit has built a trading tool that outperforms dollar-cost averaging (DCA) for buying Bitcoin (BTC). 

DCA is the strategy in which investors buy a small amount regularly regardless of price fluctuations. It works in contrast to traders keen to get the lowest entry, timing the dip to perfection and avoiding “catching a falling knife.”

The aptly named “Buy the Dip Bot” aims to “get the best price for a given asset by using a limit strategy.” Inspired by another Redditor who suggested a manual limit-buy-order strategy for getting the best price entry, u/Samjhill took the idea one step further, coding up a dip-buying bot.

The bot places limit orders at several intervals below the current price, and if an order gets executed or canceled, it starts again. Using tech from Amazon Web Services, Python, Lambda, DynamoDB and React.JS while hosted on GitHub, the cost to run is low, “about $5 per month.”

While the bot has been beavering away since December, it hit a maiden milestone on Monday. Reaching profitability versus regular dollar-cost averaging, “the price-per-coin advantage is about (cheaper) 5%–10% right now, which you could also think of as getting that much more coin for your money,” Sam told Cointelegraph.

The bot runs a backtesting library to work out the best entry points for the limit buys. A complex process, the work paid off, culminated in a “winning strategy.”

Related: TokenBot helps crypto traders build social communities and monetize market knowledge

When asked by Cointelegraph if he would recommend the bot as opposed to regular DCA, Sam replied it depends on where you are in your BTC journey:

“For people just starting out, regular DCA probably makes more sense since your goal is probably to stack as many coins as possible. For those later in their journey, they might have a decent stack already and want to minimize increasing their cost basis and so might benefit more from this.”

Sam, who first learned of Bitcoin around 2013, added that he is doing both DCA and the limit strategy “to get a more even curve of coin growth.”

While the future is currently Bitcoin orange for the trading bot, Sam built the system for easy integration with other coins. Ether (ETH) features on the GitHub page, and Sam hints he may roll out other coins to production.

US Bitcoin strategic reserve divides opinion at World Economic Forum

Strategies for trading cryptocurrency during a correction, explained

What do market corrections mean for crypto traders? And how can trading bots be used to an investor’s advantage?

How to apply automated trading in times of correction?

Investors looking to leverage automated trading must first select a platform, determine their strategy and begin implementation.

With the rising of automated trading platforms, users now have a greater selection than ever before, each of which is designed to simplify the process for new and experienced investors alike.

TradeSanta is a cryptocurrency trading bot used across the cryptocurrency industry, allowing users to take advantage of automated trading strategies. The trades are executed per market movements based on pre-programmed instructions with access to DCA and grid strategies, in addition to more advanced features, including stop loss and trailing stop.

With this combination, investors can manage risks in the event of both market reversals and corrections. More recently, TradeSanta released a Trailing Take Profit feature so investors can also take advantage of uptrend periods following a dip.

That said, a trading bot is nothing more than a piece of software that executes trades based on how an investor sets them up. Therefore, with a proven strategy and a careful eye on the market, substantial profits with automated trading can be possible in any market condition, with platforms like TradeSanta making it simple for users to set up.

Learn more about TradeSanta

Disclaimer. Cointelegraph does not endorse any content or product on this page. While we aim at providing you with all important information that we could obtain, readers should do their own research before taking any actions related to the company and carry full responsibility for their decisions, nor can this article be considered as investment advice.

What approach and strategies should investors consider leveraging as a part of an automated solution?

Automated trading strategies, including the reversion strategy with a dollar-cost averaging (DCA) bot, can help users take advantage of a market correction.

Since the price is expected to return to normal, one common tactic is the use of a reversion strategy, based on the idea that rates will return to a mean value after a certain point in time. In practice, this strategy identifies the upper and lower price limit; then, the algorithm runs to execute orders when the price surpasses the normal range.

The strategy is particularly beneficial as prices hit new highs or lows so traders can gain profits from trends in the market. When employing a cryptocurrency trading bot with this strategy, investors must be careful that prices may not reverse as quickly as expected.

As a part of a long-term strategy, a dollar-cost averaging method is often recommended. With this strategy, a bot may place a single buy order and continue to purchase additional orders if the price decreases. That way, holders can take advantage of lower asset prices without worrying about timing the market "perfectly." Again, assuming that the market will correct itself over a period, the asset will be sold based on a parameter preset by the investor. Taken together, these are only two of the strategies that investors may choose to leverage in the event of a correction.

What are some of the considerations investors must make when using automated crypto trading during a correction?

Cryptocurrency trading bots take the emotions out of trading but are not completely hands-off either and, therefore, must be accompanied with a carefully thought out strategy.

In a correction, it is not uncommon for emotions to run high. Although these events are expected, investors may be quick to act on their fear and execute a trade that is not in their best interests. For these reasons, a cryptocurrency trading bot becomes beneficial since trades are executed based on logic, eliminating emotions from the equation.

However, to successfully implement a crypto trading bot, investors must first seek out the most profitable one for them. Although making the selection is in the investor's hands, that's not where the decision-making stops.

Trading bots are built to follow a set of rules and are therefore not always perfect in the face of an unpredictable market. As a result, a carefully-crafted strategy is necessary for an automated trading bot. Programming errors can also impact crypto bots. Therefore, investors must exercise extra caution when determining the bot's actions or setting the rules for their own from scratch.

Investors must bear in mind that being successful with an automated bot requires clear goals, patience and trust in the process and is not a solution for overnight success.

What is a market correction, and how should traders respond to it?

A correction refers to a rapid price decrease, which traders can use to their advantage with the assistance of cryptocurrency trading bots.

Although the definition for a correction differs, it is most often used to describe a rapid decrease in an asset’s price, usually at least 10% and up to 20%. If an asset falls more than that, the price dip is classified as a market crash.

Corrections are often the result of a minor event, such as low trading volumes or other technical factors. They, therefore, occur fairly regularly, lasting a few days, weeks and, in some cases, months. The term correction is then used since the price will often return to its expected value. However, the alternative may also be true. A correction may lead to a larger decline, a bear market.

As most know, the cryptocurrency market is defined by its volatility, making it normal for prices to move up and down fairly regularly.

Looking at the 2021 year alone, the cryptocurrency market was subject to four market corrections and another market event.

For this reason, analysts will also recommend market corrections as a great opportunity for investors to buy assets "on sale."

The main concern here is that it can be hard to determine when a correction might occur. For this reason, crypto trading bots can play a crucial role in helping traders determine when to buy and sell using signals and indicators and also just not to miss that moment while being away from the screen.

US Bitcoin strategic reserve divides opinion at World Economic Forum

Thailand Doesn’t Prohibit Crypto Use for Payments but Warns of Price Fluctuation

Thailand Doesn’t Prohibit Crypto Use for Payments but Warns of Price FluctuationBank of Thailand’s officials say that using cryptocurrency as a means of payment is not illegal. However, they added that users “must be able to accept the risks,” including price fluctuation. Using Crypto to Pay for Goods and Services Is Not Illegal in Thailand Sakkapop Panyanukul, senior director at the Bank of Thailand (BOT)’s Monetary […]

US Bitcoin strategic reserve divides opinion at World Economic Forum

Central bank tells Thai banks not to offer crypto trading

The Bank of Thailand doesn’t want local banks or businesses using crypto, while the tourism ministry is still trying to attract crypto whales.

The Bank of Thailand has stated that it does not want commercial banks to be directly involved in the trading of crypto assets.

The edict came from central bank senior director Chayawadee Chai-Anant on Dec. 7 who cited risks associated with high price volatility.

"We don't want banks to be directly involved in digital asset trading because banks are (responsible) for customer deposits and the public and there is risk."

The latest round of central bank suppression of digital assets comes at a time when commercial banks have been making investments in local cryptocurrency exchanges, according to a Bangkok Post report.

In early November, Thailand’s oldest bank Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) announced that it was acquiring a 51% stake in the country’s largest crypto exchange, Bitkub. In late August, the Zipmex crypto exchange raised $1.3 billion in funding from the country's fifth-largest lender, Bank of Ayudhya.

The Bank of Thailand (BoT) has taken an increasingly tougher stance against digital assets despite their growing popularity in the country among individuals, companies, and banks.

Last week, BoT senior director Sakkapop Panyanukul warned businesses about accepting crypto, stating: "If other currencies are widely used, it will impact the central bank's ability oversee the economy." Referring to tokens not backed by assets, he labeled them as “blank coins.”

The central bank has also expressed concern over the use of cryptocurrencies to pay for goods and services. In a related report on Dec. 8, Chai-Anant commented that digital assets could be detrimental to merchants and consumers because they are “associated with high price volatility and risks of cyber theft, personal data leakage, and money laundering.”

“If digital assets become widely used as a means of payment for goods and services, such risks could affect payment system stability, financial stability, and consumer protection.”

Related: Thai lawmakers urged to approve tourism crypto to entice digital nomads

The BoT warnings come just a fortnight after the Kingdom’s tourism ministry ramped up its efforts to encourage the crypto-rich to visit the country. The Tourism Authority of Thailand has declared the country “crypto-friendly” but clearly, the central bankers don’t want it to be too friendly.

Thailand’s economy is heavily dependent on the tourism industry which has been battered during the pandemic. Much of the Kingdom remains in lockdown with very few arrivals at the time of writing despite efforts to lure crypto nomads and the like to a country where the central bank doesn’t want them using digital currencies.

US Bitcoin strategic reserve divides opinion at World Economic Forum

Arbitrage bot’s spam attack on the Polygon network generated $6,800 per day

An arbitrage bot managed to turn 14 ETH to 218.5 ETH simply by spamming the Polygon network for 120 days.

The growth of layer-two protocols has been one of the major stories of 2021 as the rising popularity of decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible tokens (NFT) have driven transaction costs higher on the Ethereum (ETH) network effectively pricing out many participants. 

Earlier this year the Polygon network, formerly known as MATIC, emerged as one of the top contenders in the race for an effective Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution, and the project's QuickSwap DeFi platform was also one of the more successful Uniswap clones.

The platform was quite popular initially but as other platforms like Arbitrum and Optimism popped up, discussions about Polygon fell to the wayside and some traders even refer to the platform as "slow". Data from Flipside Crypto shows that the low-cost capabilities of the Polygon network came under attack after a cleverly devised arbitrage bot managed turn 14 Ether in 218.5 Ether in less than four months.

The bot filled each block with “meaningless transactions”

According to data from Flipside Crypto, the attack began in early May and at one point in June, pushed transactions on the Polygon network went as high as 8 million per day. In the same timeframe, the maximum number of transactions on the Ethereum network was at 1.2 million.

Number of transactions on Ethereum vs. Polygon. Source: Flipside Crypto

Data found on a Polygon forum indicates that the attacker has been inflating transaction volumes by as much as 90% by stuffing each block full of “meaningless transactions” while only having to pay around 0.02 MATIC to spam the entire block and roughly $1,000 for an entire day.

A deeper dive into the transactions and addresses interacting on the network revealed that around 30% of the network’s transaction count was coming from two contracts which have been determined to be arbitrage bots that conduct thousands of daily transactions to various decentralized exchanges (DEX).

The exact reason why the spammer chose to fill each block when the bots were only conducting 2,000 - 4,000 trades per day is uncertain, but one theory is that it was done in an effort to prevent anyone else from front running the trade.

Related: Polygon can hit $3.50 in Q4 as MATIC’s 20% weekly rally triggers bull flag setup

The bot netted $6,800 in average daily profit

Over a period of 120 days, the bot was able to grow an initial amount of 14 Ether to 218.5 Ether, which is currently worth $813,694.

That works out to an average daily of profit roughly $6,800 before including the cost to spam the network.

In response to the spammer, the team behind Polygon ultimately decided to increase the minimum cost of a transaction from 1 gwei to 30 gwei as a way to fight spam and improve network health.

The move appears to have achieved its intended goal as data provided by Delphi Digital shows that the spike in average transaction costs coincided with a marked decline in the number of daily transactions because it now costs $30,000 to spam the network for an entire day.

Polygon average gas cost vs. daily transaction count. Source: Delphi Digital

Network data shows that the spam transactions have dropped from 2 million to 500,000 transactions per day, a decrease of 75%, but they still account for 16.7% of daily transactions. This means that the bots are spending roughly $5,000 of their daily $6,800 profit on gas to keep the scheme running.

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.

US Bitcoin strategic reserve divides opinion at World Economic Forum