SEC approves Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust for Trading on NYSE Arca

July 26, 2024 Coin Telegraph

bitcoin etf

Grayscale must await final regulatory signoff on its registration filing before listing the fund

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved Grayscale’s newest spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) — Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust (BTC) — for listing on the New York Stock Exchange’s (NYSE) Arca electronic trading platform, according to a July 26 filing.

The approval is an important milestone for Grayscale, which announced plans on July 19 to spin off a portion of its flagship Bitcoin fund, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), into the new Mini Trust.

“Grayscale is excited to share that the [SEC] has approved NYES Arca's Form 19b-4 application to list and trade shares of Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust (proposed ticker: BTC),” a spokesperson told Cointelegraph in an email.

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How decentralization could have prevented the global Microsoft meltdown

July 26, 2024 Coin Telegraph

Cloud Services

The recent Microsoft failure shows how vulnerable centralized systems are.

The widespread collapse of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, which disrupted key services worldwide, is being touted as a vindication of blockchain and decentralized technology.

Zain Cheng, the chief technology officer of Web3 development firm Horizen Labs, told Cointelegraph the Microsoft outage “underscores the vulnerabilities of centralized systems, where single points of failure can lead to widespread disruption.”

As Cheng points out, the disruption was indeed widespread. From July 18–19, businesses, supermarkets, broadcasters, airlines and banks ground to a halt as 8.5 million systems encountered the blue screen of death.

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Lightning Labs Rolls out Taproot Assets Seeking to Bring Stablecoins to Lightning Network

July 26, 2024 Bitcoin.com

Bitcoin (BTC)

Lightning Labs, an institution dedicated to research and development related to the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s second layer, has announced the rollout of Taproot Assets. This solution allows for issuing multiple tokens on top of it. The institution aims to capitalize on the popularity and volume of stablecoins to establish bitcoin as the global routing currency. […]

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Blackrock foresees “very little interest” in crypto ETFs beyond Bitcoin, Ethereum — Bitcoin2024

July 25, 2024 Coin Telegraph

Analysis

Clients see Bitcoin and Ethereum as complements, not substitutes, in crypto portfolios, according to Blackrock's head of digital assets.

Asset manager Blackrock sees “very little interest” among clients in crypto beyond Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) and doesn’t foresee many crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) outside of those two core digital assets, according to Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s head of digital assets, speaking at the Bitcoin2024 conference on July 25 in Nashville, Tennessee.

“I would say that our client base today, their interest overwhelmingly is in Bitcoin first, and then somewhat in ETH… and there’s very little interest today beyond those two,” Mitchnick said at a panel entitled From Strategy to Innovation: BlackRock's Bitcoin Journey.

“I don't think we're gonna see a long list of crypto ETFs,” Mitchnick said. Blackrock launched its first crypto exchange-traded funds — iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) and iShares Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHA) — in January and July, respectively.

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VanEck says Bitcoin could hit $2.9 million per coin by 2050

July 25, 2024 Coin Telegraph

VanEck says Bitcoin could hit .9 million per coin by 2050

Analysis

Bitcoin Layer-2s could be collectively worth around $7.6 trillion, the report added.

Investment manager VanEck foresees Bitcoin (BTC) potentially hitting $61 trillion in total market capitalization — or some $2.9 million per coin — in 2050 as a result of massive demand for the decentralized currency as collateral for trade settlement and a reserve for central banks, according to a July 24 report.

“It is conceivable that by 2050 Bitcoin could be used to settle 10% of the globe’s international trade and 5% of the world’s domestic trade,” VanEck said in the report. “This scenario would result in central banks holding 2.5% of their assets in BTC.”

VanEck adds that scaling solutions for Bitcoin’s blockchain network — Bitcoin Layer-2s — could collectively be worth approximately $7.6 trillion, or around 12% of BTC’s total value.

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Fireblocks launches Web3 startup toolkit amid a surge in new ventures

July 25, 2024 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

The number of startups using the Web3 platform has already increased by some 50%, according to Fireblocks.

Fireblocks, the Web3 infrastructure platform, launched a suite of tools specifically designed for startups amid a proliferation of early-stage blockchain ventures, according to a July 25 press release.

The toolkit — Fireblocks for Startups — is designed to help startups quickly build and launch Web3 products and includes solutions for treasury management, self-custody, private key storage, and secure digital asset transfers, the company said.

“The short history of crypto shows that successful projects — whether crypto exchanges, DeFi bridges, or NFT platforms — go through periods of hypergrowth during market upswings, with development teams focused solely on maintaining front-end stability while neglecting security in the process,” Idan Ofrat, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer of Fireblocks, said in a statement.

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New zero energy storage tech could lead to immortal blockchains

July 20, 2024 Coin Telegraph

Blockchain storage

Today’s tech allows us to preserve data for thousands of years with zero energy usage, tomorrow’s could ensure Satoshi’s vision lives on forever.

Recent advances in the field of long-term storage could form the basis for the development of immutable digital ledgers capable of storing data for millions of years without power. In other words: immortal blockchains.

At its core, blockchain technology operates on the simple premise that data is demonstrably safer in a decentralized ledger than it is on a centralized server.

In the event of a local outage, such as the failure of a power grid, the ledger remains safe as long as there are nodes elsewhere still in operation. A centralized server can only store and serve data for as long as it’s powered.

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TSMC becomes first Asian company to reach $1T as AI demand surges

July 20, 2024 Coin Telegraph

TSMC becomes first Asian company to reach T as AI demand surges

Apple

The company is now worth more than Broadcom and closing in on Meta.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited, more commonly known as TSMC, became the first Asian firm to reach a market capitalization of more than a trillion dollars as it briefly surpassed Berkshire Hathaway on June 20 to become the eight most valuable company in the world.

The company’s quiet rise comes on the wings of its massive portfolio of tech and manufacturing giants who source its semiconductors.

TSMC is the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer. Its top customers include Apple, AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Intel, and Qualcomm. However, Apple is by far its largest client, thanks to the use of TSMC semiconductors in iPhones, accounting for around a fifth of its total revenue.

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Nvidia claims breakthrough on path to GPU-based quantum computing

July 19, 2024 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Quantum annealing systems could impact the finance and blockchain industries in a major way.

Nvidia researchers are claiming noteworthy progress in the quest to build a fully functional, commercially viable quantum computer based on supercomputer simulations conducted with graphical processing units (GPUs).

While progress toward the development of a useful quantum computer has been steady for decades, physicists are still split on exactly what path to take towards their ultimate creation.

Quantum computers function differently from their classical counterparts. The computers we use every day, such as the one you’re reading this article on, rely on binary switches to conduct computations. But their quantum cousins exploit the nature of physics, through the use of qubits, to conduct much more complex computations than ones and zeros alone are capable of.

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OpenAI turns to Broadcom as Musk, Zuckerberg snatch up Nvidia AI chips

July 19, 2024 Coin Telegraph

chatGPT

The run on training hardware has put chipmakers at the forefront of the general artificial intelligence boom.

OpenAI is reportedly in talks with Broadcom and other chip makers in what appears to be an urgent effort to expand its artificial intelligence operations.

AI models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s Llama are typically trained using massive clusters of graphical processing units (GPUs) or similar computer chips. The most popular hardware, the H100, belongs to Nvidia.

The H100 can cost anywhere from $15,000 to $30,000, depending on the number purchased and current market conditions. It can take tens of thousands of these AI chips to train a single model, with more necessary for larger, more robust systems.

Technology