This week, Bitcoin triumphantly updated its all-time high, breaking the $60,000 mark. Vitalik Buterin assured that Ethereum is on the verge of 100X scalability, and now the problem of high fees will get off the ground. Ripple settled the conflict with YouTube and announced the “winded down” of partnerships with MoneyGram. What events this week are still remembered for, read on our review.

Ethereum’s transactional throughput will increase by 100 times in the coming weeks

Extremely high transaction fees on the Ethereum network have seriously bothered crypto enthusiasts. The record $23 per transaction in February did not please traders at all. In response to the wave of criticism, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin assured that the development team intends to solve the network scalability problem before implementing Eth2 sharding.

In the podcast, Buterin noted that the launch of second-tier solutions (Rollups) will scale the throughput of the Ethereum network by 100 times.

The Rollups launch is just around the corner. We have the opportunity to increase the network bandwidth from 1000 to 4000 transactions per second, depending on their complexity.

What are rollups? Essentially, these are networks of smart contracts that process and store transaction data off the main chain until the bundles of transactions are merged into the main Ethereum network. According to the developers, this solution will solve the problem of growing transaction fees and significantly reduce the load on the network.

Rollups are scheduled to launch in the coming weeks. Buterin is convinced that major DeFi players such as Uniswap, Aave, and Synthetix will be among the first to support rollups. These projects are extremely interested in reducing the commission, so the developers are counting on positive feedback from the market.

Fees are already going through the roof; our usual 2-3 USD has been replaced by 12-15 USD per transaction. Now, you will think three times before you pay something to someone. Sometimes the payment is just less than the fee itself. For example, additional software for trading or a subscription to TW costs 15 USD per month, and the transaction itself is the same. What can you think about it? To look for an alternative payment method and again have to pay with a bank card…

Ripple and YouTube resolve the conflict over the scam XRP giveaway

On March 9, Ripple and YouTube solemnly put an end to the conflict, which has been dragging on since April 2020. Then Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, filed a lawsuit against YouTube LLC, accusing the company of complicity in scams transactions with the so-called XRP giveaway.

The conflict erupted over a series of phishing attacks. The scheme is as easy as a pie: scammers impersonate well-known crypto players (including the CEO of Ripple himself) and urged users to participate in the “XRP free giveaway”. Allegedly, “close to Ripple” accounts promised that after sending the amount from 5,000 to 1,000,000 XRP, users will receive back their contribution five times.

According to Garlinghouse, YouTube not only did not stop the scams attack in time but also made good money by placing ads in such videos. While users suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars, video hosting reacted very sluggishly to the problem.

The conflict between Ripple and YouTube has been resolved. From now on, we will unite our efforts to detect and suppress any form of fraud.

The details of the agreement (including financial ones) Ripple with YouTube were not made public. However, Ripple announced the creation of a non-profit company that will help victims of scams crypto schemes.

Apparently, YouTube didn’t have a roadmap to track scam activity, it’s video hosting. Since there is no legal framework and regulation, it is difficult for a company to identify obvious violations. It is also impossible to say that YouTube is 100% wrong. There are a lot of fraudulent actions on the Internet, as well as faucet sites that distribute XRP for viewing ads or various actions.

For the first time, a house is offered for sale as an NFT

On the Mintable marketplace, for the first time, an offer has been published to sell a 50-percent stake in a residential building as an NFT (non-fungible token). This entry belongs to the owner of the house, investor Ivan Malpica.

The cost of this NFT is 42.42 Ethereum or $74.23 thousand. The website states that last year the house underwent repairs, including the replacement of the heating system and electrical communications. The house is located in St. Louis (USA). According to the conclusion of realtors, the house was valued at $138,000. The house is also rented out and brings the owner a passive income of $1,200 per month.

Malpica noted that he takes care of all legal issues related to the deal. According to him, after the sale of NFT, an agreement will be concluded between him and the buyer, confirming the ownership of the house in a 50/50 format. For now, there are not a lot of people who want to buy the “first-ever NFT for real estate”: at the time of writing this review, less than 100 users have viewed this lot, no one has yet made a bet. So far.

However, experts have already dubbed NFT as “DeFi 2.0” and are forecasting record digital asset sales in 2021.

Indeed, look at the NFT increase charts this year – they are off the charts. Some of them have already brought holders 400-500% and continue to increase. 2021 will be marked by the year of non-fungible tokens, just as 2020 was the year of DeFi.

Tether tokens launched on Solana blockchain

On March 9, Tether announced the launch of USDT stablecoins on the Solana blockchain (SOL). The first steps towards this integration were taken back in September 2020.

Solana bills itself as a “high-speed, low-cost” alternative to Ethereum. According to Tether, Solana’s throughput is more than 50,000 USDT transactions per second. Also, a nice bonus for users should be the size of the transaction fees: according to the technical director of Tether, fees could be as low as $0.00001.

This integration is expected to be the impetus for the emergence of new applications and projects in the DeFi space. In addition to the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, USDT tokens are also integrated into the Algorand, EOS, and Tron ecosystem.

We have seen an explosive rise in ETH, and perhaps this will also happen with SOL. Of course, Solana will not be famous for Tether alone, and it will take more than one year for this token to reach such heights. But the fact that this network will have minimal fees will effectively affect the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a whole.

Bitcoin “pushes aside” Gold as a hedge asset

“Bitcoin is confidently pushing aside the old guard,” – with these words Mike McGlon, the senior strategist at Bloomberg, tweeted his research on the market dynamics of Bitcoin and Gold.

According to technical indicators, investors prefer Bitcoin over Gold as a hedge asset. According to the strategist, the outflow of funds from Gold to digital assets will increase every year.

Gold will always be worthy of value as a collectible. But most indicators are now signaling that investors are increasingly choosing Bitcoin as a hedge asset over Gold.

Mike McGlon also posted a chart that shows a sharp decline in Bitcoin volatility versus Gold volatility. Overall, Mike McGlon is extremely optimistic about Bitcoin. In November 2020, the strategist noted that Bitcoin will reach the $170 thousand mark within the next 2 years.

How will it be in 2 years – time will tell, but the fact that Bitcoin easily storms new heights is beyond dispute. On March 13, Bitcoin set a new all-time record. It turned out even symbolically: exactly, one year after “Black Thursday” and the fall to $3,800, Bitcoin increased by 16 times and tested the level of $60,000.

Gold is the industrial era, BTC is digital. It cannot be said that only Bitcoin will remain on the market; XAU has been and will be. At its peak, the price reached 2,100 USD. Of course, these are not the “XX” of Bitcoin, but still, Gold is a fairly good conservative instrument that cannot be discounted.

Ripple and MoneyGram officially ended their partnership

The Ripple company announced the “winding down” of the partnership with the payment company MoneyGram International (MGI). According to Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, it was a mutual decision, and the companies are ready to rethink the format of their partnership in the future.

We are proud of the result that Ripple and MoneyGram have achieved through this collaboration. Together, we have processed billions of dollars through RippleNet and On-Demand Liquidity (ODL).

Ripple’s contract with MoneyGram was not terminated out of the blue. MoneyGram paused cooperation with Ripple at the end of February amid a US SEC lawsuit. Unwillingly, MoneyGram was embroiled in litigation: On March 2, the company received a class-action lawsuit from investors in Rosen, who purchased securities from MoneyGram between June 2019 and February 2021. Investors have accused MoneyGram of hiding information about the functioning of XRP as unlicensed security.

According to official data from MoneyGram, the reason for the termination of the contract was “the uncertainty of the future of Ripple”. So far, this news has not affected XRP in any way, unlike MoneyGram. As of this writing, MGI shares are down 9%, while XRP is up 2% on the day to $0.48.

From a trading point of view, XRP is a highly speculative instrument. Some news is constantly thrown into the media, which is sharply displayed on the charts. Those who globally manage this asset make colossal money from it. You can be convinced of this by opening the charts for 2008 and 2020: prices at first rіse sharply to 70-80 cents, then fell sharply down all on the same news events. You need to be careful with this tool.

Digest: The Main News On The Cryptocurrency Market (March 8-14)