The biggest news last week was Bitcoin (BTC) experienced its third halving on May 11. Mining pool F2Pool ushered in the first crypto's block halving event by embedding a mysterious message permanently into the blockchain: "History has repeated. Due to the coronavirus, there has been yet another ongoing wave of bailout[s] just like the one Satoshi had seen in 2008, but bigger in scale, like Bitcoin reinvented." The text is a reference to a similar newspaper heading Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto immortalized in the first-ever block, referencing 2008 global financial crisis and associated systemic issues, or how much bitcoin is created every 10 minutes, allowing the pool to embed the text. The third halving, which reduced the block reward for miners from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC, can be seen as a sign of Bitcoin's maturity.
Here is the rest of week of review:
Central banks in 46 countries are pondering the creation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) using a constrained form of distributed ledger technology (DLT), according to a new survey. London-based journal Central Banking found in its inaugural CBDC survey released last week that 65% of respondents had actively researched digital currencies. Conducted in February, the survey found only one central bank would use blockchain as the basis for a CBDC. The "small African central bank," noted it would only consider using blockchain "if found to be the best available platform." While Central Banking's survey does not delve much further into why central banks do not want to use blockchain, 71% of respondents said they would consider building a CBDC on DLT, a broader category of network architectures, if the issuance stage is reached. But the survey included the caveat that the majority of central banks researching CBDCs had no plans to actually move forward and create one.
JK Rowling tweeted 2 sentences asking about Bitcoin and unexpectedly unleashed the Bitcoin community's extreme passion and imagination on Friday. Responding to a tweet from CoinDesk senior reporter Leigh Cuen, Rowling tweeted: "I don't understand bitcoin. Please explain it to me." In just two hours the author and multimillionaire's tweet had attracted 1,300 replies. In attempts to speak Rowling's language, many started comparing Bitcoin to the wizarding world from her books. Even Tesla
Crypto prices climbed to $266 billion this week, buoyed by Bitcoin's halving. For the majors, Bitcoin, Ethereum (ETH), and EOS surged with outsized double-digit gains, and all ten majors ended in the green. In the top 100, the biggest losers were ABBC Coin (ABBC), down 22%, Status (SNT), down 3.6%, and Bytecoin (BCN), down 3.5%. The biggest gainers were Electroneum (ETN), up a whopping 158%, Unibright (UBT), up 95%, and Zilliqa (ZIL), up 56%. Next week traders will see if crypto can sustain its momentum from the Bitcoin halving.
The author owns a small amount of BTC.
