Riding The Wave News Summary 79
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Tweets
What Cardano’s Highly Anticipated Vasil Hard Fork Will Bring
Latest Draft of US Crypto Law Would Temporarily Ban Terra-Like Stablecoins
Tweets
Ether drops 15% since major Ethereum network upgrade as traders take profits and fret over rate hikes
Ether has fallen more than bitcoin since the cryptocurrency’s underlying technology, the Ethereum network, underwent a huge upgrade called “the merge.”
Despite the upgrade happening successfully, ether has fallen more than bitcoin.
Since Sept. 15, the date the merge was completed, to Tuesday, ether is down 15.2%. Bitcoin has dropped 4.4% in the same period.
Ahead of the network upgrade, the price of ether roughly doubled from the lows of the year in June, far outpacing bitcoin’s gains.
Investors are also wondering whether the regulatory standing of ether may change after the merge after U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler indicated last week that cryptocurrencies that work on the proof-of-stake model, which applies to Ethereum, could be classed as a security. That would bring it under the purview of the regulators.
But any “change in the macro environment in terms of inflation of interest rate surprises, is definitely cause for concern,” he said, adding that if bitcoin falls below $18,000, the cryptocurrency could test levels as low as $14,000.
What Cardano’s Highly Anticipated Vasil Hard Fork Will Bring
On Thursday, Sept. 22, the Cardano blockchain will carry out its much-anticipated Vasil hard fork, a backward-incompatible upgrade taking place on the main network that is intended to enrich smart contract capabilities, increase the chain’s throughput and reduce costs.
Plutus is Cardano’s native smart contract language. Vasil will deliver a second version of Cardano’s scripting language, Plutus version (v)2. As the foundational layer of Cardano, Plutus efficiently separates the code that drives smart contracts, which remains off-chain and runs on a user’s machine, from the on-chain validation of transactions. The new Plutus v2 features will become available one epoch after Thursday’s hard fork, expected to occur on Sept. 27.
Cardano is sometimes criticized because its smart contract capabilities are seen as lagging behind Ethereum and other layer one blockchains with their thriving decentralized finance (DeFi) communities.
Other improvements post-Vasil (although, no hard fork is required for this) will include what’s known as “diffusion pipelining,” a way of increasing Cardano’s speed and scaling potential by compressing some of the idle time by propagating blocks ahead of their full validation, while still validating headers.
New York judge orders Tether to document USDT backing
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