Bitcoin (BTC) price witnessed a sharp dump to $50,900 on April 18, which some analysts attribute to a drop in hash rate and rumors of possible action by United States regulators against unnamed “financial institutions” alleging crypto-related money laundering. While it is difficult to pinpoint a single reason, the sale of roughly $5 billion worth of COIN stock by Coinbase executives could have also played a major role in the fall. Insider selling, especially just a few days after a high-profile listing is considered a bearish sign. After this most recent pullback, investors will be on the fence on whether …

Step Finance, a Solana-native decentralized finance protocol, announced the completion of a private token sale for $2 million, which will help build and develop its platform. The round, disclosed on Tuesday, saw participation from notable Solana backers including Alameda Research, the hedge fund known for launching and backing FTX and Serum. Other investors include Raydium, One Block, 3 Commas Capital, Solidity Ventures and some undisclosed individual investors within the Solana ecosystem. Step Finance is a DeFi position manager and aggregator, offering similar functionality to Ethereum’s Zapper. George Harrap, co-founder of Step, explained the current issues the project is trying to …

Over the past six months, blockchain projects that have issued token airdrops have reemerged. Most notably, the airdrops of MEME and Uniswap's UNI will be remembered, as recipients were rewarded with gains ranging from $20,000 to $600,000 simply for holding the tokens. One Ethereum competitor that has seen numerous projects launch with airdrops in the past three weeks is Solana, an open-source project that focuses on utilizing blockchain technology to provide decentralized finance (DeFi) solutions. While Solana isn’t explicitly making a concerted effort to launch these projects, the protocol’s main decentralized exchange, Serum, was responsible for the recent COPE airdrop, …

The cryptocurrency sector has emerged as a hot topic on the global stage in 2021 thanks in large part to the growth of decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens which have caught the general public’s attention. Throughout the sector there is a need for interoperability between networks as many of the most popular projects are on siloed blockchain networks and high Ethereum fees prevent developers and investors from interacting across chains. One project focused on solving this project is Ren, which revealed on March 31 that Solana and Fantom had become the latest tokens supported by the interoperability-focused protocol. March Development …

The Solana Foundation, the grants program behind the Solana high-performance blockchain, has inked partnerships with cryptocurrency exchanges OKEx and MXC to launch two strategic investment funds designed to fuel the ecosystem’s expansion. The two funds, which are collectively valued at $40 million, will help Solana bring more of its decentralized applications and protocols to market. Anatoly Yakovenko, president of the Solana Foundation, said the blockchain platform has “grown multitudes in the past few months” both in terms of volume of projects and active developers. He said the Solana team will work alongside its new funders to “support the next wave …

Solana and Serum announced the winners of a recent two-week hackathon focusing on building decentralized finance projects on the Solana blockchain. A total of nine projects were eligible for the hackathon’s official prize pool, with an additional project winning a community prize. The winning projects are primarily new DeFi protocols, though some infrastructure and tooling solutions also made the cut. The two first-place winners, Mango Markets and PsyOptions, won $50,000 in USDC-SPL, or USD Coin (USDC) based on Solana. Both projects focus on creating new trading platforms on the Solana blockchain, with Mango Markets building a margin trading and derivatives …

Stablecoin issuer Tether has announced that USDT tokens are launching today, March 9, on the Solana (SOL) blockchain. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Tether's chief technical officer said that the integration with the layer 1 blockchain promises to support a wide array of projects in the Decentralized Finance, or DeFi, sector and other Web 3.0. activities. As previously reported, Solana is being pitched as a competitor to Ethereum, with the hope of drawing DeFi actors into its network as they wait for the full benefits of Eth2 to finally kick in. According to Tether, Solana will enable users to transact USDT at …

Bitcoin's (BTC) sharp correction below $45,000 sent shockwaves throughout the entire market for a second day and many altcoins are fighting to hold the gains they've accrued since the start of the year. Two exceptions to the current downturn are Solana (SOL) and Cosmos (ATOM), which have both managed to experience minor price breakouts following recent bullish developments for each project. Data from Cointelegraph Markets and TradingView shows that SOL and ATOM saw initial price dips in the early trading hours of trading on Feb. 23 but both were able to quickly bounce back and outperform the wider market for …

Another wave of selling pressure hit the cryptocurrency market on Feb. 23 as Bitcoin struggles to reclaim the $49,000 level. Data from Cointelegraph Markets and TradingView shows that Bitcoin fell under intense pressure in the early trading hours on Tuesday and this pushed the price of BTC as low as $44,927 before buyers arrived to stop the descent. The majority of altcoins and DeFi tokens are now even deeper into their double-digit losses and Bitcoin (BTC) price has dropped by more than $10,000 in the past 48 hours. At the time of writing, BTC is trading at a price of …

Major decentralized exchange SushiSwap is the latest to consider action to mitigate Ethereum’s extreme transaction fees, and it involves a potential port to the Solana blockchain. A proposal, which was posted to the SushiSwap forum on Feb. 22 under the codename ‘Bonsai,’ suggests building out the platform on the Solana ecosystem. The integration is intended to mitigate Ethereum's skyrocketing transaction fees, which have spiked to new all-time highs over the past 24 hours. The proposal would involve integrating SushiSwap with Raydium's platform, with the Solana-based automated market maker having launched on Feb. 21. The proposal’s author, "Handroll," notes Raydium already …

In the early morning trading hours Bitcoin (BTC) price abruptly dropped by 17.65% which triggered a major downturn throughout the entire market. Data from Cointelegraph Markets and TradingView shows that Bitcoin decreased from a high of $58,274 on Feb. 21 to a low of $47,622 during the early hours on Monday before buyers returned to lift BTC to its current value of $53,350. Despite today’s $1.6 billion liquidation event, Bitcoin bulls remain optimistic about the future of the top cryptocurrency with key indicators suggesting that those buying today’s dip are likely to come out on top. According to ExoAlpha Chief …

Following its mainnet launch on Ethereum in mid-December 2020, The Graph has today announced that it will be supporting Polkadot, NEAR, Solana and Celo. As reported, The Graph is a protocol that enables programmers to build Application Programming Interfaces, which it calls subgraphs, that can query and index blockchain data. Envisaged as an open alternative to existing blockchain analytics tools, it offers an infrastructure for accessing on-chain data from multiple blockchains, with the wider aim of supporting collaboration and interoperability across the decentralized web. Eva Beylin, director at The Graph Foundation, has underscored the need to work toward making Web …