Miners capitulate, Durov surrendered – important for the week

Bitcoin miners continue to capitulate.

Cryptocurrency analyst from Twitter under the nickname CryptoKea believes that the trend of stagnation of miners is intensifying:

“We have reached the surrender territory of bitcoin miners.”

Now they do not mine, but only sell: over the past week, 955 BTC more have been sold than mined. This situation further puts pressure on the cryptocurrency rate. After the halving, miners began to turn off unprofitable equipment, and they were forced to compensate for the losses through the sale of coins from stocks.

According to a Digiconomist report, miner power consumption has dropped by 24% since the halving, but is still quite high. After the halving, mining difficulty also decreased by 6%.

Due to a decrease in miner activity, the pool of unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions (mempool) has grown to its highest level in the last two years. This means that low-fee transactions can wait in line for a long time before being confirmed by the miners. In turn, this leads to an increase in commissions within the network, as well as to a slowdown in the network - over the past week, the average time to include a transaction in a block has increased from 7 to 16 minutes. The average transaction fee increased from $3.18 at the beginning of the month to $6.64. The size of the mempool was also affected by the shortage of electricity in the Chinese province of Sichuan, caused by a delay in the rainy season.

Binance has added options on ETH and XRP.

The largest cryptocurrency exchange is launching option contracts (the right to buy or sell cryptocurrency at a certain price) for Ripple and Ethereum, which will initially be available only in a mobile application, as was the case with Bitcoin. Bitcoin options went on sale in early April. Contracts for ETH and XRP provide for time periods from 10 minutes to one day, and the maximum amount in them is possible up to 200 ETH or 200,000 XRP within one application. The exchange itself notes that after the release of bitcoin options on the market, the site outperformed its competitors in this direction.

China will launch the digital yuan ahead of schedule.

The Chinese authorities have accelerated the development of a digital currency in order to stimulate the economy after the coronavirus pandemic. The reason for this is also the threat of US sanctions on Chinese institutions and the international status of the yuan. According to the authorities, the development of their own digital currency will play an important role in combating the economic crisis, because with its help, money will quickly flow into the affected sectors of the economy.

Switzerland has launched a debit card that uses stablecoins to convert cryptocurrencies to fiat.

The Swiss startup Eidoo introduced the Eidoo Card cryptocurrency card on the Visa payment system. Such a card will allow merchants to accept money converted from cryptocurrencies into euros or the British pound. The conversion process takes place using regulated stablecoins called Moneyfold Euro and Moneyfold GBR, issued on the basis of Ethereum. Stablecoins should provide decentralization and transparency during the conversion of cryptocurrency to fiat.

Pavel Durov withdrew the appeal against the ban on the sale of Gram tokens in the United States.

At the end of March, the court banned Telegram from selling and distributing Gram tokens, and later extended this ban to non-US investors. Lawyers quickly challenged this decision by filing an appeal. The founder of Telegram was ready to fight to the last for Gram, but now it seems he has decided to retreat. From the documents of the court it follows that the decision was made by agreement of the parties.