Coindesk

Ether (ETH) slumped Sunday to its lowest level against bitcoin (BTC) since March 2021 as the world’s second-largest token extended losses against its larger rival.One ether dropped to 0.03 BTC on Sunday, almost 50% lower than a year ago, as bitcoin soared in the run-up to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration. The exchange rate for the two tokens, conventionally called a ratio, peaked above 0.08 in 2022.ETH's value proposition has been on the decline ever since. Bitcoin touched a record high above $109,000 earlier Monday and has returned 160% to investors over the past year. Ether, meantime, has gained just 40% and is hovering some 30% below its 2021 peak. Ether tends to rally when traders see a benefit for...

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's TRUMP token has made quite a splash in the crypto market, rapidly becoming the 21st largest digital asset with a market cap of $11 billion in just two days.The TRUMP/USDT pair has emerged as the most-traded pair over the past 24 hours on the leading exchange, Binance, representing 13.3% of the total exchange volume, according to Coingecko.While this activity is thrilling, the bulls and those looking to join the market ahead of Donald Trump's inauguration might want to exercise caution, as a key derivatives market indicator has diverged bearishly from the token's rising futures open interest.Open interest in TRUMP perpetual futures has increased by 6% in the past 24 hours, according to data source Velo Data....

The world’s most-used blockchain just bagged its largest ever daily fees. On Saturday, Donald Trump’s official token, TRUMP, was issued on the Solana blockchain, which led to an uptick in trading volumes over the weekend. Between Saturday and Sunday, the network generated fees of over $35 million and revenue of at least $14 million, DeFiLlama data shows. This volume originated from some 6 million active addresses.These fees are more than double of Nov. 22 levels of nearly $14 million, when several AI Agent tokens populated the network and led to a trading frenzy.Such fees are remarkably high for a low-cost blockchain, when transactions typically take fractions of a cent to settle. The TRUMP token attracted over $3 billion in trading...

Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solutions may soon hit their limits in efficiently scaling the mainnet, warns Gautham Santhosh, co-founder of Polynomial.fi.Layer 2 solutions are protocols or networks built on top of a layer-1 networks to improve its scalability and reduce transaction costs by processing transactions off-chain and then periodically settling the results on the main chain. More and more users have embraced these protocols for faster and more affordable transactions late last year.That's evident from the spike in the number of blobs or binary large objects posted by hundreds of L2s to Ethereum. Since November, the daily tally has averaged a record 21,000, according to pseudonymous data analyst Hildobby's Dune Analytics dashboard.Here is the concerning part. Just two Layer 2s –...

As the official memecoin of the second Donald Trump presidency flirts with a market cap of $10 billion, and Melania Trump, the next first lady, launches her own, Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase, said in a thread on X that this whole category of tokens could be equated to gambling.“There is no wealth creation. Every buy order is simply matched by a sell order. And after an initial spike, the price eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything,” he posted, calling memecoins a zero-sum – even negative sum after exchange fees – lottery.Balaji said that memecoins should be approached in the same way as gambling in Las Vegas for entertainment purposes.“Most should buy assets that retain their...