Coindesk

One bitcoin (BTC) holder metric is pointing to price growth in the months ahead even as activity on the blockchain falls to its lowest in a year, a CryptoQuant analysis noted this week.The firm’s Bitcoin Network Activity Index has been down 15% since November 2024’s record high and stands at 3,760 as of Friday morning, its lowest level since February 2024. The index is a cumulative measure of active addresses, number of transactions, block size and fees among other bitcoin metrics to indicate growth or a drop in Bitcoin usage.A drop in activity was marked by a sharp decline in the number of transactions. The total daily number of transactions is 346,000 as of Friday, down 53% from a high...

Riot Platforms (RIOT) mined 527 Bitcoin (BTC) in January, marking its highest monthly production since December 2023 and reflecting a 2% increase from the previous month, according to Farside data.However, the broader bitcoin mining sector reported underwhelming production figures, with most major mining firms experiencing month-over-month declines.MARA Holdings (MARA) mined 750 BTC in January, representing a 13% decline from December. Similarly, Cleanspark (CLSK) saw a 6% decrease, mining 626 BTC. Other mining firms also reported negative month-over-month production figures:IREN (IREN): 2% declineCore Scientific (CORZ): 13% declineCipher Mining (CIFR): 7% declineBitfarms (BITF): 5% declineHut 8 (HUT): 31% declineThe widespread decline in bitcoin production can be attributed to the increasing network difficulty, which both Riot and MARA's CEOs cited as a key...

Ether (ETH) has underperformed other cryptocurrencies in recent months as the Ethereum blockchain has faced "intense" competition from other networks, Wall Street bank JPMorgan (JPM) said in a research report on Wednesday.The token lacks a compelling narrative like that of its larger peer bitcoin (BTC, the bank said, adding that bitcoin benefits from its perception as a store of value and as digital gold.Despite upgrades, such as Dencun, activity has shifted from the main Ethereum network to its layer 2's, which is detrimental to the blockchain's growth, the report said. The network's latest upgrade, Pectra, is likely to happen in early April."Competitive pressures have led some decentralized applications (dapps) to migrate from Ethereum to other application-specific chains for better performance,"...

Alexey Pertsev, the Tornado Cash developer found guilty of money laundering in 2024, is set to be released from prison on Friday to prepare for his appeal, he said in a post on X. The 31-year old Russian national was sentenced to 64 months in a Dutch prison last May after an indictment said Pertsev had "a habit of committing money laundering" and should have suspected illicit transactions on the platform.Tornado Cash is a coin-mixing protocol that allows users to privately send tokens to another wallet. It achieves privacy by pooling funds together and shuffling them until the origin is unclear.The protocol is sanctioned by the U.S. government, which alleges that Tornado Cash was being used by North Korean hackers...

Bitcoin (BTC) continues to dawdle, failing to capture trader enthusiasm amid chatter about prices being overvalued, while gold remains strong ahead of the release of the U.S. jobs report, which will influence the Fed's rate plans.Recent analysis from CryptoQuant indicates that bitcoin's fair value lies between $48,000 and $95,000, highlighting that it appears overvalued at its current market price, which hovers just above $98,000. The analytics firm's Bitcoin's Network Activity Index has plummeted 15% from its peak in November to 3,760 points, the lowest level in over a year. The downturn is driven by a staggering 53% drop in daily transactions, which have fallen to 346,000 from September's all-time high of 734,000.Since its recovery from the slide early Monday, BTC...