Anirudh Tiwari
Bitcoin’s price has been rallying in tandem with altcoins, sending mentions of the markets flipping back to a bullish supercycle for Bitcoin (BTC). The flagship cryptocurrency went through the resistance levels of $42,000 for the first time since May 19, hitting a peak of $42,541 on July 31.
Alongside the market rally, the Bitcoin dominance (BTCD) index has been seeing an uptrend as well. As per data from TradingView, BTCD hit a 3 month high of 49.2% on July 31. The last time it was at these levels was back in May when it was on the decline from the yearly high of 73.6% it hit at the start of January.
The BTCD index is calculated using the ratio of the Bitcoin market versus the rest of the cryptocurrency market. As the name suggests, being the flagship crypto asset indicates the dominance that Bitcoin has over the rest of cryptocurrency tokens.
Speaking with Cointelegraph about the market rally being led by Bitcoin, Pete Humiston, manager at Kraken Intelligence, the research division of Kraken, a cryptocurrency exchange, stated: “Because altcoins felt the brunt of the sell-off over the past few months and because BTC is crypto's ‘safe haven’ asset, a rally in dominance indicates that market participants are reluctant to rotate back into altcoins.”
Helen Partz
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volumes, continues actively expanding into the crypto payments industry through a new crypto-to-fiat integration.
The company announced Tuesday a partnership with crypto-fiat hybrid payment platform Alchemy Pay to enable peer-to-peer (P2P) crypto payments at over 2 million global merchants through its payments application Binance Pay.
The new integration will allow users and merchants to pay and accept payments using 40 supported cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) in 18 countries where Alchemy Pay operates. Binance Pay users will be able to pay across merchants of Alchemy Pay’s partners, including e-commerce giant Shopify, software technology company Arcadier, mobile payment provider QFPay and others.
Osato Avan-Nomayo
The bid to introduce human-readable as an alternative to the usual lengthy alphanumeric crypto wallet address system is set to achieve another milestone following the recent partnership between Circle and Unstoppable Domains.
According to an announcement issued on Wednesday, Unstoppable Domains, a blockchain domain name provider, and USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin issuer Circle are collaborating to release readable .coin usernames for USDC transfers. As part of the partnership, both companies will collaborate to enable support for .coin username extensions across wallets and crypto exchanges that support the popular stablecoin.
Under this arrangement, USDC transfers will become akin to sending an email, likely mitigating the problem of transferring coins to the wrong address, especially for the not-so-tech-savvy. Indeed, the announcement quoted Josh Hawkings, senior vice president of marketing at Circle making a similar point adding that the feature will help to make USDC more accessible.
Commenting on the partnership, Unstoppable Domains CEO Matthew Gould said: “Simple usernames combined with dollar-pegged stablecoins take the fear and risk out of spending crypto.”
