Special purpose integrated circuits (ASICs) for bitcoin mining on 7 nm chips manufactured by the Japanese GMO Internet will come to the market later due to the shortage of components.

Jihan Wu, the head of Bitmain, the largest mining equipment manufacturer, and the worldwide known “face” of the company for years, left the board of directors of Bitmain. Now he will not be able to participate in the decision-making process.

Jackson Palmer, the creator of Dogecoin, criticized the aspirations of many crypto enthusiasts who are waiting for large institutional organizations to enter the cryptocurrency market. According to him, their appearance will deprive the cryptocurrency world of its main advantage.

Paradox of the institutionalization of cryptocurrency

In the author’s column titled “Why “the Institutionalization of Cryptocurrency” is a Paradox,” Palmer outlined three main events that are often considered to stimulate the cryptocurrency market growth. These are NYSE-affiliated Bakkt launching custodial and trading infrastructure, up-for-approval Bitcoin ETFs and large 401k retirement plan service providers such as Fidelity opening crypto trading desks.

If many crypto enthusiasts, including billionaire Mike Novograz, call these events incentives for a sharp rise in the cryptocurrency prices, with bitcoin hopefully returning to $20,000, Palmer draws attention to the fundamental contradiction between the cryptocurrency world and institutional investors. According to Palmer, the three main advantages of cryptocurrency are censorship resistance, transactions in a trustless environment, and verifiable transaction history. These features helped cryptocurrencies to achieve their main goal which is the decentralization. The aspirations of institutional investors, as well as authorities and governments of different countries, are directly opposite to this idea.

“Censorship resistance implies that a user’s ability to interface with the currency should never rely on a potential single point of failure <...> The shift back to reliance on a single corporation (essentially a bank) as your window to a cryptocurrency network introduces a clear single point of failure. If Coinbase.com is hijacked or taken offline, a user relying on that provider essentially loses their access to the decentralized Bitcoin network,” Palmer wrote.

No decentralization, no freedom

Centralized cryptocurrency companies offer “custodial services,” pursues Palmer. Their work contradicts the very idea of transferring assets in a trustless environment. In addition, such services “obscure away the notion of private keys in the name of convenience.”

“Broadly speaking, if you aren’t holding your private keys, you aren’t holding cryptocurrency,” Palmer reminds.

He noted that the community is working to protect decentralization from institutional dominance at the protocol level.

“But for a movement previously described as “the real Occupy Wall Street”, cryptocurrency now sadly resembles a community that instead wants to be occupied by Wall Street itself,” concludes Palmer.

By most standards, the past decade has been an investor’s paradise. After a cataclysmic market drop and subsequent global recession in 2009, the stock market is continually posting incredible gains, the real estate market roared back to life, and entirely new investment opportunities have diversified the investment field.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has accused Zachary Coburn, the founder of decentralized EtherDelta exchange, of operating an unregistered stock exchange. He was fined of $388,000.

The one question algo-traders have been asking themselves lately: is it worth trying to trade on cryptomarkets or is it still too much of a Wild West out there?

The EOS project, which calls itself a blockchain system, is actually a cloud computing service and has nothing to do with decentralization, the researchers found through months of experiments.

Blockchain is the technology of the future, which allows the expansion of the boundaries of business. It can be used in any field, including mining, and in particular, in gold mining. The Innovaminex project is designed to involve the real economy with virtual assets and to allow any individual or legal entity to invest in a real project and receive benefits and advantages from the sale and processing of gold extracted from the mines.

Tether, issuer of controversial stablecoin USDT, has announced that it opened a bank account for $1.8 billion in one of the banks on the Bahamas.

Prague hosts the largest conference of developers of Ethereum solutions. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin held a presentation on the first day. He took part also in singing song about the decent goals of Ethereum devs.

AntPool and BTC.com are witnessed by refusing to confirm SegWit transactions and, as a result, slowing down the adoption of SegWit capable of scaling the network.

The European cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp was acquired by a little-known investment company from Belgium. The deal was paid in cash, but the amount is not disclosed. It is estimated at $400 million.