Coronavirus brings down markets, disagreements in the Ethereum community and other events of the week

In the traditional Sunday digest, we recall the sharp drawdown of Bitcoin and the rest of the cryptocurrency market,a petition from the Ethereum community calling for the refusal to activate one of the controversial proposals, as well as some other events of the week.

Bitcoin price

The concluding week in terms of price has becomefor bitcoin, the worst this year - according to its results, the first cryptocurrency, dropping from almost $ 10,000 on Monday to the region of $ 8500- $ 8600 on Sunday, lost more than 11%.

The fall of BTC also triggered a collapse of the restmarket, with leading altcoins losing even more in value. So, Litecoin fell in price by more than 20%, Bitcoin SV turned out to be in a similar situation, about 17% of losses were recorded by Tezos, in the region of 15-16% they lost Ethereum, XRP and Bitcoin Cash.

Data: Coingecko

The fall of cryptocurrencies occurs simultaneously withthe collapse of stock markets around the world, taking place against the backdrop of growing fears of the further spread of coronavirus and the consequences for the global economy.

And if some experts have already putdoubts about the value of Bitcoin as a defensive asset, with traditional instruments the situation is little better today. Thus, for the S&P 500 index, last week was the worst since the financial crisis of 2008: minus 11% in just five days. The Dow Jones index fell 12%, which was its worst performance since July last year.

Moreover, even gold, which is regarded by many investors as the most reliable asset, did not escape the fall. On Friday, its price fell by 5% — the biggest drop since June 2013.

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At the time of publication, the total cryptocurrency market capitalization was $ 245 billion, dropping from $ 290 billion on Monday, February 24.

Bitfinex repays another $ 100 million loan for $ 700 million from Tether

On Friday, February 28, the Bitfinex exchange saidthat transferred another $ 100 million to Tether to repay a previously taken loan of $ 700 million. This is about repaying the main debt, the interest accrued under the loan agreement is paid separately, Bitfinex emphasized.

Affiliate Funds Assumedthe exchange needed a reimbursement of $ 850 million, frozen in December 2018 by regulators from the payment provider Crypto Capital Corp. The first $ 100 million exchange was returned by Tether last July.

Curious that a few hours beforeBitfinex paused for about 50 minutes, reporting a DDoS attack on the platform. Another major bitcoin exchange, OKEx, faced the same problem. Its representatives said that the technical staff had coped with the attack “in a matter of minutes”, and it did not cause noticeable problems to users.

Ethereum community urges to refuse ProgPoW code activation

This week, a number of well-known representativesThe Ethereum community has signed a petition calling for refusal to activate the ProgPoW code, which is designed to make mining the second-largest cryptocurrency capitalization on ASIC equipment ineffective.

ProgPoW proposal (EIP-1057) was put forward inJanuary 2019 and is intended to replace the current Ethash algorithm. If adopted, ETH mining will be carried out exclusively on more traditional equipment such as video cards, limiting the influence of ASIC miners.

Many developers and equipment manufacturers, however, consider this proposal hasty, and potentially even lead to a network split.

Now on GitHub there is a petition in whichmany other representatives of the community expressed their disagreement with this proposal. According to them, at the moment there is no necessary support for the adoption of ProgPoW.

Petition author Justin Leroux from ETHBoston said:

“Ethereum is a global platform with a large anda diverse group of key players. For this reason, it is critical that major changes to the protocol have a clear purpose and broad support. EIP-1057 obviously does not have such support, nevertheless, its activation is considered. ”

More than 70 people signed the petition, including representatives of projects such as Uniswap, EthereumDC, Aragon, MolochDAO, Gnosis, DeFi Pulse, ConsenSys, DARMA Capital, Truffle Suite, DeFi Pulse, etc.

Jack Dorsey may be removed from the post of head of Twitter

American Investment Company ElliottManagement Corp., which owns a significant stake in Twitter Inc., intends to achieve the removal of Jack Dorsey from the post of CEO of the popular social network. On Saturday, February 29, Bloomberg reported.

Citing sources familiar with the situation, the publication claims that Elliott Management has already appointed four people to Twitter’s board of directors.

Meanwhile, Reuters said the decisionElliott Management founder Paul Singer is partly due to the fact that Dorsey’s activity is scattered between Twitter and payment company Square, which has Square Crypto, a cryptocurrency division. They also expressed dissatisfaction with the excessive focus of the Twitter chapter on the main product and the insufficient pace of innovation.

In addition, since mid-2015, when Dorsey again headed Twitter, the company's shares have dipped 6.2%. During the same period, the shares of the largest social network Facebook grew by 121%.

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The first cryptocurrency bank announced in the USA

A very intriguing initiative was this week.represented in the United States, and to follow its development will certainly be interesting. A well-known cryptocurrency supporter and co-founder of Wyoming Blockchain Coalition, Caitlin Long announced the creation of a new bank focused on providing regulated services in the field of digital currencies. The technology company Blockstream, known for its developments in the field of bitcoin, also takes part in the project.

A new company called Avanti (Forward in Italian) was registered on January 6, having managed to get $ 1 million in seed investment to date.

Avanti will work in the stateWyoming will also offer institutional investors the possibility of making cryptocurrency payments, custodial services, as well as operations with digital securities.

Blockstream CEO Adam Back noted that usingdeveloped by his company, the Bitcoin sidechain Liquid, Avanti will be able to create a “single window” for storing digital currencies, as well as create related APIs - both for transactions with the multi-signature system and between traditional banking networks.

Coinbase Tests Clearview AI's Face Recognition System

The largest cryptocurrency company in the United States has launchedto testing the controversial face recognition system Clearview AI, which through artificial intelligence, the system uses a database of images collected on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other sites. In this case, data is collected without the consent of users.

According to The New York Times, since 2019The company collaborates with more than 600 government departments. In particular, the police and special services of the United States and Canada received access to the system. The system has already been tested by the financial giants Bank of America and Wells Fargo, and more than 2,200 companies are using it.

Many experts believe that data collection methodsviolate social media policies. For example, Facebook, Google and Twitter have already announced that they have begun verification. However, representatives of Clearview AI claim that the system uses only public images. That is, if the user changes the privacy settings on Facebook, the system will not include photos from the profile.

A Coinbase spokesman, however, said thatthe company tests Clearview solely to meet its “unique security and legal compliance needs” and does not use it to work with user data. It was also noted that Coinbase did not assume any obligations for the further use of the system.