Binance considers UAE as possible headquarters
The UAE is looking promising as a base for company’s operations according to Dubai GM Alex Chehade. Cointelegraph, who spoke to them directly reported that Chehade said that the UAE’s favorable stance on digital assets would make the country a great location for businesses operating in the crypto sector.
A recent spate of legal moves against Binance in the US is likely to force the organisation to consider where it operates from in the mid-term. The UAE’s leadership has indicated that it wishes to establish itself in the region as the ‘go to’ country for Web3 businesses in order to provide an alternative revenue stream from it’s primary business of extracting and refining fossil fuels.
Bitcoin leaps 12% since start of June despite low trading volume
The world’s largest coin by market cap has traded upwards this month, adding double digit growth to it’s value. Breaking the $30,000 threshold, it’s highest peak since April earlier this year was largely attributed to established market players filing for spot Bitcoin ETF funds. BlackRock and Fidelity Investments both filed with the SEC, effectively applying for permission to operate the funds which would directly track Bitcoin, the underlying digital asset.
Unlike previous filings for futures ETFs, a spot ETF would allow buyers to hold Bitcoin within the fund in the same way that they would hold a regular stock. Crypto companies have long sought to create spot ETFs which the SEC have yet to approve. An approval could trigger an influx of institutional investors, driving up the demand and thus the price of Bitcoin.
Retail traders of Bitcoin are still moving relatively low volumes of the token in daily trading which currently sits at approximately $25bn. This is in stark contrast to the $100bn seen in overall trading during the 2021 peak.
BTC Nitro sees influx of accelerations for Bitcoin stamp transactions
The Bitcoin NFT continues to gain traction in the form of STAMPS (Secure Tradeable Art Maintained Securely). Instead of embedding image data by using the witness data section of a transaction (in the way that Ordinals do), Bitcoin Stamps embed images within the transaction outputs (UTXO). This means that the data cannot be pruned by full nodes and ensure that their content is preserved indefinitely.
One challenged faced when minting their NFT is the large transaction sizes. Embedded images regularly grow to 3-8mb is size and attract large mining fees for them to be confirmed in a timely manner compared with simple transactions that would normally consumed just a couple of hundred bytes, Many users of Stamps don’t realize this and often have to wait for extended periods during the minting process. The problem is further compounded by a number mining pools which also appear to be identifying and de-prioritizing these transactions due to their large size and often low fees. BTC Nitro is currently investigating ways to help speed up these highly inefficient transactions beyond regular mining pool confirmation incentives.
Currently, the developer and creator of Stamps is working with Emblem and Hiro Wallet to create integrations into their protocols. If successful, the move would allow Stamps NFTs to be traded on OpenSea and provide a simple mechanism to store and transfer these nascent NFTs.