Bitcoin (BTC) is on the verge of closing another week that saw the price dip closer to $30,000 but the same bearish observation cannot be made for all altcoins. On Friday, several smaller-cap altcoins managed to shake off the bearish assault and post-double-digit gains before traditional markets closed for the weekend. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that the top movers over the past 24 hours were NEM (XEM), Augur (REP) and district0x (DNT). It's worth noting that four of the top seven gainers are layer-one protocols, an interesting development that comes at a time when Ether’s (ETH) …

Bitcoin (BTC) bulls faced strong headwinds on March 22 that quickly dampened any attempt at a breakout above the $58,000 level despite comments from United States Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell which called the top cryptocurrency a “substitute for gold.” Data from Cointelegraph Markets and TradingView show that traders made several attempts to push BTC above $58,000 over the past two days only to be rejected, with Monday’s failure resulting in a pullback to the $54,000 support level. On-chain analysis shows that while BTC price struggles to climb back above $60,000, whale wallets have been in accumulation mode over the …

On August 31, 2020, Morpher Labs announced the launch of its flagship Ethereum-based contract trading and prediction market platform, Morpher, with the stated goal of providing users unlimited access to long-and-short trades of real-world stocks, commodities, and FOREX markets. The technical obstructions of such a goal, however, have historically proven tricky to navigate. In a recent interview with Cointelegraph, Morpher Labs CEO Martin Froehler explained that Morpher’s vision is to allow worldwide access to asset classes that normally have multiple barriers in the form of geographical restrictions, middlemen, and steep fees. “The goal of the platform is to enable anyone …

PlotX seeks to create robust prediction markets for the burgeoning DeFi space by taking a slightly different approach than Augur and other similar projects. Its founder Ish Goel told Cointelegrpah that his company follows in Uniswap's footsteps: What Uniswap did for exchanges, PlotX essentially is planning to do that with prediction markets. Unlike many of its competitors, PlotX generates markets automatically and focuses on short-term predictions instead of trying to cover all durations. For every trading pair that gets added to the platform, the algorithm automatically creates hourly trading pairs in perpetuity. According to Goel, this should make PlotX more …

Santiment research has revealed that the top DeFi platforms in July in terms of development activity include Maker, Synthetix, Band Protocol, and Augur. But it also revealed that some of the platforms that saw the biggest gains in price or locked collateral recently did not have much developer activity comparatively including Compound, Aave, Balancer, and Yearn Finance. The report delved into the top ERC-20 projects (not exclusively DeFi projects) with the highest-recorded developer action using its own ranking system called Sanbase. It defines development activity as a demonstration of “month-to-month commitment in creating a working product, continuously polishing and upgrading …

Decentralized predictive betting market platform Augur (REP) has announced the successful deployment of its v2 upgrade. The upgrade is intended to address bugs and vulnerabilities identified with the existing platform and its rules surrounding betting markets, to introduce support for the Dai stablecoin and other popular DeFi protocols, and to institute an affiliate program. On July 29, Augur revealed that its v2 protocol contracts had been deployed on the Ethereum Mainnet and verified on Etherscan. In a statement the project noted that “exchanges, wallet providers, block explorers, and additional services will be updating to the REPv2 contract address over the …

Dan Morehead, the founder of the first crypto venture capital firm, Pantera Capital, believes that altcoins will outperform Bitcoin (BTC) over the next couple of years. Speaking at the Unitize virtual event, Morehead said that in the short-term, his firm is betting on altcoins: “And it's our opinion that these altcoins and particularly smaller cap smart contract tokens are going to outperform Bitcoin over the next couple of years.” Portfolio altcoins are up 100% He emphasized that it would be incorrect to suggest that Pantera does not believe in Bitcoin. Rather, they are of the opinion that smaller coins will …

Blockchain-powered event betting company Augur says that users of its REP cryptocurrency need to migrate their tokens once a new version of the platform is available starting July 28. According to an announcement posted to the platform’s website on June 29, Augur v2 will launch on the Ethereum mainnet at the end of next month. This means that REP token holders need to manually migrate their coins to the new version, REPv2. "Use it or lose it" says platform In addition, the company said the release of Augur v2 would require all REP token holders to participate in any forking, …

Facebook’s research and development engineers have launched a community platform built around predictions, encroaching on the territory of the emerging crypto-powered predictive market sector. Dubbed ‘Forecast’, Facebook’s new iOS app polls users on a variety of forward-facing issues, with respondents using in-app points to access surveys on the platform. Survey results will be made publicly available via the Forecast website. Facebook launches COVID-19 predictions The app is currently only available to invited users based in the United States and Canada while the platform is in beta testing. Prior to its invite-only beta launch on June 23, Forecast was tested internally …

Major United States stock exchange Nasdaq has unveiled a blockchain decentralized finance index called Defix (DEFX). According to a Defix press release published on Sept. 9, brokerage firm Exante streamlined the launch of the index. A disparate group of crypto assets The index includes crypto assets of projects such as those belonging to Proof-of-Work blockchain Amoveo (VEO), decentralized exchange protocol 0x (ZRX) and prediction market Augur (REP), as well as the governance token of the decentralized autonomous organization behind the DAI stablecoin and MakerDAO (MKR). Amoveo main developer Zack Hess said: “[I am] glad to see increased awareness being brought …

The Ethereum-based predictions platform Veil is shutting down, according to an official Medium post on July 11. As of July 11, no new markets will be added to the platform. Trading will be disabled entirely on July 24. Veil co-founder Paul Fletcher-Hill recommended that users redeem open positions, withdraw positions from active markets, and withdraw Veil Ether and convert it to Ether. Veil was a type of extension to the Ethereum-based predictions market Augur. Augur is a predictions market — that still exists — that uses smart contracts to let users create and bet on the outcome of any event …

Blockchain-powered event betting platform Augur has launched a token denominated in MakerDAO’s Dai (DAI) stablecoin as part of a major upgrade to its platform. The news was announced in an official blog post tweeted on April 8. Augur argues that introducing DAI-denominated markets will make trading less volatile as compared with Ethereum (ETH), which has been used for trading on the platform thus far. DAI support comes as part of wide-ranging improvements to Augur’s protocol, with the company today stating that its version two (V2) protocol contracts are “now ready for the first round of audits with integration work in …