Weekly Cryptocurrency News. Friday, May 19


Friday, 19th May. As the week comes to an end we can focus on the highlights of the crypto industry over the past few days.

OKX to add support for Ordinals and BRC-20

In a couple of weeks OKX will phase in new features allowing customers to issue and trade Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens using the native wallet of the exchange.

Prior to that, OKX announced the launch of a BRC-20-oriented browser.

“Adding Ordinal support and BRC-20 support just makes sense. This is going to be a key pillar of what people are going to be doing as they interact with Web3,” said Jason Lau in an interview with The Block, OKX’s chief innovation officer.

The top manager acknowledges the volatility of the current hype around Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens.

This May, the team associated with the OmniBOLT project revealed it was working on integrating BRC-20 tokens into the Lightning Network “for faster, more efficient transactions.”

Recently, Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dash Jr. suggested that the BRC-20 and Ordinals tokens be banned.

The other day, the number of active bitcoin addresses dropped to 2021 levels. Analysts at The Block attributed the trend to high fees.

Looking back, the hype around BRC-20 tokens led to a skyrocketing in bitcoin miners’ revenues.

Binance opens up trading via TradingView

The widely-known crypto exchange made the direct spot trading possible through the TradingView charting and analytics platform.

To activate the toolkit, you need to link your Binance account in the platform’s settings page. 

Afterwards, the trading history is automatically synchronized and you get the ability to manage orders on TradingView. Detailed instructions on how to connect and use the new option are described on the website of the crypto exchange.

“Access to data is invaluable for traders in any market. Having more charting data better informs and develops our fast-growing industry as well as drives greater adoption with mainstream investors,” said Catherine Chen, Head of Binance VIP & Institutional.

Earlier the company launched Capital Connect for easy communication between its VIP clients and investment fund managers. Capital Connect is a service available free of charge to users whose monthly trading volume exceeds $1 million. 

This month, Binance announced the integration of Bitcoin Ordinals into its NFT marketplace.

At the same period of time, the trading platform declared a metaverse reality show called Build The Block, where Web3 developers have to compete for the spotlight.

CZ says Musk extends the life of Dogecoin

Elon Musk “extended the life” of DOGE, which could have “disappeared” a long time ago. This was stated by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao during the AMA session.

He expected Dogecoin to “fade away,” given its “lack of utility,” but Elon Musk expressed interest in the asset. According to Zhao, the Tesla founder encouraged curiosity in the memecoin, which might otherwise have evaporated.

Binance CEO admitted that he neither understands the appeal of such assets nor owns them, preferring cryptocurrencies “with utility.” There is “very high risk” associated with Dogecoin and similar coins, but the exchange is willing to keep them on the list if users show explicit appetite for them, he added.

Musk was actively promoting the meme coin. Back in April 2022, the businessman proposed lowering the cost of a Twitter Blue subscription and allowing users to pay for the premium service in DOGE.

Before that, Tesla started selling merchandise for Dogecoin.

On April 3, 2023, for a couple of days, the dog-ish coin symbol became the Twitter logo.

As you may remember, in July 2022, Keith Johnson, an American, accused SpaceX and Tesla, as well as their head of promoting a Dogecoin, or, as he calls it, “Crypto Pyramid Scheme”, and demanded to pay him $258 billion.

By early April 2023, Musk’s attorneys referred to the claims from the DOGE investor as “fanciful work of fiction.” The billionaire asked the court to dismiss the suit.

These days, the number of transactions in the renowned network has surpassed the figure shown by Bitcoin. 

DOGE daily transactions hit the roof, surpass BTC

The volume of daily transactions made on the Dogecoin blockchain reached ATH at 628,209, ahead of Bitcoin and Litecoin.

As the community assumes, this is due to the activity around the DRC-20 token standard, which allows the creation of new digital assets on top of the blockchain.

A Twitter user nicknamed Mishaboar alleged that Patrick Lodder, a lead programmer of the meme coin, had predicted this trend a few days earlier. At that time, the surge in transactions was noticeable, but it had not yet reached record highs.

Crypto-enthusiast Martin Stauber disputed the claim made by the community. Per his data, most of the traffic came from a few large addresses that made small transfers. One such wallet sent 5,766 transactions in a day.

There has been unprecedented activity on the Dogecoin chain in recent days. Based on DogeWhaleAlert, an unknown person shifted 13.07 million DOGE ($927,413) to several different addresses on May 11, spending $0.26 on transaction fee. What actually happened is that the transaction occurred after Elon Musk’s announcement that he was stepping down as CEO of Twitter. 

Despite the upsurge in dynamics, the DOGE exchange rate remained almost unchanged – over the past 24 hours, the coin has lost 1.1%. As of this writing, the asset is trading at $0.072327, according to CoinGecko.

To recap, in April, Mike McGlone, Macro Strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, criticized DOGE and SHIB by calling them “nothing but sheer speculation engines”. He also stressed the need to cleanse the market of “speculative” assets to pave the way for a “more credible crypto landscape.”

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