Want to know what took place today in crypto? Here is the most recent information regarding the daily trends and events affecting the Bitcoin price, blockchain, DeFi, NFTs, Web3, and crypto regulation. To start off the crypto day, Mike McGlone of Bloomberg Intelligence believes that a “global economic reset” could cause Bitcoin’s price to drop to $10,000.
Crypto markets wrap up August in a downturn
Crypto mining could be leading the close of August’s market downturn. Électricité du Laos (EDL), the state-owned electricity distribution company in Laos, has decided to suspend electricity supply to crypto mining operations in the country due to the impact of drought on power generation in the region.
The first half of 2023 was marked by drought in Laos. Extreme heat increased the demand for electricity and made it difficult for hydropower facilities to generate enough power.
The EDL stated that hydropower plants generate 95% of the country’s electricity and that it intends to export significant volumes of electricity to Thailand in 2024.
Friend.Tech comes to a deadly close
As reported by Cryptopolitan, Critics have already declared the decentralized social network Friend.Tech “dead” less than three weeks after its inception, citing a reduction in key metrics such as activity, inflows, and volume.
The decentralized app, which is housed on Coinbase’s Base network, reached new highs around August 21, when daily fees peaked at $1.7 million and transactions reached 525,000.
However, according to DefiLlama, prices have already dropped by 87% to roughly $215,000 on August 26. Meanwhile, according to Dune Analytics data, the app logged over 51,000 transactions on August 27, a 90% decrease from its high.
Coinbase payments risk manager Lisandro Rodriguez stated on X (previously Twitter) on August 27 that the platform is “dead” due to “greed and poor execution.” One user simply stated, “RIP Friend Tech August 2023 – August 2023.”
PayPal’s stablecoin adoption hits a snug
According to on-chain data provided by Nansen, the launch of PayPal’s stablecoin, PayPal USD, has been met with small adoption thus far.
Since the stablecoin’s inception on August 7, nearly 90% of PayPal USD has been held by Paxos Trust, the stablecoin’s issuer. Only 7% of the total PYUSD supply is held on exchanges like Kraken, Gate.io, and Crypto.com. In other words, the coin is not currently circulating on exchanges and has received minimal adoption among cryptocurrency users.
Only ten people have acquired more than $1,000 in PYUSD, excluding contracts and trades, according to Nansen. Adoption among “smart money” investors, which refers to institutions and experienced traders, is minimal.
PayPal has over 350 million customers, and the launch of a stablecoin was billed as a watershed event for cryptocurrency adoption. So far, that hasn’t happened. Nansen went on to say:
On the surface there’s a lack of demand from crypto users for PYUSD when other alternatives exist (might be due to Paypal targeting a different demographic).
Nansen
Ethereum sees huge developments
According to L2Beat data, Ethereum’s layer-2 blockchains have scaled the layer-1 network more than five times in the last week.
Patrick Scott, a crypto education YouTuber, initially mentioned the development in an Aug. 26 X (Twitter) post, claiming that the scaling factor increased from less than one to 5.2 times in less than a year.
Layer 2s like Polygon and Coinbase’s Base bundle thousands of transactions for processing on Ethereum to ensure they’re immutably recorded, with several promising better transaction rates and lower prices than Ethereum.
Arbitrum had a nearly 56% market share, followed by Optimisims OP Mainnet at 26% and zkSync Era at 4.2%, according to L2Beat.
Crypto scams are on the loose on X – ZachXBT
ZachXBT, a blockchain detective, has issued a warning about imitation verified organizations on X that are “out of control” and posting phishing links to deceive unwary users.
ZachXBT published a snapshot of 12 X-verified organizations created in the last two days in an Aug. 27 post, all of which were impersonations of actual crypto projects such as Lido, Friend.tech, Synthetix, and ApeCoin.
Following Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform, Twitter altered its verification system to a paid verification system that allows businesses to pay $1,000 per month for a gold checkmark.
Cryptopolitan got wind of a scam project run by AI GTrader, who have since then disabled their comment section on X.
Bitcoin could drop to $10k
The crypto markets could face the worst crypto winter in history. 2022 may have been merely the tip of the iceberg. According to Bloomberg Intelligence’s senior macro strategist Mike McGlone, a potential “global economic reset” could cause the price of Bitcoin to drop to a level not seen since mid-2020.
McGlone told Kitco News on August 25 that economic indicators from China suggest the country’s economy is declining, which could be the catalyst for the next major global recession. According to him, such a prospective catastrophe could bring the price of Bitcoin to $10,000.
Bitcoin was hovering around $10,000 before the big pump of liquidity. I know things have changed, I know on-chain metrics have increased but there’s a potential we can easily get back there if we get the reset I think we’re going to get.
Mike McGlone
McGlone added that he views Bitcoin as a leading indicator for the majority of risk assets, and that even if Bitcoin falls to $10,000, it’s “probably the best-performing asset ever — so that’s a problem for me.”
He stated that a zero-interest rate environment caused Bitcoin’s past performance, but he still believes it will reach $200,000 unless “we get the global economic reset I think we’ll get.”
