Ethereum’s price suffers as new DeFi scams continue to emerge
Ethereum's value has failed to showcase any sort of recovery despite its hashrate soaring over the past month.
- Earlier this week, the Ethereum Foundation announced that it was going to be moving away from its ETH 2.0 branding.
- Moving forward, the project as a whole will simply be known as "Ethereum", completely abandoning its previously held monikers of ETH 1.0 and ETH 2.0.
- To help facilitate the development of its stablecoin offering, PayPal revealed that it is looking to work closely with regulators.
Ethereum has been on a constant downward trend since November 2021, with the altcoin's annual gains dipping from over 450% to around 80%. To elaborate, over the last 30 days, ETH has registered losses of 31% and is currently trading at a price point of AUD$3,550.
These dips come at a time when the Ethereum Foundation has made a conscious decision to move away from its ETH 2.0 branding, preferring to stick simply with the name "Ethereum" moving forward. The reason cited for the move was that the ETH 2.0 branding presented users with a divisive mental model where they often believed that "ETH 1.0 came first and ETH 2.0 after" or that "ETH 1.0 will cease to exist once ETH 2.0 goes live".
Amidst these developments, an anonymous white hat hacker revealed that he had been able to track down miscreants associated with a recent decentralised finance (DeFi) scam worth over US$25 million (related to a platform called StableMagnet). The cyber vigilante revealed that to facilitate the operation, he coordinated with local police authorities while using various novel tracking mechanics.
Paypal is looking to release its own stablecoin
Earlier this month, global payments giant PayPal revealed that it was actively exploring the creation of its very own stablecoin. Since the revelation, the firm's senior VP for crypto and digital currencies Jose Fernandez da Ponte noted that his company is looking to work closely with regulators to not meet the same fate as Meta's Diem project.
While it is hard to ascertain the exact impact such a move may have on the crypto industry, if a mainstream firm like Paypal was to, in fact, move into the realm of stablecoin payments, the repercussions for the sector could be immensely positive.
ETH hashrate hits all-time high
As Ethereum's price has fallen from AUD$6,200 to around AUD$3,500 since 8 November, the network has continued to witness an influx of miners looking to capitalise on these dips. To elaborate, the altcoin's hashrate scaled up to a new all-time high of 1.11 petahash per second (PH/s) on 27 January.
This development is particularly noteworthy since the asset is planning to make a switch from its existing proof-of-work (PoW) to a proof-of-stake (PoS) set-up sometime later this year — ditching its existing mining infrastructure completely.
Interested in cryptocurrency? Learn more about the basics with our beginner's guide to Bitcoin, dive deeper by learning about Ethereum and see what blockchain can do with our simple guide to DeFi.
Disclosure: The author owns a range of cryptocurrencies at the time of writing.
