The EOS Network Foundation is leading plans for a consensus mechanism upgrade, an Ethereum Virtual Machine system (EVM), as well as an overall renewed growth strategy.

EVMs shall play a central role in EOS’s future plans, not just technically but also from a business perspective.

The EOS blockchain is once again looking to mark in the blockchain and crypto space as its plans for its second innings in the market. Back in 2017, EOS raised $4 billion in an initial coin offering (ICO) creating much fanfare.

Its native coin (EOS) also attained a market cap of a staggering $14 billion during its lifetime high. However, years later, the crypto project was written off by skeptics. But now, the project is once again reviving through a complete resurgence in network activity and growth along with extensive support planned for its application developers.

Crypto research firm Messari recently reported that Yves La Rose, the CEO of the EOS Network Foundation is leading plans for a consensus mechanism upgrade, an Ethereum Virtual Machine system (EVM), as well as an overall renewed growth strategy.

The EVM mainnet release shall happen tentatively next month on April 14th, along with updates and improvements planned in the upcoming weeks and months. In a tweet last week, Rose wrote:

Combining the performance of EOS with the familiarity of Ethereum, Solidity developers are in for a treat. At 800+ swaps per second, $EOS EVM will be BY FAR the fastest EVM, benchmarked 3x faster than Solana + BNB and 25x faster than Avax. There’s a huge opportunity available for developers who want to build on $EOS EVM early and be first-to-market.

EVMs and EOS

Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) basically refers to an environment wherein Ethereum accounts and smart contracts live. It basically functions like a virtual computer used by developers to create decentralized applications (dApps).

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Upon deploying EVM to other blockchains, they will allow developers to build dApps and other decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. EVMs shall play a central role in EOS’s future plans. Earlier this year in January, the EOS Network Foundation noted:

Attorney John E. Deaton expects the SEC and Ripple case ruling tonight or in a couple of weeks.

He also believes that the court’s recent decision is a huge victory for XRP holders.

The Ripple Labs and US Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit is edging to an end after Judge Analisa Torres released her ruling on the motion filed by both parties to rule out expert testimony. This was disclosed in a tweet by Attorney James K. Filan, sharing a copy of the Judge’s ruling. In her Daubert motion ruling, the judge denied and granted a motion in part from both parties.

Attorney John E. Deaton, the founder of CryptoLaw and a representative of thousands of XRP holders as a friend of the case, has disclosed that he does not expect any significant delay from the judge to give her ruling on the summary judgment motion. According to him, the judge could release her ruling as early as tonight or in a few weeks.

I seriously doubt that we will see a significant delay from here. Could be tonight or in a couple of weeks.

Court strike out testimonies from SEC’s experts

Last week, the attorney observed that the ruling of whether XRP is a security could take about two more months to come out. 

With the latest ruling, it is said that the XRP holders appear to be the biggest winner. The court granted in part Ripple’s motion to strike out testimony from the SEC’s Expert No. 1. In addition, the judge struck out an opinion from the SEC’s Expert No. 4 concerning the risk of XRP Ledger if Ripple “disappeared.”

Deaton explained:

@Ripple’s Motion to Exclude Expert No. 1 from testifying is GRANTED as to his first opinion about the perceptions of a reasonable XRP purchaser, and DENIED as to the remainder of his testimony.

– Judge Torres 

Now try and tell me #XRPHolders don’t make a difference!

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The expectation of victory for Ripple

According to reports, these are very important as they speak to the fact that XRP holders purchased the asset in expectation of profit from the efforts of Ripple. This is a bitter pill for SEC to swallow especially with the claims that all XRP sales represented unregistered securities sales. This also speaks to the third and fourth elements of the Howey Test. 

A Ripple-pro attorney and a partner at Hogan and Hogan, Attorney Jeremy Hogan have also confirmed that the latest ruling makes it difficult for SEC to come up with substantive proof that XRP holders purchased the asset with expectations of profit from the effort of Ripple. 

The SEC has to prove that you had a REASONABLE expectation of profits from Ripple’s efforts.

And the Judge just struck the SEC’s ONLY Expert Witness on that subject.

So, now, how the heck can the SEC prove “reasonable” reliance? Who will testify?

Just thinking out loud. 

Hogan further stated that even though the judges maintained that the opinion of SEC’s Expert No. 3 on Ripple’s incentives and actions to influence XRP’s price could decide whether XRP holders had any expectations of profit, it could only have a less significant implication on the case. Deaton has also stated that he expects the court to clarify the secondary market sales of XRP, which the SEC claims to be an unregistered securities offering. If the judge opposes SEC’s position on this, it could be a victory for XRP holders even if Ripple loses at the district court. When this happens, the crypto market could record a massive run. 

With the pilot test of Digital Real, the Brazilian government is looking to replicate the success of its instant payment system Pix.

The Brazilian central bank is conducting the pilot test on the Stellar blockchain since it is highly functional and designed for mass enterprise adoption.

Every major economy across the world is looking to launch its own central bank digital currency (CBDC) and Latin American country Brazil is the latest to conduct a CBDC pilot. As per the latest report by Reuters, Brazil’s central bank has officially launched the pilot for its experimental CBDC.

The test for Brazilian CBDC – Digital Real – is currently taking place on the Stellar blockchain network. On Monday, March 6, the Brazilian central bank announced the launch of its digital currency pilot project and is seeking to emulate the success shown by Pix, an instant payment system.

Fabio Araujo, the Brazilian central bank executive coordinating the entire CBDC project expects the public use of Digital Real to happen by the end of 2024. Of course, the adoption shall happen after a successful testing phase as well as after the subsequent evaluation of feedback.

The Brazilian central bank is conducting the pilot test on the Stellar blockchain since it is highly functional and designed for mass enterprise adoption. The tests include Know Your Customer (KYC) verification and anti-fraud procedures, along with traceability and an on-chain decentralized identity process.

Although the Brazilian central bank has chosen the Stellar blockchain for the pilot tests, there’s no surety that they would choose the same blockchain for actual issuance. The testing phase of Digital Real will include buying and selling federal public bonds among individuals.

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Brazil’s CBDC ambitions

Fabio Araujo, who is actively working on Barzil’s CBDC project stated that the Digital Real will be built as means of payment executed on the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). Additionally, it will also support the provision of retail financial services settled via tokenized deposits in institutions of financial and payment systems in Brazil. Speaking to Reuters, he said:

This environment reduces costs and brings the possibility of financial inclusion for people. You have services that are very expensive to carry out, such as repo operations, which today are only for banks, but which could be performed by anyone with a technology based on digital currencies.

This could reduce the cost of credit, the cost of improving the return on investments. There is a great potential for new service providers, fintechs, democratizing access to the market and offering new services.

Araujo further added that bank deposits will continue to exist with the Brazilian CBDC, but would exist in a more modern environment. “Banks are very interested in this new tokenized world, in every conversation we have they have shown a lot of interest,” said Araujo.

Chainlink’s details how Chainlink Function can serve developers. 

Users can connect to Meta, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and other platforms using Chainlink function. 

ChainLink has revealed the different use cases that come with Chainlink function, as developers prepare to use the newly launched platform.

Chainlink recently launched a platform called 'Chainlink Functions'  which is a self-service serverless platform. Using the platform, developers can connect their decentralized applications (dApps) or smart contracts to any Web 2.0 API.

Chainlink has detailed the functions of the platform in a recent blogpost. There are five ways that developers can use the ChainLink Function in their Decentralized Applications. They include connecting to Twilio, Meta, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Decentralized Insurance.

https://twitter.com/chainlink/status/1631293449193287681?s=46&t=Qh-YV4_3i72FNQGNf60cvA

Using Chainlink Functions, business owners can successfully launch social media campaigns with the integration of Web3 into social media. Businesses looking to make an advert can offer a limited number of unique digital collectibles in the form of NFTs to their customers.

Users will then respond with their wallet addresses, along with the specific hashtag for the advert. Businesses will later interact with a smart contract to handle the NFT minting.

The eligible list of customer wallet addresses can be found using Chainlink Functions and smart contracts. The smart contract will receive the output from Chainlink Functions, mint an NFT for each address and reach out to the winners. Winners will be able to access their newly minted digital collectibles in the Instagram Digital Collectibles gallery or in their account on OpenSea.

Chainlink Functions offers developers more use cases

The second use case focuses on facilitating music artist and record label streaming income digital agreements. This involves the use of the cloud communication platform Twilio. Using a smart contract, an artist and a record label can set up an agreement that will allow the artist to receive a certain amount in USD, depending on their music streams. Chainlink noted.

The ability for the smart contract to reach out and find the artist’s Spotify streams and generate an email alert to the artist is not something that smart contracts can do themselves. In this example, the smart contract uses Chainlink Functions to connect to a music data API to come to consensus on the number of Spotify streams the artist has.

The next use case shows how developers can create a universal connector Chainlink Function. This can be used to connect to any AWS Data Exchange. This will allow developers to integrate third-party data in AWS with smart contracts, in a seamless manner: The blog post added.

The universal connector has been built as a JavaScript function for all nodes in the Chainlink Functions decentralized oracle network (DON) to execute before coming to consensus on the result of the API call.

The last two use cases detail how developers can drive and influence logic in an on-chain smart contract, using website data collected by Google Analytics, and how developers can create parametric insurance using multiple data sources.

In a lawsuit, Silvergate Bank and its CEO Alan Lane were accused of aiding and abetting a fraudulent scheme orchestrated by SBF.

Recently, Coinbase announced that it would no longer be involved with the bank business-wise.

It was recently reported that crypto bank Silvergate is being investigated by the United States Department of Justice fraud unit for hosting accounts linked to the collapsed FTX empire. FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has been charged with wire and securities fraud and money laundering. In a separate lawsuit, Silvergate Bank and its CEO Alan Lane were accused of aiding and abetting a fraudulent scheme orchestrated by SBF.

According to the plaintiff, the bank failed to detect occurrences of money laundering in an amount exceeding $425 million. For this reason, the company was likely to face regulatory repercussions. 

While this is said to be a mere effort for the bank to be investigated to uncover the extent to which it was involved with FTX and Alameda, some major firms have, however, decided to terminate their relationship with Silvergate Bank. Recently, Coinbase announced that it would no longer be involved with the bank business-wise.

In light of recent developments & out of an abundance of caution, Coinbase is no longer accepting or initiating payments to or from Silvergate.

Crypto firms terminate their relationship with Silvergate

Unfortunately for the bank, other firms including stablecoin issuers Paxos and Circle and Mike Novogratz's Galaxy Digital have taken a similar stance. On March 2, Galaxy Digital announced to its followers that it has stopped initiating or receiving transfers from the bank out of caution. Similarly, Paxos has announced that it has discontinued all transfers and wires from the bank. However, it will continue to process all payments to the bank. Circle has hinted that it is in the process of halting certain services with the bank. Bitstamp has also warned that it is not responsible for any funds deposited into the Silvergate Bank accounts. 

As a precautionary measure in light of recent news, we are no longer processing transfers with Silvergate.

Bank transfer services will now be provided by our other global banking partners. Bitstamp client funds remain secure and fully available.

Recently, Silvergate's annual 10-K required by the US Securities and Exchange Commission was delayed. They, however, pleaded for two more weeks to complete the report for the 2022 fiscal year, making its stock record another 40 percent fall in pre-market trading. The bank explained that it sold additional debt securities in January and February and expects more losses in the coming months.

These additional losses will negatively impact the regulatory capital ratios of the Company and the Company’s wholly owned subsidiary, Silvergate Bank (the “Bank”), and could result in the Company and the Bank being less than well-capitalized.

Following the insolvency scare, JP Morgan downgraded Silvergate Capita from "neutral" to “underweight". 

In the last quarter, the bank recorded about a $1 billion loss following the collapse of FTX in November. In addition, the bank laid off about 40 percent of its staff and also hinted that it will take billions of dollars in loans to prevent a liquidity crisis and bank run. 

The decision by crypto firms to terminate their relationships with Silvergate could have a marginally negative impact on the crypto market.

Polygon and Mercy Corps will work together to push the benefits of blockchain solutions in underserved communities.

The two players plan to fund blockchain pilots, conduct a series of hackathons, and run a blockchain bootcamp roadshow to spread awareness.

On Thursday, March 2, Polygon Labs, the parent firm behind Polygon blockchain, has undertaken a new initiative to accelerate the use of blockchain-based solutions for low-income individuals, the underserved, and communities in the emerging market.

To accomplish this mission, Polygon Labs has joined hands with Mercy Corps Ventures (MCV), the impact-investing arm of the global development organization Mercy Corps. Over the last eight years, Merch Corps Ventures have been investing in solutions that help underserved groups become part of the formal global economy. So far, they have supported more than 41 early-stage ventures in scaling and raising more than $335 million in follow-on capital.

Although there’s been a lot of talks over the benefits of blockchain and Web3 solutions, they haven’t really translated into something fruitful for the underbanked populations in emerging markets. Also, solutions that exist in reality lack the measure outcomes such that one can build a business case.

Polygon Labs is proud to team up with @MCSocialVenture, the impact investing arm of @mercycorps, to pilot real world use cases by providing #Web3 tools, resources, and solutions to emerging markets, to empower underserved communities.

 More: https://t.co/4eNV6OeTm7

— Polygon (@0xPolygon) March 3, 2023

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Mercy Corps Ventures have been actively piloting several Web3 solutions in order to responsibly test, de-risk, and build the evidence base for promising, cutting-edge innovation. All these solutions leverage Web3 for exploring nascent areas of their thesis. They are also using Web3 to build resilience for underserved individuals and communities.

The Three Major Pillars of Partnership

The partnership of Mercy Corps Ventures (MCV) with Polygon Labs will have three major pillars:

Funding blockchain pilots to enable access to the financial system for the underserved and excluded communities. The two players will work to provide tailor-made blockchain solutions to the 1.4 billion population that’s underbanked. This will ultimately enable an inclusive and equitable global financial system.

MCV and Polygon Labs will conduct a series of blockchain hackathons with developers thereby serving emerging market users in order to increase awareness and education about how blockchain solutions can help solve local challenges.

The third pillar is running a blockchain bootcamp roadshow in all those markets where Mercy Caps has a presence. These efforts will help in providing “educational and informational sessions for local educational institutions, NGOs, and other organizations looking to improve operations through blockchain technology”.

In order to drive global financial inclusion, MCV launched the Crypto for Good Fund II last month. They will be conducting a series of pilots thereby building up evidence to prove the scalability of blockchain-based solutions and their impact on emerging markets. During the first phase of the fund launch last year, MCV has already received over 200 applications from more than 50 countries worldwide. Applications for the second round are already up until March 31st.

Leading U.S. based investment firm Fidelity is planning to launch Fidelity Crypto, an investment arm solely dedicated to digital currencies. 

Fidelity Crypto will serve 36 states in the country, and will be made available to only U.S. citizens. 

Despite industry leaders raising concerns about the cryptocurrency regulatory policies in the United States, some leading firms are iterating confidence in the market, by taking steps to launch Crypto-related ventures.

Most recently, the top U.S. based investment firm Fidelity investments, has hinted that it will roll out an investment arm dedicated to digital currencies. Dubbed “Fidelity Crypto, the platform is designed to focus on cryptocurrency investments.

Prominent Cryptocurrency analyst Peter Brandt took to Twitter to update the crypto-twitter community on Fidelity’s move. The analyst shared a screenshot highlighting a section of the company’s official website that read “Fidelity Crypto is coming soon.”

On the homepage, a section highlights “Crypto decoded”, an initiative designed to help newbies interested in their services to understand the concept of digital currencies.

Customers will not be charged for commission

Fidelity appears to be calling for early birds to make their way into the platform and gain an early access list to trade digital currencies. Although there was no mention of any other digital asset for trading, except the leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin, and the second largest crypto Ethereum. The platform will also be integrated into the Fidelity mobile app once it launches. The website reads.

Get on the early-access list to trade bitcoin and ethereum. Start with the names you know, invest with a name you can trust. Plus, get education that takes the code talk out of crypto.

It was also noted that Fidelity Digital Assets is behind Fidelity Crypto, as it provides services for the platform. It is also worth mentioning that Fidelity Crypto is limited to only a select few states in the United States.

The services will be made available in Alabama, New York, and Washington, along with 33 other states in the country. At present, the platform is restricting participation to only U.S. citizens.

Fidelity Crypto is also offering a mouth-watering incentive to prospective customers, revealing that trading Bitcoin and Ethereum will attract zero commissions.

You will not be charged a commission on bitcoin or ether (“crypto”) trades placed through Fidelity Crypto. Fidelity Digital Assets will collect a spread (assessed at no more than 1%) calculated as the difference between the price at which you buy or sell crypto in your Fidelity Crypto account and the price at which Fidelity Digital Assets fills your order.

Fidelity explained, adding that the spread will be reflected in a customer’s execution price. While fees are subject to change, Fidelity digital assets say it might not charge a spread.

Projects including Blockchain Lock, Bloock, Clique, Collab.Land, DePay, Fractal ID, Grail, and Kaleido are currently building with the Polygon ID. 

 According to the announcement, DAO can be able to verify membership without the need to disclose their identity.

The scaling upgrade from the Ethereum layer 2 solutions provider Polygon – the zero-knowledge Ethereum scaling machine (zkEVM) was recently confirmed to be launched on March 27. As the crypto community is getting ready for this occasion, Polygon has launched a web3 identity service, Polygon ID in a bid to solve the problems of digital trust. According to the announcement, Polygon ID would enable applications built on blockchain technology to validate users without putting personal data at risk. Also, businesses leveraging these services would have fewer problems in user data management. 

It means greater control over their own identity and discretion in how they use their data to answer questions from institutions and private organizations. Polygon ID enables developers to accomplish what previously has not been possible online: enabling trust and verification while delivering a user-friendly experience and maintaining the veil of privacy.

The official announcement also mentions some projects currently building with the Polygon ID. These include Blockchain Lock, Bloock, Clique, Collab.Land, DePay, Fractal ID, Grail, Kaleido, etc. The previous version of the Polygon ID tooling has already been used by some third-party builders and thousands of users at hackathons. 

Some use cases of the Polygon ID

Its ability to enable developers to build self-sovereign, decentralized and private identity solutions makes it unique in the blockchain industry. Last March, it was announced that Polygon ID is now available under an open-source license to the public. It also stated that it was fully serviced. This means anyone can become an issuer using the Polygon ID infrastructure stack. The updated version offers developers building for end users the option to allow users to prove that they are humans without disclosing personal information. Additionally, users can have the option for a ‘passwordless’ login to avoid falling prey to hackers. Developers can take advantage of the zero-knowledge technology within their compliance processes without putting user privacy in danger. 

The public release adds four new tools to the Polygon ID Toolset: Verifier SDK (for verifiers), Issuer Node (for issuers), Wallet SDK (for wallet builders), and Wallet App (for devs and end users). This helps developers integrate decentralized identity into their applications while also being Web3 native. All of these tools are made available under the open source AGPL license.

The announcement further mentions some use cases for polygon ID developers. According to them, DAO can be able to verify membership without the need to disclose their identity. In addition, the ID provides an identity layer for e-commerce customers to enable payment security and reduce the cost of storing customer payment data. 

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A spokesperson of the project confirmed:

Polygon ID enables compliance for both web2 and web3 industries which strengthens the regulatory framework through KYC/AML checks.

The reusability and self-sovereignty of credentials also reduce the cost, time, and complexity of user onboarding and user verification.

MATIC price still in bearish mode

The announcement has had a minimal impact on the price of MATIC as the asset is 12 percent down in the last seven days with a current price of $1.2. However, this, coupled with the launch of zkEVM in late March could send the price to $10 depending on the investors’ response. 

Bitcoin whale activity has dropped considerably in recent times showing a lack of confidence among big investors.

As the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade comes closer, experts predict a sell-off further as liquidity increases. ETH technical chart shows the possibility of another 25 percent correction.

After a strong start to the year 2023, the world’s largest cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC) has been consolidating in line with the broader cryptocurrency market. Over the last week, Bitcoin (BTC) has been facing strong selling pressure and is down by 4 percent on the weekly charts.

As of press time, BTC is trading 1.45 percent down at a price of $23,456 and a market cap of $456 billion. The current macro indicators such as rising inflation have been weighing down on Bitcoin and the overall crypto market.

Several market analysts expect the Federal Reserve to continue to increase interest rates going ahead leading to the possibility of an economic recession in the US. Well, if such a scenario pans out, risk-ON assets like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will be the most impacted.

After its recent surge, Bitcoin has failed to move past $25,000 levels facing stiff resistance. Mike Mcglone, the senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg writes:

“Don’t fight the #Fed” was the dominant headwind for markets in 2022, and remains so in 1Q. Bitcoin $25,000 resistance may prove significant for all risk assets.

As the macro headwinds remain strong, McGlone explains that the trajectory shall remain downwards. On the other hand, the total number of Bitcoin whale addresses has continued to drop. On-chain data provider Santiment reports:

The amount of existing whale #Bitcoin addresses are continuing to sink, with 2,011 existing compared to 2,266 that existed one year ago today. 2,489 was the #AllTimeHigh set on February 8th, where prices jumped +70% in the following 10 weeks.

Alike Bitcoin, Ethereum shows signs of weakness

The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency Ethereum (ETH) has been moving more or less in trajectory with Bitcoin. Ethereum has also faced selling pressure over the last week and is currently trading at $1,645 levels with a market cap of $201 billion.

The Ethereum developers are now gearing up for the launch of the Shanghai upgrade ahead of this month. This is one of the most important network upgrades as it will unlock the staked ETH for withdrawal by investors. Some market analysts believe that this could put additional selling pressure on ETH as liquidity increases. However, on-chain data provider CryptoQuant has a contrarian view of this. It notes:

We believe there will be little selling pressure for ETH when staking withdrawals become available after the Shanghai upgrade. This is based on our analysis of the profit and loss of staked ETH. Two factors support the argument: 60% of staked ETH is at a loss, and the largest staking pool’s depositors are also at a loss.