🗞 Daily Crypto News, May, 1st

ETH 2.0 Issuance Will Be 2 Million a Year at Most Says Vitalik;
Justin Sun Recounts Steem-Hive Hard Fork at Virtual Blockchain Week ;
Bitcoin Unfazed by Record Profit-Taking as BTC Price Resets for $9K ;
Why Crypto Exchange OKCoin Jumped Through Hoops to Get Licensed in Japan;
Bitcoin Whale Addresses Hit Highest Number Since August 2019 ;
🗞 Daily Crypto Calendar, May, 1st 💰
Bitcoin Trading Update

Welcome to the Daily Crypto News: A complete Press Review, Coin Calendar and Trading Analysis. Enjoy!

🗞 ETH 2.0 Issuance Will Be 2 Million a Year at Most Says Vitalik

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that issuance on the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade will be drastically reduced in a podcast interview with POV Crypto called “Internet Money”. Discussing some of the differences between Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), Buterin explained why the team chose Proof of Stake as the upgraded consensus mechanism:

“One of the reasons why we’re doing Proof of Stake is because we want to greatly reduce the issuance. So in the specs for ETH 2.0 I think we have put out a calculation that the theoretical maximum issuance would be something like 2 million a year if literally everyone participates.”

He said the current testnet participation sees around 100,000 ETH issued a year. The current Ethereum network has about 4.7 million ETH issued annually. Eth 2.0 issuance meanwhile is expected to be somewhere between 100,000 and 2 million a year, with the most likely scenario being that it will be much less than 2 million.

🗞 Justin Sun Recounts Steem-Hive Hard Fork at Virtual Blockchain Week

Speaking at the Virtual Blockchain Week (VBW), Tron founder Justin Sun presented his side of the recent events involving Tron’s "partnership" with Steemit Inc, and the subsequent hard fork that resulted in Hive (HIVE) forking away from Steem (STEEM).

During February, it was reported that Justin Sun had acquired Steemit Inc alongside the platform’s founder’s reward of 20% of the total STEEM token supply. In response to the purported acquisition, the Steem community moved to initiate a fork to freeze the reward.

Sun rejects the narrative of Tron "acquiring" Steemit Inc

At VWB, Sun stated that he does not think the term “‘acquisition’ is the right word to describe the partnership between the Tron Foundation and Steemit Inc.”

“At the beginning, we didn't use the word acquisition, we more talk about partnership,” said Justin, seeking to clarify the nature of the relationship:

“Steemit Inc take a certain percentage of the tokens inside of the Steemit ecosystem, and also Steemit.com is one of the most important apps in the ecosystem [...] Bitcoin, like Steem, is definitely decentralized, but [some] of the companies, they hold lots of the Bitcoin. So that’s the relationship between the company and the Steem blockchain.”

🗞 Bitcoin Unfazed by Record Profit-Taking as BTC Price Resets for $9K

Thursday's Bitcoin (BTC) price action was relatively uneventful compared to the past 48-hours of activity that the top-rated crypto on CoinMarketCap pulled off on Tuesday and Wednesday.

On crypto-Twitter, one will easily find analysts calling for the digital asset to rally to $10,000 before halving, and a few have even hinted that a new lifetime high is on the cards.

Tether withdrawals soar with BTC price

Regardless of these predictions, Bitcoin’s $1,700 single day move made waves and crypto exchanges like Binance managed to handle $16 billion in trading volume, a new all-time high not seen since January 2018.

A retest of $9,000 back in play

🗞 Why Crypto Exchange OKCoin Jumped Through Hoops to Get Licensed in Japan

After more than two years, San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange OKCoin received its license as a Virtual Currency Service Provider in March from the Kanto Local Finance Bureau in Japan.

While the country is known for its retail market, the exchange is betting on Japan’s strict licensing regime to attract the institutional investors OKCoin specializes in serving.

“Japan is famous for having a lot of money,” said John Feng, CEO of OKCoin Japan, a subsidiary of blockchain services company OK Group. “In Japan, the rate of return is low on any asset for real estate and the stock market because interest rates are so low. Asset management companies and large institutional insurance companies want a little higher return on their assets.”

🗞 Bitcoin Whale Addresses Hit Highest Number Since August 2019

Large crypto investors, popularly known as “whales,” seem to be accumulating bitcoin amid the ongoing price rally.

The seven-day moving average of the number of addresses holding 10,000 bitcoins or more rose to 111 on Wednesday, the highest level since Aug. 2, 2019, according to blockchain intelligence firm Glassnode. That number has risen by more than 11% since early March.

“The increase in the number of BTC addresses with more than 10,000 BTC is likely the result of long-term holders coming back online to expand their holdings,” said Matthew Dibb, co-founder of Stack, a provider of cryptocurrency trackers and index funds.