After weeks of jubilance over the Solana ecosystem’s resounding comeback—one that boosted SOL, Solana NFTs, Solana meme coins, and even the lackluster Solana smartphone—the momentum began to cool this week, triggering intensified exchanges between advocates of the blockchain and those of its dominant rival, Ethereum.
On Thursday, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin bemoaned the dying Web3 vision that originally spurred much crypto development, blaming stalled progress on the exorbitant cost of gas fees.
The tension was likely heightened by the declining fortunes of key Solana winners of recent weeks, most notably the once-unstoppable dog-themed meme coin BONK.
And just in time, native tokens of Ethereum layer-2 networks such as Optimism and Arbitrum shot up over 30% and 16%, respectively—likely due to those blockchain’s lower gas fees.
Even seemingly unrelated news events got sucked into the fray. When news broke earlier in the week that Donald Trump had started offloading millions of dollars worth of ETH from his struggling NFT projects, Twitter users were quick to view the news as a referendum on the never-ending Ethereum/Solana fracas.
Stablecoin issuer Tether is ending its USDT support for five blockchains effective on September 1, the company announced on Friday, ending redemptions and freezing the remaining assets on those blockchains.
Last June, the firm ended its minting function on Algorand and EOS (now called Vaulta), meaning it would no longer issue new stablecoins on those chains. In 2023, it announced the same for Bitcoin Cash, Kusama, and Omni Layer Protocol.
Now, Tether has put a hard end date on its stablecoin s...
Solana token launchpad Pump.fun is prepping for its initial coin offering, aka ICO, on Saturday, July 12. With U.S. and UK citizens banned from participating, traders are eagerly awaiting its full launch to purchase PUMP—but will it pump or dump once it starts trading?
The token is set to go on sale via six centralized exchanges (Bybit, Kraken, Bitget, MEXC, KuCoin, and Gate.io) as well as the Pump.fun website Saturday, with 150 billion tokens up for grabs at $0.004 each. Within 48 to 72 hours a...
U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds pulled in over $1.17 billion on Thursday, notching their second-highest day of inflows ever as institutional capital flooded into digital assets.
The massive inflows to Bitcoin ETFs were led by BlackRock's IBIT with $448.5 million, followed by Fidelity's FBTC at $324.3 million and ARK's ARKB with $268.7 million, according to Farside Investors data.
Even with $40.2 million in outflows from Grayscale’s GBTC, total net flows turned sharply positive.
The infl...
