Mornin’ Coinheads…

Eelcome back to the Old Skool Yard. Bitcoin is on a BTC burn, up strongly and well past US$22,800. Ethereum is somewhat soaring, up (well into double-digits) and on past $1,600. This is Merge-optimism right here.

All round, crypto markets are sweatin’ it to some joy-inducing upward movement in the right direction for investors, dragging the new kids along for the ride.

It’s time to fire the barrister and hire a barista – because all courtship and no coffee makes Jack a dull boy.

 

People are feeling good about crypto. Again. 

Sentiment’s running pretty high across the crypto space at the moment. Over the past 24 hours, the crypto charts at coinmarketcap.com have been looking positively verdant, with Bitcoin up around +7.4%, XRP up +6.8%, and Ethereum still on something of a rampage, up around 19% (more on that in a few seconds).

It’s heartening to see the old gang doing so well, like it’s a 10-year high school reunion where everybody invented Post-It Notes and can now afford to eat a private jet for dinner every night.

 

Ethereum sentiment still driving things skyward

Ethereum is, for want of a better term, absolutely spanking it at the moment, after a surge on the weekend got the market all hot and bothered in a way it hasn’t been for a few months.

According to cryptonews.com, it’s the upcoming ‘Merge’ – ETH’s transition from the proof-of-work (PoW) to the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism that has been tentatively pencilled in for late September.

That is apparently fueling double-digit percentage gains, and has seen ETH barrell past US$1300, through US$1400 and then beyond the significant sentiment level of US$1500 in just days. At the time of writing, it was closing in on US$1600 at a rate of knots – and here’s a picture!

ETH crypto morning

“Here’s the bill for the mistakes we made,” says Celsius.

The legends at News Ltd have some legendary news from inside the legendary wreckage of Celsius Network. And it’s not awesome.

Word is the Big Brains behind the absolutely-not-a-bank crypto lending platform are shaping up to do yet another thing precisely the way a bank sans brains would (despite really, really not being a bank) – and that is: lumbering its customers with the cost of its failures.

Celsius could be offering customers a pennies-on-the-dollar settlement, or they could leave the debt with Celsius and trust the crypto-lender not to screw the pooch again as it tries to dig a whole upwards instead of downwards, for a change.

Bankruptcy filings show of the US$5.5 billion of the co’s total liabilities, more than $4.7 billion is owed to around 1.7 million users, which went up in flames after Celsius flew, Icarus-esque, sunwards.

 

Miners selling up to spend more on… mining

CNBC is reporting there are a number of miners liquidating Bitcoin, most likely to help fund further mining activity, because – like uranium-powered model trains made of solid 99.9% pure Lego – it’s an expensive hobby.

Around 14,000 Bitcoin, worth more than US$300 million was transferred out of wallets belonging to miners in a single 24-hour period at the end of last week, adding to the single-largest Bitcoin offload since November 2021. Yeah – that November.

 

UK judge says OK to legal peril via NFTs

And last up for the day is from the UK, where the High Court of England and Wales has apparently granted service of court proceedings via the transfer of a token on the blockchain.

Basically you can now be served (a legal proceeding) via an NFT.

Yes. That means you can sue someone through the blockchain. At last.

The precedent was set last month, when UK courts – the makers of hits such as Brexit and Boris Johnson – granted legal digital eagles Giambrone & Partners the permission to serve legal documents to an anonymous individual through an NFT airdrop, the firm said in a statement.

Expect newly-minted caricatures of the cream of the British legal community arriving on an exchange near you, or on you, soon.