In August, the markets were less hectic and we saw the first dips. The most impactful cryptocurrency news, events and changes? ChangeHero’s updates for the past month? A coin digest for most of the top currencies? Find all this in this August digest by the ChangeHero team!
ChangeHero August updates
SwapSpace
Finally, we joined the list of partners of SwapSpace, an instant cryptocurrency exchange aggregator. Now on their site users can choose rates from a variety of partners, including ChangeHero, compare them and perform swaps seamlessly, saving their time. Together with them, we launched and concluded a giveaway on Twitter for the communities of both teams.
CoolBitX
We got the chance to interview David Tsai, the Executive Vice President of Sales of our other recently announced partner, CoolBitX. We highly recommend checking it out for the insights about CoolWallet S, ChangeHero integration in it and an inside view from the blockchain industry.
Coinify
In July, we finally announced our partnership with Coinify! Users can now buy crypto with Europe’s leading fiat-to-crypto provider integrated to our website. And now, let’s see what cryptocurrency news made the most impact in August in the next section. Find Bitcoin digest and top coin digest further in the article!
Cryptocurrency News in August
Bitcoin News
Bitcoin digest for August can be summed up by saying that despite the dips and spikes in price, for the past month it has been slowly climbing up. We covered the price change in one of the following sections, make sure to check it out!
- Bitcoin’s market capitalization exceeded Intel and Coca-Cola stocks at the beginning of August. Later, in mid-August, it exceeded Bank of America (BoA) and NZ Dollar (NZD) (At the moment of writing our Bitcoin digest, both BoA and NZD are back in their positions in respective ratings).
- A few entities ran ads in prominent financial newspapers suggesting to invest in Bitcoin. Galaxy Digital Investments did it in The Financial Times, while Apple Daily, Hong-Kong newspaper, did so of their own accord in protest of the mainland regime. Bitcoin was also advertised in India’s The Economic Times, as Bitcoin.com reports.
- Bitcoin’s rich list (the amount of addresses with at least 1,000 BTC) is at its highest. Experts connect this to the increase of interest from institutional investors.
Policy News
About a week ago, Jerome Powell announced a new monetary policy for the US regarding inflation. The US will be willing to increase their 2% goal in the light of the damages dealt by the pandemic to the States’ economy. Due to a high degree of penetration of USD in the global economy, this might have an impact on it as well. This factor might also have been driving investors seeking hedge against inflation to Bitcoin, as its supply is hard-coded to be 21 million. But enough about Bitcoin, as there us even more news for an altcoin-focused coin digest!
Tech News
The whole month we were closely following the development of Ethereum 2.0 testnet Medalla. The news associated with it were both positive and negative. Since this is an Ethereum coin digest, suffice to say in the end, it seems that everything is proceeding according to plan. The first implementations of the rehauled Ethereum network will be released this year. This is extremely timely, since Ethereum network is seeing extreme load again, and the network fees keep going higher.
DeFi News
And speaking of Ethereum fees, the main, though not the only, culprit is the DeFi. In August, the interest in DEX trading and yield farming scored unprecedented records. The buzz spread so far and involved so many quick-buck seekers that the number of voices calling out for regulation is increasing. The situation is reminiscent of the 2017 ICO craze, and if things continue to develop in the same vein, regulators will not take too long to crack down on this market. That is, once they figure out how to do it in the first place.
Crypto Twitter in August
IMF on Crypto
What are cryptocurrencies? https://t.co/ggONlLkA2r pic.twitter.com/yYpj3Jf37E
— IMF (@IMFNews) August 23, 2020
The International Monetary Fund posted an educational video in their Twitter account, which went viral. In 2 minutes, they explained the main advantages of cryptocurrency and gave insight into what risks should be solved before they see truly global scale of adoption. However, this video was criticized for not even mentioning Bitcoin and bringing up an old argument of sceptics that anonymity makes it attractive to “bad guys”. Nevertheless, even the IMF acknowledged the role cryptocurrencies can play in transforming the global economy.
Dave Portnoy’s Friends to Lovers to Rivals Journey in Crypto
I currently own zero bitcoins. I will wait and watch. I lost 25k. Just like with the stock market it took my brain time to figure it out. I know this. The Link Marines are weak and the orchid flowers do die in the crypto world. I may or may not be done. #bitcoin
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) August 21, 2020
Fintwit celeb Davey Day Trader AKA Dave Portnoy has been the fascination of the month on Crypto Twitter. First, he held an open mind to the topic and invited Winklevoss twins to gain more knowledge. A few days later, he started shilling low-cap coins and proclaimed himself the King of Bitcoin. However, his reign did not last long, for Portnoy exited the game as soon as it cost him money. Anyway, it looks like he swore to eventually make a comeback.
Rise of the Memers
Crypto vs Dave Portnoy pic.twitter.com/xMir8MFyKs
— CryptoChimp (@Cryptanzee) August 22, 2020
Speaking of Portnoy, user @Cryptanzee made a couple of videos on his journey, going viral in the process. This is coinciding with DeFi having a weird moment when meme tokens and protocols break all kinds of records: YAM, Spaghetti Money, Based, SushiSwap — you name it. A meme coin digest would be really welcome in this landscape! Memeability became an earnest metric in a chance of a project’s success, and many of developers are none too shy to use it to their advantage.
Top Coin Digest: August Price Change
Now that we have covered the news, it is the part of our digest in which we make a lightning round-style top coin digest. In this list we included top-10 by market cap currencies that can be exchanged, bought and sold on ChangeHero. Here is what the difference between the opening price of each currency and the closing price looked like in August:
- Bitcoin +3.06%;
- Ethereum +20.52%;
- XRP +8.11%;
- Chainlink +50.72%;
- Bitcoin Cash -9.45%;
- Litecoin +5.08%;
- Bitcoin SV -19.18%;
- Binance Coin +10.86%;
- Tezos +12.88%;
- Stellar Lumens +0.39%.
ChangeHero Gainers of August:
- OMG Network +229.56%;
- Chainlink +119.75%;
- Compound +68.80%.
ChangeHero August Stats
We’re excited to sum up and share our successes with you in a form of statistics.
Min/Max Fee
The Best Rate exchanges were maintained at 0.5% service fee, as always. The risk fees in Fixed rate transactions varied from 0.3% to 1.2%.
Top five pairs of August
- BTC–ETH — 1277 exchanges;
- BTC–USDT(ERC-20) — 513 exchanges;
- ETH–BTC — 393 exchanges;
- BSV–BTC — 241 exchanges;
- LINK–BTC — 168 exchanges.
New reviews and ratings
BestChange: 17 reviews, 16 positive and 1 neutral; TrustPilot: Excellent (4.8), 13 reviews (all 5 stars!)
Swap time facts
The quickest exchange took only 33s to be processed (BSV_XRP); Out of 11,052 successfully finished transactions in August, 7.37% (814) of them were processed in less than a minute and 33.3% (3,680) — in 5 minutes or less.
Growth of our reserves
In comparison with July, in August we have slightly reduced the reserve to $10,443,617. Regardless, this is ample supply to be sure that all exchanges go smoothly.
Average response time of support
August was busier than previous months because of the growing activity on the markets. Still, the average response time reported by the support team comes up to 16 minutes on email and a minute in chat.
New website users
In August, our unique pageviews and users on average were increasing by ~10% each week. In total, when compared to the end of July, both metrics increased by 10%.
What are our plans for September?
ChangeHero team keeps working on improving the user experience and security of the service on the back end. We are also working on a new coin integration at the moment of writing, and getting ready for another yet unannounced partnership. For all three campaigns mentioned in the first section, we still got some more activities on social media coming in the near future, so keep your eyes peeled for the news! We’ll see what we achieve in the next news and top coin digest!
Summary
Hope you enjoyed this news and top coin digest for August. In the coming weeks and months, there surely will be more news to include in our Bitcoin digest, as the market is readying to move. Keep swapping with ChangeHero and follow our updates and cryptocurrency news reported on our blog, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and in Telegram.
