CRYPTO MOVERS AND PRICES
BTC reached USD 60k briefly overnight following reporting from Bloomberg that the SEC would not block a slate of BTC futures-backed ETFs. BTC last traded above USD 60k in April.
Crypto Story of the Day
DOT, the native token of the Polkadot Network, added as much as USD~8B to its market cap following news the network is due to launch ‘Parachain Auctions’ on November 11.
On Wednesday, Polkadot announced that the network ‘is now technically capable of supporting its first Parachains….’ Following the announcement, November 11 was selected as the tentative date for beginning a series of ‘Parachain auctions.’ Parachains are described as ‘the last piece of core functionality to be delivered as outlined in the Polkadot whitepaper,’ allowing the network to ‘realize its scalable multi-chain architecture.’
An official announcement from Polkadot explains that although Parachains are ‘ready for an initial production release,’ this does not imply the ‘code is fully mature.’ According to the announcement, while the code for the new feature ‘has been unit and integration tested, audited, and deployed and demonstrated’ on testnets, it ‘may still contain uncaught bugs.’
Polkadot’s architecture allows projects to create their own Parachains, blockchain sub-networks with specific rules. These specialized blockchains connect to the Polkadot Relay Chain, the network’s final consensus layer, where data and transaction finality occur. Parachains constitute the ‘multichain’ aspect of Polkadot architecture. The Parachain Auctions, which will begin on November 11, will allow DOT holders to vote on allocating a limited number of Parachains to competing projects.
While a definitive list of auction participants is not available, projects have participated in auctions on Polkadot’s ‘Kusama’ testnet. These projects include Kintsugi, which aims to bridge BTC and Polkadot, Basilisk, which ‘helps young crypto projects distribute tokens to their communities,’ and Sakura, a cross-blockchain bridge.
DOT achieved a record-high market cap of USD 46.68B in May. The coin’s current market cap is USD 39.97B. In the Top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap, currently, five tokens are native assets on smart contract networks. These assets are ETH, BNB, ADA, and SOL, which, along with DOT, have a combined market cap of USD~680B. These five assets have added an aggregate of USD~579B to their market caps since the beginning of 2021, a growth of 537%.