There have been some big shakers in the crypto-verse amid recent sell-offs seen in the fast ever-changing financial market and Polkadot is among them.

According to figures from a leading analytics firm, Coinmarketcap, Polkadot has comfortably surpassed XRP in terms of market value following a massive gain of 62% in barely 7 days. This makes it the fourth-biggest crypto asset in the crypto market.

What you should know

• At the time of writing this report, Polkadot traded at $14.82 with a daily trading volume of $6 Billion. Polkadot is up 4.85% for the day.
• The fast-rising crypto-asset presently has a market value of around $13.3 Billion. It has a circulating supply of 900,576,862 DOT coins and the maximum supply is not available.
• In addition, XRP, conversely, has been down 10% for the week as XRP bulls had challenges taking the cross-border transfer token above $0.30. Its market cap is currently just below DOT’s at $12.7 Billion.

Polkadot’s native DOT token serves three clear purposes: providing network governance and operations, and creating parallel chains by bonding. Its founders are Dr. Gavin Wood, Peter Czaban, and Robert Habermeier

The fourth most valuable crypto asset is an open-source multichain protocol that enables the cross-chain transfer of any data or asset types, cryptocurrencies, thereby expanding blockchains interoperable with each other.

The Polkadot protocol connects private and public chains, oracles future technologies and permission-less networks, allowing such independent networks to share information and transactions through the Polkadot relay chain.

A large entity paid a transaction fee of $7.5 fee to just move $1 billion worth of SNX assets on the Ethereum network at a time the utility crypto, Ether itself traded around $1,200.

According to data retrieved from Etherscan data, money was transferred from a contract called “Synthetix: Reward Escrow” to an Ethereum wallet that contains the $1 billion in SNX tokens and appears to be a second version of the Synthetix Rewards escrow contract.

At press time, Synthetix traded at $15.75 with a daily trading volume of $314.3 million. Synthetix is up 8.90% for the day.

It is presently the 23rd most valuable crypto by market value worth about $1.8 billion. It has a circulating supply of 114,841,533 SNX coins and a max. supply of 212,424,133 SNX coins.

What you should know: Synthetix is a type of Crypto liquidity protocol asset on the Ethereum network that facilitates the issuance and trading of synthetic assets.

• Each synthetic asset (or Synth) is an ERC20 token that tracks the price of an external asset; for example, each dollar token tracks the price of the US dollar (and unlike the other synthetic assets, is fixed at 1).
• A wide variety of Synths exists within Synthetix, including commodities, fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies, and inverse indexes.
• In principle, the system can support any asset with a clear price and provide on-chain exposure to an unlimited range of real-world assets. The protocol will enable a variety of trading features including binary options, futures, and more.

Analysts at Swiss firm UBS are warning investors that popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoins could lose their allure just like Myspace and Netscape did earlier on in the social media and browser revolutions respectively.

According to Bloomberg, the firm issued this warning to its investors citing regulatory actions or if a better-designed version is launched to rival the existing ones.

“There is little in our view to stop a cryptocurrency’s price from going to zero when a better-designed version is launched or if regulatory changes stifle sentiment…..Netscape and Myspace are examples of network applications that enjoyed widespread popularity but eventually disappeared,” UBS strategist.

What this means: UBS suggests that a rival cryptocurrency backed by powerful Western Governments could eclipse Bitcoin when launched as it will attract more credibility and transaction value. Bitcoin is currently not owned by any government.

What the US Fed is saying

Bitcoins, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency with a 66.5% market share saw its price rise above $40,000 during the week before falling 8.9% to close just above $37,000. Cryptocurrencies are very volatile assets and is viewed somewhat negatively by most regulators.

Recently, the US Fed Chair, Jerome Powell, recently spoke on why the U.S central bank had no reason to rush into central bank digital currencies. According to him;

Since we are the world’s reserve currency, we actually think we need to get this right, and we don’t feel an urge or need to be first,” he said. “We effectively already have a first-mover advantage, because we’re the reserve currency.”

Powell also revealed that stablecoins were of high-level priority.

“We’ve been very focused… on potential regulatory answers for global stablecoins, in particular,” said Powell in response to a question about CBDCs, or central bank digital currencies.

“So that’s been a high-level focus, and that will continue to be a high-level focus because they could become systemically important overnight and we don’t begin to have, you know, our arms around the potential risks and how to manage those risks, and the public will expect we do and has every right to expect that… It’s a very high priority.”

Upshots

According to a report by Google, Nigeria has the highest interest in Bitcoin globally. The report claims Nigeria emerged the first amongst other countries around the world in Bitcoin searches on Google. Delta State has the highest level of Bitcoin interests on a state level in Nigeria, followed by Ebonyi, Ekiti, Anambra, and Osun.

Surprisingly Nigeria’s business capital, Lagos misses out of the top 5 as regards Bitcoin level of interest in Google.