Binance Buys Part of GOPAX

Binance has completed a minority purchase of GOPAX, a South Korean digital asset exchange. The move allows Binance to re-enter the county’s market for the first time since 2021.

The purchase is in conjunction with Binance’s Industry Recovery Initiative (IRI), according to Binance’s blog announcement from February 3. GOPAX has been seeking investment since late 2022 after halting the withdrawal of principal and interest payments. Binance will invest funds into GOPAX to help make users whole while also providing industry support for education and development.

“Binance has a responsibility to protect our users, as well as our industry,” said Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, founder and CEO of Binance. “The Industry Recovery Initiative was created to support promising companies that were negatively impacted by the events of last year. We hope that taking this step with GOPAX will further rebuild the Korean crypto and blockchain industry.”

The move comes after Binance reportedly passed due diligence in early January for a 41% purchase of the company. The terms of the deal were not officially disclosed.

The GOPAX acquisition marks the first time that Binance will have global crypto trading services in South Korea since 2021. The world’s largest crypto exchange operated in South Korea from 2019 to 2021 and also helped Busan City develop a blockchain ecosystem. Binance recently opened an office in Busan in late Summer of 2022.

Binance launched the IRI in November 2022 following the collapse of FTX and upon seeing the incredible industry fallout from the situation. The world’s largest exchange took it upon itself to create an industry organization to help support regular users in the industry who lose funds.

What is Binance:

Binance positions itself as the world’s leading blockchain ecosystem and crypto-asset infrastructure provider with a financial product suite that includes the largest digital asset exchange by volume. The Binance platform aims to increase the freedom of money for users and features a comprehensive portfolio of crypto-asset products and offerings, including trading and finance, education, data and research, social good, investment and incubation, decentralization, and infrastructure solutions.

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Bitcoin is the longest-living, market leading OG cryptocurrency. For better or for worse, it has given birth to the entire cryptocurrency industry. Many believe that Bitcoin has fulfilled its mission as peer-to-peer digital cash, bringing freedom to people worldwide. Users of the oldest cryptocurrency range from political dissidents like Alexey Navalny to financially excluded Venezuelans. It has the highest brand recognition of any project in the space and works exactly as advertised.

Perhaps it does not have the bells and whistles of newer projects, but it also doesn’t have their implosions (see Luna) or constant network shutdowns (see Solana). Amidst all the chaos in the markets this year, Bitcoin keeps relentlessly producing block after block after block. Despite some in the cryptocurrency space viewing it as "legacy tech," it remains the market leader for a reason.

One of the reasons for Bitcoin's success is its design simplicity, which limits the threat surface of attacks. Its smart contract functionality may be highly limited, but this has helped it avoid hidden leverage and the corrosive problems of MEV. It does not have stablecoins, which curtails the protocol-level influence of large centralized players like Circle and Tether. Had the ETHPOW fork been more contentious, stablecoin issuers would have had an outsized say. Bitcoin’s simplicity makes it resilient.

Many cryptocurrency enthusiasts critical of Bitcoin’s “old fashioned” technology fail to understand that most cryptocurrency projects are parasitical of Bitcoin's pristine censorship resistance. Regulators and lawmakers realize that Bitcoin cannot be easily censored, so these projects pretend to be similar to Bitcoin and avoid scrutiny. Moreover, market participants also know that they can easily exit these weaker coins into Bitcoin at the push of a button if needed, so they are happy to park their wealth there temporarily. Many think that these projects will always exist in the shadow of Bitcoin.

In recent years, Bitcoin has solidified its position as "digital gold," with countries and companies adopting this narrative. While the 2017 bubble saw numerous projects attempting to be “the next Bitcoin,” Bitcoin was the undisputed king of its category by 2022. Competitors now seek to be “smart contract platforms” rather than digital money. With crypto lenders and exchanges defaulting on their obligations and DeFi protocols getting hacked left right and center, the simplicity of keeping Bitcoin in cold storage is increasingly appealing. Staying humble and stacking sats, as some would say.

Bitcoin hasn’t escaped the price volatility of 2022, having lost ~60% of its value year to date. But it has avoided the devastation of many other market participants. Investors in Luna, depositors of Celsius or users of FTX have found themselves completely wiped out. What these projects have in common is the complexity of their narrative: numerous tokens, intertwined in a myriad of ways, offering both yield, price stability and the allure of exponential growth. Ultimately, they provided none of that and imploded within days. Bitcoin eschews complexity, it promises neither yield nor price stability. Instead, it offers resilience.

Those that were misled by the siren call Celsius, Luna, FTX and the like are looking for answers. Self-custody and censorship resistance are narratives that struggle to compete with “get rich quick” while the market is hot, but their value has been re-established recently. Hardware wallets have had record sales since FTX’s collapse. People have learned hard lessons about trusted third parties and protocols obfuscating risk with complexity. It is a great opportunity for Bitcoiners to embrace them and educate them on Bitcoin’s ethos and mission.

Yet there are concerning trends. The Lightning network continues to grow, but at a pace far slower than most advocates anticipated.  Bitcoin has lost mindshare among speculators and technology enthusiasts to Ethereum. More worryingly, Bitcoin is losing market share to stablecoins, which function as digital bearer instruments that can now reach those who previously only had access to Bitcoin. Even in markets that require a higher degree of censorship resistance, such as dark net markets, Monero is gaining ground. Furthermore, there are growing concerns that its transaction fees may not compensate for the decline in the block subsidy.

The Bitcoin community must address the challenging task of maintaining the predictability and simplicity of the protocol without shutting out impactful innovation. A careful balance must be struck between the users’ needs and Bitcoin’s mission. Ideology cannot trump reality, Bitcoin’s future development must be practical, not just theoretical. There are encouraging examples of forward-looking research, such as the fellowship sponsored by the Human Rights Foundation for roll-ups on Bitcoin.

Despite these challenges, Bitcoin remains the king and will likely continue to lead in 2023. However, it cannot afford to rest on its laurels: it must continue to evolve and adapt to the changing landscape.

This is a guest post from CoinMarketCap by By Boaz Sobrado. The original article was published here.

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unshETH Liquid Staking Derivatives

Liquid Staking Derivatives (LSD) is a relatively new industry that is disrupting how people earn rewards and how they interact with financial products. Token holders are given a derivative for their original token, which they can put to additional use, gaining rewards from two tokens instead of one.

unshETH.xyz is striving to take this industry a step further with a unified ERC-20 token (unshETH). All liquid staking derivative tokens on the Ethereum network can be swapped for this one token, increasing accessibility. Moreover, unshETH is taking a completely new approach to Liquid Staking Derivatives.

unshETH is aiming to ensure decentralization of Ethereum validator nodes, y allowing users to delegate with whom their eth should be staked. The protocol will also be open source, so that any other LSD provider can copy their features. This will help to strengthen and improve the overall ecosystem.

Decentralization Of Ethereum Validator Nodes

Ethereum runs on validator nodes. These nodes ensure that the industry is impervious to a 51% attack and that transactions are legitimate. To ensure the longevity and viability of the Ethereum ecosystem, it is important that Ethereum validators are decentralized.

Currently, it costs nearly $50,000 (32 ETH) to run a validator node. This is not a flaw - the high price ensures that only those who are committed to the Ethereum ecosystem will invest for a long-time horizon. It also ensures that no single actor owns too many nodes, given the cost. The staked 32 ETH cannot be withdrawn, at least until the Shanghai Upgrade this March.

But while the overall validator nodes on Ethereum are increasing in their decentralization via the overall numbers, this has not been the case for Liquid Staking Derivative validators. The unshETH team witnessed this firsthand, having developed some of the first LSDs themselves.

To this end, the core aim of unshETH is Ethereum validator node decentralization for liquid derivatives. One means they use to achieve this is that validator rewards decrease with the total amount staked. This should serve to greatly disincentivize centralization. The second is incentive engineering, whereby capital is distributed across the LSD ecosystem to promote decentralization.

The Benefits Of Liquid Staking Derivatives

Liquid Staking provides multiple benefits for decentralized finance (DeFi) users. A derivative token is given to a user when the original token is staked. In this manner, the DeFi native gets staking rewards for the original token and can put the derivative token to a different use.

The use cases of liquid staking are innumerable. All traditional derivative products within the financial markets (such as futures and options) can be placed on a blockchain, with additional risk mitigation and transparency features. This would be done with a much smaller amount of red tape.

But all of these benefits can only come to fruition when the core network is sufficiently decentralized. unshETH provides a variety of mechanisms to restore decentralization for LSD nodes on Ethereum. It does this in an open source manner so that all other providers can assist with one of the most pressing issues of Web3 - node decentralization.

Why UnshETH Is A Game Changer For Liquid Staking Derivatives

unshETH allows liquid token holders to exchange their Liquid Staking Derivative assets (such as stETH or cbETH - built by Lido and Coinbase respectively) into one unified asset: unshETH. This is different from other providers that offer various derivatives for various tokens, resulting in a messy string of derivative pairs to keep track of. Moreover, they are focused on bringing back decentralization to the Ethereum LSD market.

Most, if not all, of the other LSD providers are not focused on assisting in decentralization of validators. They are interested in taking a profit through fees. unshETH is Ethereum-specific and takes a more streamlined approach with its unified token. This will restore integrity to the ecosystem.

unshETH aims to restore validator decentralization to the Liquid Staking Derivatives industry through incentive engineering, an idea that was strongly endorsed by Vitalik Buterin, the original Ethereum founder. This alone sets it apart from other providers. unshETH further allows liquid holders to consolidate a variety of derivatives into one functional and tradable unified token.

Users will be able to withdraw tokens after the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade in March. This is when the full version of unshETH will be unlocked. The unshETH team will then roll out Validator Dominance Options, a brand new DeFi derivative designed to add another layer of enforcement of decentralization, by redistributing staking yield away from monopolistic LSD providers via a novel mechanism.

About unshETH:

UnshETH is a decentralized initiative for disrupting the dominance of a single Liquid Staking Derivative (LSD) on the Ethereum network by incentivizing the diversification of validator ownership through the use of incentive engineering. The core mission of unshETH is to ensure decentralization of Ethereum validator nodes, restoring original design principles. The protocol increases LSD market accessibility and helps users unlock the power of liquid staking derivatives in a fully decentralized manner.

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Boost Your Individual Mining Rate

While the popular mode of increasing Pi is through mining via the mobile application, Pioneers can increase their holdings by boosting individual mining rates through diverse contributions.

Here are the different ways you can increase your Pi mining rate in addition to mining daily:

• Inviting your friends to mine Pi, increasing Referral Team Rewards.
• Maximizing Security Circle Rewards by completing your Security Circle.
• Reminding your existing referral team to mine so you can earn more.
• Increasing your lockup commitment after setting up your lockup configuration.
• Engaging with the Pi Browser applications in the directory to increase App usage rewards.
• Increasing Node rewards by running a Node on the Testnet.

Visit the Pi mobile application and read more about mining rates in the Whitepaper. BSC News will continue to publish daily tips and updates about the mobile mining network.

What is Pi Network:

Pi Network is a novel cryptocurrency and developer platform that allows mobile users to mine Pi coins without draining the device’s battery. Pi’s blockchain secures not only economic transactions via a mobile meritocracy system but also a full Web 3.0 experience where community developers can build decentralized applications (dApps) for millions of users.

Where to find Pi Network:

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Proof of Reserves Explained by CertiK

Proof of Reserves is a hot and important topic across crypto and Web3. More and more major exchanges and projects are implementing ways to transparently show their assets reserves. Users want to see Proofs of Reserves to gauge the security and solubility of projects.

Learn how to understand Proof of Reserves in just one minute from CertiK!

What is CertiK:

CertiK is a blockchain security firm that helps projects identify and eliminate security vulnerabilities in blockchains, smart contracts, and Web3 applications using its services, products, and cybersecurity techniques.

Where to find CertiK:

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