Bitcoin falls below $100,000
On December 19, the cryptocurrency market saw $1.01 billion in forced closures, of which $844 million was long liquidations, according to Coinglass. Most of the liquidated positions were in altcoins, which made up about 75% of the total. At the time of writing, BTC is trading at $97,400, down 6.2% over the past 24 hours. Among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap, excluding stablecoins, the declines range from 5.9% to 15.9%.
Avalanche update reduces fees by 25 times
The Avalanche team has unveiled a major upgrade, Avalanche9000, which reduces the cost of deploying Subnets by 99.9% and makes transactions on the C-Chain, designed for Ethereum-compatible smart contracts, 25 times more cost-effective. The testnet was launched on November 25, and a private token sale of $250 million was held in December with the participation of more than 40 leading investment firms, including Galaxy Digital, Dragonfly, and ParaFi Capital. This upgrade, known as Etna, included seven important proposals to improve the network.
One of the key innovations was the ACP-77 proposal, which introduced a new type of validator that does not require confirmation of transactions on the main network. This innovation significantly reduced operational costs and hardware requirements. Previously, validators had to lock at least 2,000 AVAX (~$100,000) in staking.
ETH rate falls
Ethereum suffered a significant drop at the end of the week, losing more than 10% of its value and falling below $3,300. The collapse has raised concerns among investors and added pressure to the cryptocurrency market as a whole, reinforcing the negative trends of recent days.
Bitcoin mining difficulty hits new record
After another recalculation of Bitcoin mining difficulty, the indicator increased by 4.43%, reaching a record 108.52 T. The average network hashrate over the past two weeks was 772.2 EH/s. As a result of these changes, the interval between blocks increased to more than 11 minutes, which may indicate a possible decrease in difficulty during the next adjustment.
Tether invests in YouTube competitor
Tether, the company that issued the most popular stablecoin USDT, announced a strategic investment of $775 million in the Canadian video hosting and cloud storage platform Rumble. The main goal of the investment is to support the development of decentralized media platforms that are owned by their users and communities. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2025. Chris Pavlovsky, CEO and chairman of the board of directors of Rumble, will retain a majority stake in the company. On the back of this news, the video hosting company's shares jumped sharply, increasing their value by more than 50%.
Ledger owners receive phishing emails
Attackers posing as Ledger support sent out a fake hack notification in an attempt to trick users into giving up their seed phrases. The email warns of a supposed data leak and redirects to a fake page to "check the device." The email address looks like a legitimate Ledger domain, but in reality, it is an email marketing platform.
On the fake page, a pop-up window asks for a private key to access wallets. Ledger representatives said such fraudulent attempts are part of the digital reality and stressed that they will never ask for seed phrases.
