blockchain

Japan Government’s Crypto Czar Touts Nation’s Web3 Capabilities

Japan was an early adopter of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies before exchange breaches prompted a ban. But as the crypto market advances, the government has become a crypto supporter.

The race to promote and adopt the crypto market and its benefits for the growth of financial systems has led many countries to introduce new updates and crypto solutions. 

Japan is among these countries striving to step up and promote better crypto accessibility solutions for its community. 

Also Read: SBI, a Japanese e-Commerce site, adopts BTC and XRP

Masaaki Taira, a politician in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the chairman of its Web 3.0 project team, said on Thursday at the NexTech Week trade exhibition in Tokyo that Japan has seen the future — and its blockchain.

Taira, a vocal proponent of Bitcoin, used his presentation on national strategies for emerging technologies to showcase Japan’s potential in Web3, or the concept of a new Internet based on decentralized blockchain technology, the metaverse, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

“While other jurisdictions attempt to regulate a space that is not yet fully understood, Japan already has a relatively good grasp of what it is that we’re trying to promote,” Taira said, adding that global technology businesses are taking notice.

Japan’s government and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida have embraced developing technologies, particularly Web3, as foundations of the country’s economic future. This comes when U.S. cryptocurrency exchanges are sued, causing regulatory chaos and casting questions on the country’s Web3 future.

In comparison, a white paper from the Japanese government that came out in April explained how the country could get everyone to use Web3, which includes crypto. Since the paper came out a few weeks ago, it has become a “major talking point” in Japan and around the world, said Taira.

Crypto Adoptions in Japan: 

Before the government’s shift toward crypto and blockchain started picking up speed at the start of this year, it seemed like the digital asset space in Japan was stuck.

Even though Japan was one of the first countries to use cryptocurrency, the 2014 failure of the Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange Mt Gox and the 2018 hack of the Coincheck exchange, in which hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency was stolen, have hurt trust in the industry.

The Financial Services Agency then cracked down on trade platforms, making them follow stricter rules. This caused some exchanges, including Binance, to leave the country in 2018.

But when the FTX exchange failed in November of last year, customers worldwide lost a lot of savings and investments. Japan’s FTX clients were protected, and their money is in the process of returning to them. 

Also Read: Japan Sets New Regulations for Virtual Assets Margin Trading

According to Taira, Japan’s cryptocurrency exchanges are the safest globally. He further mentions that it’s hard to believe that company and customer assets weren’t kept separate during the FTX situation.”

In his discussion about Japan’s crypto market and its potential, he also talked about Japan’s progress concerning the crypto market so far. 

Taira also shares that Japan’s experiments with stablecoins are paying off. The government advisory group he heads is looking into ways to link public and private blockchains to make them more scalable.

Aside from that, he said that Japan’s soft power strengths in anime, manga, and games work well in the Web3 space, especially in NFTs and metaverse development, which have a lot of promise but haven’t been fully explored yet. 

Also Read: Japanese E Commerce Giant Rakuten Ventures Into Cryptocurrency

How is Japan Planning to Grow Its Web 3.0 Industry? 

The Web3 project team of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party just submitted a whitepaper with suggestions for improving the country’s crypto industry. This is part of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s “Cool Japan” project to promote technology.

Other governments are trying to put regulations in place to protect customers. Still, Japan is trying to make a friendlier environment for crypto because companies started leaving because of the high taxes.

The white paper says that Japan should show leadership at this year’s Group of Seven meetings, where crypto will be discussed. 

It also says that the country should look ahead to the future potential of Web3 and clarify its leading stance on technology-neutral and responsible innovation.

It also suggests making more changes to tax rules, pointing out that token producers have already been given a big break. 

One of the ideas is to not tax companies that hold tokens made by other companies that won’t be sold in the near future. It says buyers should be able to self-assess so that losses can be carried over for three years. It also says that crypto assets should only be taxed when traded for fiat currency.

Also Read: Google Announces Major Generative AI Power Updates On Its Search Engine

Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital Partners with Abu Dhabi-based Zero Two for the Largest Middle-East Bitcoin Mining Operation

Marathon Digital (MARA), a Bitcoin miner, has partnered with Zero Two to build the Middle East’s first large-scale immersion dedicated to Bitcoin mining operations.

Web3 and crypto industry collaborations with financial and other industries are not new. However, we rarely encounter large-scale collaborations that introduce revolutionary solutions and operations in the Web 3.0 metaverse. Speaking of one, the partnership between a US-based miner and the digital asset infrastructure development company in Abu Dhabi called Zero Two is worth noting. 

The Middle Eastern alliance comes as the White House campaigns for a new levy requiring crypto miners in the country to pay 30% of their energy bills.

According to a press release, the new project, dubbed Abu Dhabi Global Markets JV Entity (ADGM), will begin by developing two mining sites with a combined capacity of 250 megawatts (MW) of mining power. 

The statement stated that the sites would be powered by excess energy in Abu Dhabi, increasing the base load and sustainability of that Middle Eastern capital’s power infrastructure. Each site’s mining equipment and infrastructure have already been ordered, and the building is ongoing.

Marathon Digital Holding took to its Twitter to announce this partnership on May 10th. 

Also Read: Crypto Exchange Bybit’s Global Headquarters to Operate in Dubai

Providing Miners with a Better Environment in Abu Dhabi: 

Zero Two will own 80% of ADGM, and Marathon will own 20%. Their initial investment of about $406 million will be split this way.

Most digital asset miners use air cooling to keep their mining computers cool. But in places with high heat and humidity, miners with razor-thin profit margins can save a lot of money by cooling their tools with liquid immersion instead of air cooling.

In the press release, it was said that Abu Dhabi’s desert environment makes air-cooled digital asset mining impossible and that a pilot program for immersion cooling started by Marathon and Zero Two showed a big drop in maintenance ASIC miners need to do to produce hash rate.

The Pilot Program: 

Marathon and Zero Two previously conducted a pilot program to see if building an air-cooled digital asset mining business in Abu Dhabi would be feasible, where the desert climate makes air-cooled mining difficult.

Hence, Marathon and Zero Two built a custom immersion cooling solution for ASIC miners and proprietary software to optimize their performance to overcome these environmental challenges.

Using Marathon’s and Zero Two’s technological advances, it is now possible to operate digital immersion asset mining sites in Abu Dhabi, according to the preliminary results of the pilot project, which show a significant reduction in the maintenance required for the ASIC miners to produce hash rates. 

Now, the mining equipment and infrastructure needed to build each site have already been ordered, and work is already underway at both sites. With the high-end work in progress, miners believe that these sites’ digital asset mining operations will be among the most technologically advanced and energy-efficient in the world once they are operational. 

According to the current construction schedule, both sites will have a total hash rate of about 7 EH/s and will be operational by the end of 2023.

Read More About Crypto Licensing in Dubai: Easy Way To Obtain Crypto License in Dubai: Gofaizen & Sherle Launches A New Service

Bitget Introduces the BRC20 Zone and Lists Ordinals (ORDI)

May 10 2023 Victoria, Seychelles – Bitget, the top derivatives and copy trading platform, has announced the listing of the ORDI token in the newly launched BRC-20 zone and has also revealed plans to bring other promising BRC-20 tokens to its platform. In addition to ORDI, Bitget has also announced a new round of Launchpad featuring another BRC-20 token, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals 1 (BIP1), to further support the continuous improvement of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

BRC-20 is a new fungible token standard designed for the Bitcoin blockchain that has become one of the latest trends in the industry. This new token standard is set to revolutionize the crypto space. Built on the Ordinals protocol, BRC-20 is a coin on Bitcoin that allows users to write information to each Satoshi, such as text, pictures, audio, and video, among others. The protocol aims to inscribe information mainly in the form of NFTs and tokens on the BTC chain, despite the size limit of the Bitcoin block. The introduction of BRC-20 and Ordinals will enable users to create and manage more efficient and secure blockchain-based assets.

“Bitget is excited to list ORDI and be among the first exchanges to offer BRC-20 tokens to our users,” said Gracy Chen, Managing Director of Bitget. “We believe in the potential of this token standard to enhance the functionality of the Bitcoin blockchain and provide more truly decentralized opportunities for the crypto community. Bitget is committed to supporting the BRC-20 ecosystem in the long run and is thrilled to be a part of this innovative development.”

Since its launch just two months ago, the total market cap of BRC-20 tokens has already surpassed 1 billion on May 9, proving the demand for this innovative standard. The deposit service of ORDI started at 12 PM UTC on May 10th, 2023, and trading commenced on the same day. Bitget users can now trade and transact with BRC-20 tokens, with futures trading and other features coming soon. Bitget aims to offer a seamless trading experience for its users and continues to innovate and add new features to its platform. The launch of the BRC-20 token is just one of many exciting developments to come from Bitget.

As a leading derivatives crypto platform, Bitget is expanding its product offerings beyond derivatives. Bitget is also rapidly listing promising coins in its revamped Innovation Zones on Bitget Spot, providing users with access to the most trending sectors, such as MEME, Liquid Staking Derivatives, BRC-20, NFT and so on. According to Coinmarketcap, Bitget Spot now supports over 500 coins with approximately 551 trading pairs.

About Bitget

Bitget, established in 2018, is the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange with futures trading and copy trading services as its key features. Serving over 8 million users in more than 100 countries and regions, the exchange is committed to helping users trade smarter by providing a secure, one-stop trading solution. It also inspires individuals to embrace crypto through collaborations with credible partners, including legendary Argentinian footballer Lionel Messi, the leading Italian football team Juventus, and official eSports events organizer PGL. According to Coingecko, Bitget is currently a top 5 futures trading platform and a top 10 spot trading platform.

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Weekly Crypto News for the Last Week of April 2023

Artificial intelligence has enormous promise as it becomes more integrated into our lives, from cell phones to ChatGPT. Considering this, the AI world is witnessing constant and frequent advancements.

The latest update for the last week of April 2023 contains significant breakthroughs and announcements in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Let’s go ahead and explore some prominent AI news updates. 

AI News Key Highlights:

  • Stanford has issued their yearly AI Index Report for 2023, which highlights, among other things, how much AI research has moved from academia to industry and quantifies the field’s growth over the last decade.
  • With its revolutionary v5 picture generation model, Midjourney (an independent research lab) has taken the world by storm. Adobe is developing competitive solutions for its creative suite, but it appears they are failing to achieve comparable quality since they are more cautious with training data to avoid accidentally using copyrighted data. Runway, the company behind Stable Diffusion, has been promoting its new video generation tool Gen 2, for quite some time.

Also Read: Solana Labs AI Can Now Fetch Blockchain Data With its ChatGPT Plugin

  • GitHub has released Copilot X, a major update to Copilot that includes chat and voice interface capabilities, support for pull request completions, question answering on documentation, and the adoption of GPT-4.
  • During their most recent developer conference, Nvidia announced their efforts to become the leading foundry for large foundation models. Clients will be able to define the model they wish to train, and Nvidia will train the model for them using their infrastructure and expertise. Meanwhile, Google has detailed its latest TPU v4 accelerators in a new paper.
  • Researchers from Zhejiang University and Microsoft Research Asia have published a paper that investigates using large language models (LLMs) as a controller to govern current AI models available in communities such as Hugging Face.
  • With the release of the Amazon Bedrock and Titan foundation models, AWS announced its entry into the generative AI competition. Amazon intends to democratize access to generative AI technology by serving clients from various sectors and use cases. This game-changing invention establishes Amazon as a serious rival in the fast-expanding AI business.
  • Visual ChatGPT, a chatbot system that can generate and alter visuals in response to human verbal prompts, was recently open-sourced by Microsoft Research. The system blends OpenAI’s ChatGPT with 22 alternative visual foundation models (VFM) to facilitate multi-modal interactions.
  • StableLM is a new open-source language model from Stability AI. The model’s Alpha version is available in 3 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, with 15 billion to 65 billion parameter models to come. Under the CC BY-SA-4.0 license rules, developers are permitted to inspect, use, and alter our StableLM base models for commercial or research purposes.

Also Read: Crypto and AI: Make the Most of Crypto & Telegram with the AiravatBot Limited Beta

For More crypto and AI news updates, follow Cryptoiscoming.com

Bitcoin Ordinals Passes its 1 Million Milestone in Less Than 3 Months of Its Launch

The number of inscriptions has surpassed one million less than three months after the Ordinals initiative was begun. As of press time, there are 1,058,189 Ordinals NFTs that have earned miners over 170 BTC in fees, or $4.8 million.

Bitcoin Ordinals, which debuted on January 21, is a technology that allows digital assets to be stored on satoshis (sats), the smallest Bitcoin denomination. It quickly became a fad after its debut in the NFT market, with over 50,000 Ordinal inscriptions received as of February 10.

Read Here: Impact of Ordinals on the Bitcoin Ecosystem

The important milestone of Bitcoin Ordinals was reached on April 8 at 17:44:24 UTC with an inscription consisting of the single, now immortal, word ‘Piggy.’ The ‘Piggies World‘ project, comprising hand-drawn graphics attached to the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol, has an enviable asset.

Now with the rapid growth of Bitcoin Ordinals in the NFT world, many more exciting projects are heading to this protocol for their collection’s launch, including Bit Apes by BAYC Members. 

Key Highlights of Bitcoin Ordinals Rapid Success: 

  • Caser Rodarmor, a software developer, created the protocol last year. It is based on Bitcoin’s Segwit and Taproot updates, which improved the blockchain’s smart contract functionality.
  • Ordinal inscriptions are analogous to Bitcoin’s non-fungible tokens (NFTs). They enable users to mint images, videos, text, and even video games on satellites, taking advantage of the network’s immutability.
  • According to Dune Analytics data, over 170 Bitcoin (US$4.8 million) in fees were paid to inscribe the assets on the Bitcoin blockchain.
  • The millionth inscription occurs as interest in Bitcoin Ordinals grows. According to Dune Analytics statistics, there were 76,374 inscriptions on the network on Tuesday, April 4, a daily high.
  • CoinMarketCap announced that Bitcoin increased 1.23% from 24 hours to 9:30 p.m. Hong Kong time, to trade at US$28,263.
  • With its rising trend, more platforms and corporations are also stepping into the Bitcoin Ordinals world. Last week, Bugatti also announced cooperation with Asprey Studio, a branch of luxury retailer Asprey, to produce a Bitcoin-native NFT collection.

Now, despite its popularity, Ordinals has caused controversy in both Bitcoin and NFT circles, with some saying it undermines the broader message of the world’s largest blockchain network. But, with over a million inscriptions, the Ordinals freight train shows no signs of stopping down – picking Bitcoin back up on its strong grounds in the crypto market. 

Related Article: NFTs Launching on Bitcoin Unsurprisingly Sparks Controversy

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