General News
Crypto Markets Update
This has been a very exciting week for the Crypto markets, as it has brought us the much anticipated Ethereum Merge. The event took place on Thursday, and it seems to have been a total success from a technical standpoint. However, markets have not reacted to it with optimism, as Ethereum has ended the week losing quite a bit of value. Other than the usual “selling the news”, the recent words by SEC chair Gary Gensler regarding Proof of Stake blockchains could be part of the reason for this fall in prices. In his opinion, staking coins have attributes that make them resemble securities, which would imply that in order to trade legally they would need to be registered with the SEC. This seems to exclude Proof of Work blockchains, though Bitcoin remains the only blockchain recognized by US regulators as a commodity and not a security. The persisting lack of clarity on which coins are securities and which laws should be applied to which investments scares investors away from Crypto and is likely one of the main reasons why prices remain at the current levels.
Also affecting the markets could be a report published this week by the White House on the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining. Apparently they find necessary to take measures that limit the carbon footprint from miners, and go as far as to recommend a ban of Proof of Work blockchains if these measures should fail. Unfortunately many of the conclusions reached are based on long-debunked research that greatly exaggerates the amount and composition of energy used to power the miners. Although the language is vague and no decision has been made, this adds further uncertainty to an already fearful market. You can read the full report here:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/09-2022-Crypto-Assets-and-Climate-Report.pdf
StakeCube in Numbers
Once again we had a huge spike of trading volume on the exchange, mainly coming from the SAPP/BTC pair. The peak seems to have happened on Tuesday, when exchange volume reached more than $300,000. User count also had stronger than average growth this week, with almost 500 new registrations. The only indicator that exhibited bad performance was SCC price, which fell back to the 1,100 Satoshi level.
- User Count: 148,286 +0.25%
- Pool Value: 643.37 BTC -0.89%
- SCC Price: $0.235 -16.96%
- SCC Market Cap: $2,543,000 -16.92%
- Daily Exchange Volume $149,721 +468.01%
- Daily SCP Transactions: 15 -21.05%
Top 5 Gainers
This was a very unusual week for coins listed on StakeCube, as four of them had huge growth despite the flat/bearish market conditions. RVN found itself again in the top 5, as the prediction that many Ethereum miners would move to their blockchain has proved to be true.
- PIVX +103.2
- NEBL +76.4
- DIVI +69.5%
- RVN +39.1%
- SMART +9.1%
The Ethereum Merge
The famous Ethereum “Merge” event finally took place this week, transitioning Ethereum’s consensus algorithm from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. With this, Ethereum will no longer require mining to verify blocks, and the energy consumption needed to run the network has been reduced by 99.9%. This has triggered all kinds of reactions from the Crypto community. On the one hand, Proof of Work advocates have denounced the move as centralizing, stating that only an energy-based consensus algorithm can ensure true security and decentralization. On the other hand, many have pointed out that this will at least exclude Ethereum from the environmental FUD that has taken central stage of the debate lately. Whichever side of the discussion you belong to, at least we can all agree that this has been a massive technological undertaking that will have tremendous influence on the Crypto markets moving forward.
Over the coming weeks, we should be getting answers to many of the questions that the Merge poses. If Proof of Stake proves successful for Ethereum, Bitcoin could come under additional pressure to abandon their Proof of Work algorithm in favor of other less energy-intensive ones. Perhaps new Proof of Stake Bitcoin forks will pop up, or other Bitcoin alternatives might come into fashion. Some people are wondering what will happen to all of the Ethereum miners. For the moment they seem to have moved to other blockchains like ETC or RVN but those markets are significantly smaller. And there is also the question of whether Ethereum will now fall under the ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) label. Many investors have been unable to invest in Crypto due to the perception that it is bad for the environment. Ethereum’s transition to Proof of Stake could open the floodgates to a lot of institutional money that might have hesitated to invest on that basis.
Future for Ethereum on StakeCube
On StakeCube we have now finalized the implementation of all necessary changes after the Ethereum Merge. All of our services for Ethereum and ERC20 tokens are online again. With the Merge on mainnet, it becomes possible to offer Ethereum staking to our users. At the moment, we are looking at some options for this that we could implement already before StakeCube version 3. Then, after the release, we plan to add interest earning to Ethereum and stablecoins as one of our Earn strategy offerings. Once we have more details we will make them public on this newsletter.
Derek Impersonator
A scammer has been impersonating Derek on Telegram to try to steal funds from our community. Their username is @Z1239I. The real Derek’s username is @Z12391. StakeCube team members will never reach out to you in private messages to offer technical support of any kind. Support is only offered through our ticket system on our official support email: support@stakecube.zohodesk.com
Please read our security notice section at the end of this newsletter to remain safe against scammers.
MMT Added to Earn
This week the transition to the Earn system continued with the addition of Moments (MMT). MMT holders will now receive daily Earn rewards, proportionally to their balance.
Graphene Airdrop
To this date, we are still working on claiming the fifth and sixth Graphene airdrops. Unfortunately the process has been quite slow and there is no progress yet. We are in contact with the Phore team, who is examining the issue in order to find a solution. Hopefully we will have good news to give you in this respect soon. If you don’t know what this is all about, you can read the following newsletters where we covered this topic:
https://stakecube.info/this-week-on-stakecube-22nd-of-july-2022/
https://stakecube.info/this-week-on-stakecube-5th-of-august-2022/
EthereumPoW, ETHW
Following the Ethereum Merge, some Ethereum miners have supported a blockchain fork called EthereumPoW (ETHW). If the fork ends up being successful, we will be able to credit our users with 1 ETHW for every 1 ETH in their balance at the time of the merge. For this purpose, we took a snapshot of all balances at the following date and time: (2022-09-15 06:42:42 UTC). This snapshot includes both your available balance and any coins you might have had in open orders.
After the crediting process, we would notify you through this newsletter to let you know when we would enable deposits and withdrawals of ETHW. We estimate that the whole process would take less than 1 week. Nevertheless and as mentioned, this is all dependent on whether the fork is successful or not. To determine this, we will apply the same review process as we do for any other coin listing. Also, please be aware that our support for the distribution of ETHW does not guarantee the listing of ETHW on StakeCube.
Maria Coin Listing
This week we welcome to StakeCube our newest listed coin: Maria Coin (MARIA). Maria Coin is a cryptocurrency with an uncapped supply and both masternodes and staking. Maria Coin is a part of the Maria ecosystem centered around HostMaria, with more than 3,500 active users. Hostmaria offers cloud hosting, and from now on it will support payment in Maria Coin for any of their services.
In the future, the Maria team has plans to develop Maria Payments, a non-custodial payment gateway providing plugins for various ecommerce CMSs. Maria Payments will make accepting multiple cryptocurrencies for your business as easy as entering a wallet address, and they plan to offer support for most popular Proof of Stake coins.
They also have plans to release an exchange: Maria Coin Exchange (MariaCX). MariaCX will offer trading for a great variety of cryptocurrencies through a platform that emphasizes ease of use and low costs.
You can check out the following links to learn more about the project:
Bitcointalk:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5413122
Official Website:
White Paper:
https://github.com/hostmaria/mariacoin/blob/main/whitepaper.md#mariacx—maria-coin-exchange
Some Coin Specs:
- Premine: 8,888,888
- Block reward: 888
- Treasury allocation: 10% of the block reward
Trading of Maria Coin is already available on StakeCube Exchange:
https://stakecube.net/app/exchange/maria_btc
https://stakecube.net/app/exchange/maria_scc
https://stakecube.net/app/exchange/maria_usdt
KTS Delisting
KTS will be irrevocably delisted from StakeCube due to the lack of wallet and chain maintenance, intolerable and untruthful communications from their team, and the unwillingness to offer solutions to fix the existing issues.
Effective immediately, we will start the process by disabling the KTS Earn service and removing the KTS trading pairs from the exchange. To better manage your funds, we strongly suggest that you destroy any running masternodes of KTS you might have on NodeCube, as well as cancel all your exchange orders on the KTS trading pairs. Find them here:
https://stakecube.net/app/exchange/kts_btc
https://stakecube.net/app/exchange/kts_scc
Withdrawals of KTS will be closed on 15th of October 2022. If you are currently holding KTS on StakeCube, please withdraw it before the deadline. If you do not withdraw your KTS before this date, we will consider that you are giving up these funds, and you will not be able to claim them, or obtain any form of compensation.
Please also note that, in case withdrawal becomes impossible for reasons external to StakeCube, we will be forced to close the withdrawal service, and will not be able to cover any losses that users incur as a consequence. This can be the case if the blockchain stops generating blocks during that period, or if transfers of funds on-chain simply stop working. Therefore, please make your withdrawal as early as possible.
New NodeCube Coins
We have added two new coins to NodeCube this week: our newest listing Maria Coin (MARIA), and Birake (BIR). You can now deploy Hot and Cold nodes of these coins:
https://stakecube.net/app/nodecube/
Maria Coin:
- Collateral: 100,000 MARIA
- Collateral value: $300 to $30,000 (currently there’s a large spread on the exchange)
Birake:
- Collateral: 20,000 BIR
- Collateral value: $1,580
- ROI: 122%
- Monthly Earnings: $160
Wallets in Maintenance
This is the status of all wallets currently in maintenance:
- BLTG: Forking issues.
- DAPS: Wallet won’t sync.
- LUX: Wallet won’t sync.
Security Notice
Please read the following information regarding the security of your account and funds:
The StakeCube.net team will:
- Never contact you first
- Never ask you to send them or move coins to some other address
- Never ask you for remote access or to install any third party software
- Never ask you for your password or 2FA codes
- Never provide support using direct messages
If you observe any of these listed behaviors, someone is trying to steal money from you. This applies to all of our social media channels. Our team will post official messages in the appropriate channels, and we only offer support through our ticket system on our support email:
support@stakecube.zohodesk.com
Please, also take into account the following measures to keep your account secure:
- Enable 2FA in the account settings
- Enable IP verification in the account settings
- Use a strong password
- Change the password regularly
- Never share your password with others
- Never allow remote access to your devices
- If you require assistance, use only the official channels
- Download software only from verified sources
SCP Wallet is now signed with JSKitty’s public PGP key. This allows users to verify that the wallet has been cryptographically signed and approved by him. Even if our GitHub is compromised, the downloads are still safe as long as the PGP verification confirms that the files have not been tampered with. If you download SCP, please verify the binary against our developer’s public key:
Social Media and Other Important Links:
- Discord: https://discord.gg/RTJKjdwEsY
- Telegram: https://t.me/Stakecube
- Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/964396784312480
- Facebook Fan Page: https://www.facebook.com/StakeCubeEcosystem
- Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/stakecube
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stakecube/
- SCPScan: https://scpscan.net/
- SCC Explorer: http://79.143.186.234/