The bull market for BTC began back in March, according to Arthur Hayes, former CEO and co-founder of Bitmex. According to Hayes, the market has yet to respond, but anticipates it will in six to twelve months. The beginning of this bull run corresponds with the Federal Reserve’s $25 billion program aimed at stabilizing the U.S. banking system.
The series of events unfolded from a chain reaction started by the liquidation of Silvergate Bank, followed by Signature Bank’s forced closure by New York’s regulators. The sticky wicket led the Federal Reserve to establish the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP) in an attempt to avert the chain of possible financial collapses. Hayes sees this move as a blatant acknowledgment of their causal role in structuring the problematic banking system and sees the solution as printing more money.
In the eyes of Hayes, the actions of the Federal Reserve have essentially abandoned the facade of concern around the value of the dollar and other fiat currencies. This sent traders into considering the safe haven of fixed-supply assets like BTC. Moreover, Hayes expects that regardless of the Federal Reserve action – whether they raise interest rates to tighten the economy or print more money – BTC would perform well.
Meanwhile, the Ethereum network is grappling with the centralization of nodes, as revealed by co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Majority of the currently active Ethereum nodes operate via centralized web providers, of which Amazon Web Services is a leading platform. This setup leaves the Ethereum blockchain exposed to centralized points of failure.
Buterin recognizes the need to make running nodes cheaper and easier, thereby solving the centralization issue. Yet he hints that it may take a decade or two to address these technical issues fully. He also identifies other significant steps towards decentralization, including making documentation easier, lowering barriers to distributed staking, improving the security and convenience of staking Ether.
The pressing and time-sensitive concern, however, is achieving higher levels of scalability. Scaling protocols currently dominate the Ethereum landscape mainly through the use of zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups. They are believed to be crucial in attaining scalability as they improve throughput by shifting computation and state storage off-chain.
Source: Cointelegraph
