THE ABANDONMENT OF SOLANA NETWORK
This week's market volatility is being caused by a few pieces of information, the first of which is the recovery of the bitcoin hash rate following a brief decline of 38%. After being blasted by a polar blast over Christmas, the US miner had to shut down. Many miners did voluntarily cease operations in an effort to maintain grid stability at the time of heightened demand. On a typical day, the Bitcoin hash rate is between 225 and 230 exahashes per second, but on Christmas Day, it was closer to 170. A day later, the hash rate was back to 241 exahashes per second, demonstrating once more that miners can be adaptable and contribute to grid balancing.
Argo, a bitcoin miner, almost escapes bankruptcy thanks to a $100 million lifeline from Galaxy Digital. You should be aware that many Bitcoin miners are in grave danger. The layer 2 solution zkEVM's second testnet has been launched by Polygon, completing the process before the mainnet. Recursion, a new upgrade that is significant and intended to improve the scalability of the Ethereum blockchain, will be tested on this testnet. The Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution will be available in the future, even if there is no specific date set for the zkEVM mainnet launch. Throughout this bad market, Polygon has been doing excellent work; the team just continues on creating and delivering partnerships. So, the Polygon network will undoubtedly have a good year in the coming year; all you have to do is keep a watch on it.
DeGods and y00ts, two prominent Solana projects, are switching to the Ethereum and Polygon networks, respectively. The teams believe that switching to different networks will enable them to attract more customers away from the faltering Solana network. y00ts, which has a floor of 140 Sol, intends to switch to Polygon, an Ethereum side chain that will enable less expensive and quicker transactions. With the price of Sol's assets falling from $35 to $9 since the FTX collapse, Solana has been hit extremely hard. Who knows how much further it will fall? Moving to an ordered network with a leading NFT collect is not beneficial for the Solana network, and others may follow suit.
Andre Cronje has returned to the Fantom network and is prepared to raise Fantom to a new level in 2019. Fantom will concentrate on developing its dApp ecosystem because they want the app developers to be able to create profitable ventures that set them apart from other layer 2 solutions. The network intends to create the Fantam Virtual Machine in a manner similar to that of the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Andre has also said that he will join the Fantom foundation's board of directors. Even if Andre's return to Fantom is intriguing, we doubt it will be enough to boost Fantom.
Despite the weak market, stablecoin transactions this year totaled $7 trillion. Stablecoin transactions, according to some predictions, will overtake Visa and may even surprise all other significant credit transactions. The real-world use of stablecoins as a form of payment for products and services, in my opinion, will be the true test of their adoption. We must be able to visualize the actual use case and have faith that it will destroy the payment sector. We are anticipating Russia to legalize cryptocurrency for foreign trade; the news has been circulating for some time.