Welcome to the daily crypto news :

• Diamonds Are (Finally) Forever on the Ethereum Blockchain ;

• This New Coding Language Could Help Unlock Bitcoin’s Smart Contract Potential ;

• Testnet Results Suggest Matic Could Power Ethereum to 7,200 TPS ;

• Chainlink (LINK) Becomes the ‘Tesla’ of Cryptocurrency — What’s Next? ;

• What It’s Really Like to Live on Bitcoin in the Middle East ;

Diamonds Are (Finally) Forever on the Ethereum Blockchain

A company founded by Jacques Voorhees, father of ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees, is offering NFTs representing diamonds on the OpenSea marketplace.

Non fungible tokens (NFT) representing diamonds have made their way to the OpenSea marketplace.

In the past, there have been quite a few attempts to tokenize diamonds and other precious stones and metals. But Icecap founder and CEO Jacques Voorhees says the problem with previous attempts was they treated diamonds as fungible commodities, which they are not.

He told Cointelegraph that when he first heard about NFTs from his son Erik Voorhees (CEO of ShapeShift), it all came together. “They're as different as a snowflake,” he said. “All the efforts to try to create fungibility with a non fungible item, have ended up failing. And even though they've thrown blockchain technology at it, they still have yet to meet with success.”

“I've seen this going back all the way to 1972 when the West Coast Commodities Exchange tried to create fungibility and diamond futures contracts. The thing lasted about three days and the market fell out because the contracts weren't actually similar.”

NFT representing a diamond. Source: Icecap.

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This New Coding Language Could Help Unlock Bitcoin’s Smart Contract Potential

Bitcoin Core contributor Jeremy Rubin has revealed his work on a new smart-contract language for Bitcoin, which he hopes will increase the “financial self-sovereignty” of users.

Rubin demoed the new language, Sapio, on Saturday at a RecklessVR meetup presentation in virtual reality, with many audience members joining the talk in VR headsets. He plans to release the programming language as a part of his new research organization, Judica.

Stateful smart contracts allow users to lock up money so funds can’t be spent until certain conditions are met or a series of interactive steps have been taken. These contracts are most commonly associated with the Ethereum blockchain, which is very flexible, making stateful smart contracts easy to write.

It’s lesser-known though that Bitcoin also supports several different types of more complex smart contracts, such as requiring more than just one person to sign off on a transaction before it can be spent. But compared to Ethereum, Bitcoin smart contracts are much more complicated and unwieldy to create, or they are stateless – that is, the conditions are met either all at once or not at all. Thus far, this has meant that there have been fewer options for developing smart contracts on Bitcoin.

Rubin hopes to further expand the smart contract use cases for Bitcoin to give users even more control over what they can do with their money.

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Testnet Results Suggest Matic Could Power Ethereum to 7,200 TPS

Matic Network may be closer to a scalability solution for the Ethereum blockchain after a test run showed it could handle 7,200 TPS.

Blockchain scalability solution Matic claims the network can supercharge the Ethereum ecosystem, after a two-month testnet run revealed it was able to process 7,2000 transactions per second (TPS).

In a July 14 blog post by Matic Network, the project reported it had stress tested its Counter Stake CS-2008 testnet, which could “reliably handle a performance level of 7,200 TPS.”

The blog stated that this performance could be extrapolated to the Matic mainnet, which employs the same architecture. According to Matic, “the network was truly decentralized,” with 122 active validators running validator+sentry nodes:

“The current performance capabilities of the network as it stands means that Matic can be instrumental in helping the Ethereum ecosystem to overcome its performance constraints and reach its full potential.”

Bringing scalability before ETH 2.0 launches

The “performance constraints” referred to are the scalability issues facing the current iteration of Ethereum, which can only process a handful of transactions per second. Ethereum 2.0 will fix the scaling issue, however Phase 0 looks like being delayed until early 2021 and it will take years to get up to full speed. There is an urgent need for a scaling solution in the interim.

The network has dealt with significant congestion in 2020 due to the popularity of Tether (USDT) and the growth of DeFi projects, resulting in higher transaction fees. Recently, Ethereum increased the maximum amount of gas allowed per block on the blockchain to allow the network to process more transactions.

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Chainlink (LINK) Becomes the ‘Tesla’ of Cryptocurrency — What’s Next?

Chainlink overshot the previous bullish target, hitting a new all-time high of $8.40, but how much higher can LINK's price really go?

As Bitcoin's (BTC) price continues to trade in a tightening range, the altcoin market has been pushing higher each week, and the most recent surge has come from Chainlink (LINK).

After breaking above the $5 level, LINK's price surged nearly 100% in a matter of days and ended by making a new all-time high at $8.40. Through this massive push, LINK surpassed EOS and Crypto.com (CRO) to claim a spot among the top ten cryptocurrencies listed on CoinMarketCap.

Investors are now curious to see if Tezos (XTZ) will continue to follow LINK, and there are expectations that other altcoins will also follow LINK’s upward trajectory.

Crypto market daily performance. Source: Coin360

What pushed LINK's price to $8.50?

LINK has proven to be one of the strongest movers in the cryptocurrency markets of recent years. This was proved once again as the cryptocurrency broke above the previous all-time high of $5 and surged with 85% toward $8.50.

LINK/USDT one-day chart. Source: TradingView

In a previous article, a target of $7.00–$7.25 was established using the Fibonacci extension tool. However, LINK overshot that target by a mile.

As the chart shows, the rally might be temporarily over, as sellers are stepping in, but this will only be confirmed if the daily candle closes as shown on the chart above. Currently, the candle shows a giant wick on the upside, indicating that there’s more sell than buy pressure.

Aside from the candle, such a giant move is due for a corrective move, so it is good to review the levels to watch for potential support.

LINK/USDT one-day chart. Source: TradingView

The 1-day chart is showing clear support levels. One of them is found between $6 and $6.50. The previous resistance at $6.57 can be confirmed as support, which would suit a renewed test of the $8.50 resistance level.

However, a clearer signal would be a corrective move toward the $5 level, as that used to be a significant resistance zone before the massive breakout occurred.

LINK/USDT four-hour chart. Source: TradingView

The four-hour chart shows a bright support/resistance flip of the $5.70 level, which caused continuation and the price to accelerate toward $8.50.

The most likely scenario is a test of the previous high for support; in this case, the $6.50–$6.60 level. A potential wick toward the $6.20 level is an area to watch for.

If this zone holds, a renewed test of the highs at $8.50 is likely to occur. If the $6.50 level is lost, further downward pressure is likely to occur on the markets with a potential retest of the $5 level.

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What It’s Really Like to Live on Bitcoin in the Middle East

Syrian developer Ghass Mo has been living off freelance bitcoin gigs from Kurdistan, Iraq, for nearly two years.

“I get paid in bitcoin for doing work on open-source projects related to the cryptocurrency industry,” Mo said. “The first programmer I met was Amir Taaki. … I learned a lot from him and he was supporting me.”

It’s impossible to say how many people are like Mo, inspired by a chance meeting with a bitcoiner to embark on an educational journey toward financial sovereignty. These cases are often isolated, at least in the developing world. Yet, they are increasingly familiar to people who work with digital nomads. They are showing bitcoin can work as intended, as a global currency without borders.

Mo left Syria in his early 20s because of the civil war and became an unbanked migrant worker to support his family. This may sound bleak but Mo has a lot in common with the other developers he now works with online.

He is a quiet man, a self-taught developer who rarely leaves his chosen Batcave except for shopping and rare outings. Mo has a perpetual five o’clock shadow and a minimalist home office setup, with just a few laptops, a monitor and always a cup of Arabic coffee. He’s never met most of the people he works with online, nor does he know of any local bitcoin meetups. He spends his evenings reading about Rust and studying at home with books like “Mastering Bitcoin.”

“The ongoing war in Syria and lack of stability affected me,” he said. “Sometimes I spend months trying to finish an online course, translating every single word [from English]. … The people [I know] interested in this field of study could be counted on one hand.”

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