The DAO crowdsale has only just ended, but prominent members of the Ethereum community are already calling for a moratorium on proposals. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 21:
- The week started off with the international Bitcoin Pizza Day on May 22. On this day six years ago programmer Laszlo Hanyecz famously paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas to another Bitcoin Talk forum user. The transaction was worth about $25 at the time, and is widely recognized as the first real-world Bitcoin transaction. At today’s rate 10,000 BTC would be worth about $5.1 million. It is also interesting to note that this is more than double of last year’s rate.
- CEO Jihan Wu of Bitmain, the company known for running the second largest mining pool in the world (Antpool), has reportedly stated that they might delay the implementation of Segregated Witness in Bitcoin Core as they are “waiting for the July hard fork code promised in the February Hong Kong meeting. We and other mining pools will want to talk to Core again after the hard fork code is public before we take next steps”. Wu also noted the possibility of a “disaster” as a result of transaction fees and delays caused by Bitcoin’s limited block size.
- The DAO crowdsale officially ended on May 28, 2016, enabling the project to finally claim the title of the most successful crowdsale in history with an amount of $132 million worth of Ether raised. In total, The DAO holds 15 percent of all Ether currently in existence, which may now be used to fund other project proposals submitted to The DAO. The DAO tokens also immediately became tradable on various exchanges like Kraken and Poloniex. The price paid for the tokens doesn’t deviate much from their intrinsic value, which is equal to the proportional amount of Ether that can be retrieved from The DAO.
- Before The DAO crowdsale ended Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir, together with Dino Mark and Emin Gün Sirer, already called for a “temporary moratorium on proposals” for The DAO “to prevent losses due to poor mechanism design”. According to the group, a “moratorium would give The DAO time to make critical security upgrades”, hence they “encourage the community to adopt a moratorium until The DAO can be updated”. The message quickly received support from other prominent members of the Ethereum community, including Ethereum creator and The DAO curator Vitalik Buterin.
- After last week’s drop, Bitcoin experienced a strong rally this week boosted by a devaluation of the Chinese Yuan and a so-called short squeeze once the price of Bitcoin sailed past 3,000 CNY per BTC. The price of the most valuable digital currency gained more than 16 percent, taking the exchange rate to about $518 per coin. The price of Ether dropped by a similar percentage this week. One ETH can now be acquired for $11.70 per coin.
