Fifteen billion dollars evaporated, gone up in smoke, lost in a fraction of a second. Investors big and small, ruined, potentially in the millions. It was 15 days ago: the crash of LUNA, one of these cryptocurrencies yet equipped with a protection mechanism that did not resist a transaction of two billion dollars.
LUNA – and its “stablecoin“, or stable virtual currency, Terra (“UST“ for friends) – was still worth 120 dollars a month ago. Today: 0.0001 dollars and a few cents. Yes, you have to count the zeros so as not to be mistaken: unfortunately zeros after the comma. Yet a virtual Terra was always supposed to be worth at least a real hard dollar…
Logically, we wonder about the possibility of a crash of another cryptocurrency, the best known: bitcoin. Is it totally impossible? No, but it’s very unlikely. Why ? It is true that the price of bitcoin is very volatile but it is one of the characteristics of all cryptocurrencies.
56,278 euros: it was on November 12, its all-time high. Today ? The price has been halved in six months: just under 29,000 euros at the time of writing these lines. However, it is estimated that 30,000 euros is the psychological bar below which investors start buying bitcoin again, and therefore to raise the price, theoretically.
But the tendency, at the moment, faced with the return of inflation, the rise in interest rates, and the war in Ukraine, while the stock markets have been plummeting for a month, is above all to take no risk. . Fear being a very bad advisor, it has become difficult to predict the sequence of events. Long gone are the days when a bitcoin was only worth, as in this article, a hundred euros.
The other risk, precisely, for bitcoin, would be the technical collapse of the blockchain, this technology which ensures the consistency of cryptocurrency. It is not centralized and therefore, the more it is disseminated throughout the world, the less it is vulnerable.
It would take, in fact, a ban – as was the case in the Maghreb, five years ago – everywhere in the world, and at the same time, to potentially put bitcoin down. Unlikely scenario since two countries have adopted bitcoin as their official currency, since the Central African Republic has followed the example of El Salvador.
And then there are those countries that have legalized cryptocurrencies like Ukraine, in the particular context of the war. Be careful though: each transaction requires considerable computer power. And so, better to avoid a bitcoin run in the same fraction of a second.
Well frens it happened to me. Got phished and had 4NFT stolen. @BoredApeYC @opensea @doodles @yugalabs please don’t buy or trade these while I work to resolve:@DarkWing84 looks like you bought my stolen ape- hit me up so we can fix it pic.twitter.com/VL1OVnd44m
— Seth Green (@SethGreen) May 17, 2022
On the NFT side, these digital assets, (from English non-fungible token, in French non-fungible token) the other danger, as with cryptocurrencies, is theft. Latest example, that of Seth Green, the American actor seen in the series buffy the vampire slayer. He announced it himself on his Twitter account: he was fooled by a fake site to which he linked his digital wallet.
This contained 4 of these NFTs, digital works of art, immediately sucked up by the hackers: the equivalent of 300,000 euros, stolen remotely, in an instant, without possible parry. And so, whether for cryptos or NFTs, only one piece of advice: be careful, when buying and using!