Harmony will have a hackathon including 4 challenges from 3 different categories starting from mid-August to the end of September.

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This hackathon will start next month according to Harmony blockchain and you can register for this event. Participants will reap rewards of more than $1M in seed funding.

Harmony made this announcement on their official Twitter account on Thursday and said that the hackathon’s focus is to attract people who are engaged in traditional finance which is done to bridge their fields and decentralized finance. There would be 4 issues and challenges in each category of cross-chain and trustless bridges, social wallets, and keyless security, and cross-border with fintech integration. 

Harmony said:

> **“In blockchain, finance is where we are seeing product market fit, but most of DeFi was created by people who didn't come from traditional finance. We want to bring more TradFi in to contribute to DeFi. We know they have much to teach us and we can help them understand and harness the power of DeFi and teach them a lot as well.”**

In this hackathon, certain judges or speakers are there such as Earn.com co-founder Lily Liu, SushiSwap core developer Omakase, DeFi Alliance lead Imran Khan and others. Besides that CoinGecko, SushiSwap, Messari, Unstoppable Domains, DappRadar, DoraHacks, The Defiant (news platform), and Hummingbot are the sponsors.

Harmony's mainnet started working in 2019 and it is comprised of a sharding protocol with a trustless Ethereum bridge that breaks the chain into parts that process transactions as well as storing data in parallel. After its launch, it started joining forces with some partners and has a number of integrations. For instance, Terra which is a stablecoin platform migrated its token to Harmony to enjoy the ecosystem of Harmony.

The hackathon aims at reaching 10 billion people and the teams in this event can be up to 5 people maximum. On August 15, the registration for this six-week event will be closed and the event is limited to teams of 5 people.


$1M hackathon for Harmony to merge traditional finance and DeFi

Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari believes that DOGE is a Ponzi scheme.

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It might be interesting to know that earlier, the Minneapolis Fed President had called cryptocurrencies “giant garbage dumpster” before and last week he took another step against the crypto space and lambasted DOGE calling it a Ponzi scheme.

The chief legal officer and corporate secretary of Coinbase, Paul Grewal conducted a poll on Linkedin in which he asked his contacts about the pronunciation of the word Doge.  Here is the discussion:
 
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Source: LinkedIn

One of the participants was Neel Kashkar who said “the right pronunciation is pon-zi”, which triggered a hot discussion there. It must be said that he had also criticized Bitcoin earlier in February 2020 when he said that BTC does not resemble the features of a stable currency and admired SEC for restricting ICOs. 

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) which is in charge of setting United States monetary policy is different this year since Kashkari is not a member of it,  he won’t be able to vote for the coming year’s monetary policies. Therefore, the Minneapolis branch of the Fed will replace him as an FOMC member and this suggests that the interest rates will continue rising in 2023 while Kashkari was against adding to the interest rates before 2023.

This change of futuristic perspectives has played a major role in the drastic increase of USD while most of the digital assets saw a decline in their values. 

Some coins were supported by celebrities and draw the attention to themselves like DOGE which was backed by Tesla CEO Tweets and was pushed up in price through FOMO although it fell sharply later.


Neel Kashkari calls DOGE a Ponzi scheme

Upon the order, the crypto-miners in the city of Ya'an in China have shut down their miners temporarily say the reports.

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China is imposing even more severe restrictions on Crypto mining and this time it’s Ya’an City’s turn.  A city in Sichuan whose authorities have stopped local miners from mining Bitcoin for the time being.

The mining operations according to Chinese financial publication Sina Finance have been suspended apparently for investigations and whether the miners can resume these mining activities and its probable time remain a mystery says Chinese news agency PA News.

This decision has direct impact on China’s biggest hydropower producer, Sichuan where huge Bitcoin mining farming are operating says Colin Wu, a Chinese crypto blogger. He said that power generation companies received orders from Sichuan to cut the power supply to any Cryptocurrency miner. 26 big mining projects are the target of this document that need to be investigated and shut down: 

> **“There are many small and medium-sized hydropower stations in Yunnan, Sichuan, and it may be difficult for them to receive government supervision. However, large-scale projects will be shut down in the short term.”**

Ya’an City is not the only city to have such crackdowns and restrictions. Yunnan province is another huge hydropower-based mining hub which experienced ban after Sichuan’s. This did not end here. Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Qingha had to stop mining as well upon having an order to do so.

As you might have heard, China has been banning one province after another and shutting down miners so some miners choose Sichuan and relocated here where they could use lots of renewable energy, the hydropower.

According to a spokesperson for the BTC.Top *“Currently, we believe 80–90% of China's crypto miners are using hydropower.”*



Crypto-miners shut down for investigation as requested in Ya'an in Sichuan

LatamConnect is GoldConnect’s new platform which enables GoldConnect to process crypto assets’ transactions from now on. 

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Another milestone for Latin America in accepting cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin) with an open arm was made by the Latin American telecommunications wholesaler GoldConnect. GoldConnect customers can use Bitpay payment processors to pay with cryptocurrencies.

LatamConnect which is a platform that directly connects with Bitpay can be used for crypto payments and these payments are usually cleared in fiat currency.

Accepting crypto for payments is indicative of increasing demand for such services according to GoldConnect. Currently, GoldConnect is providing service for 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries. Jeremy Villalobos, GoldConnect CEO explained their decision in this regard:

> > **"As a disruptive telecom provider in the LATAM region, we must continuously embrace the latest technologies and business methods to improve the interaction and experience of our clients,"**

 And along the same line, vice president of BitPay Shaun Worley added:

> **"GoldConnect realizes the potential for crypto to transform the wholesale telecommunication industry, making payments faster, more secure, and less expensive on a global scale.”**

It seems that Latin American countries are very interested in the crypto space. The first country in this part of the world to embrace cryptocurrencies was El Salvador. They adopted Bitcoin as their legal tender. Following this trend, Panama and Brazil have shown interest in accepting Bitcoin as well.


Crypto payments via Bitpay in GoldConnect

Using polkadot seems to be possible but it may take a while as delays may occur. 

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A roadmap for Polkadot project was released on Monday for parachains and slot auction’s launch which suggests that the protocol is going to be fully launched.

Polkadot roadmap is comprised of three stages. Rocco testnet environment which is the current phase is where communication mechanisms between various Polkadot parachains can be tested. Cross-Chain Message Passing-lite, or XCMP-lite is the mechanism being utilized to transfer generalized messages and tokens using the main coordinator of the network which is Polkadot’s relay chain.

Although Rococo testnet came in Aug, 2020, its component features remains incomplete. Once completed, the Polkadot codebase will enjoy feature completion. But this is not enough for implementing parachains. Next, a vote needs to be held to empower parachains on Polkadot’s “canary network”, Kusama. Kusama serves as a middle ground between a testnet and a mainnet. Maintaining its economic value, Kusama possesses a better experimentation tolerance.

An on-chain vote is triggered on Polkadot to inaugurate parachain auctions as soon as the parachains on Kusama are stable. However. No clear timeline are suggested for the milestones.

Parachains rollout, however, was supposed to take place in the first season of 2021, and more than half of it is already there. 

There has been stability issues with Rococo testnet like the stucking of  the parachains on block 1036. Despite such issues, Melikhov who is the CEO of Polkadot parachain candidate Equilibrium is positive about meeting their deadlines regarding the Polkadot parachain launch.


Polkadot full-launch roadmap triggers an upward trend towards a new all-time high

Using polkadot seems to be possible but it may take a while as delays may occur.