BLOCKCHAIN BATTLES

BITCOIN BREAKS HIGHER IN APRIL. As the Biden administration made rounds trying to sell a huge new $2 Trillion boondoggle under the rhetorical rubric of an “Infrastructure Plan,” blockchain currencies ticked up.
Bitcoin, which has been mostly stuck in the $53,000 to $58,000 range over the last few weeks, again flirted with all-time highs over the weekend, reaching $61,500.
Ethereum and other blockchain currencies also headed higher.
According to crypto analyst Alex Krüger, BTC short positions have taken a beating in the crypto’s latest surge: “Bitcoin shorts just got steamrolled by a wave of leveraged longs.”
As of 08:40 UTC on 10 April, funding rates for BTC perpetual swaps are positive. On Binance, the funding rate is 0.1889 percent and on OKEx it is 0.2128 percent.
Here is how Bybt says we should interpret these numbers:
Reacting to the moves, the crypto futures trading info site Bybt.com noted that “Positive funding rates suggests speculators are bullish and long traders pay funding to short traders. Negative funding rates suggest speculators are bearish and short traders pay funding to long traders.”
NEW KIND OF NETWORK (NKN) BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY SEES INVESTMENT INFUSION. One of the reasons why blockchain currencies are scaring the bejesus out of governmental authorities goes beyond the decentralized currencies themselves.
Blockchain, a kind of digital, decentralized database highly resistant to manipulation, is proving to be fueling innovations in fresh ways almost every day.
One of the latest ripples in that growing pool is New Kind of Network (NKN). According to Cointelegraph.com, the project is a peer-to-peer network connectivity protocol and ecosystem that uses economic incentives to “motivate internet users to share network connections and utilize unused bandwidth.”
Incredibly, though NKN is barely known to the wider public, it has become the biggest blockchain network in the world, with over 67,000 full consensus nodes.
In early April, the company tweeted triumphantly about its technology:
When we say NKN is the indispensable networking foundation for web 3.0, we don’t mince words.
– 100% private p2p communication
– Over 52,000 unstoppable community nodes
– Killer apps like Surge, nConnect, nMobile
The rise of the NKN network hasn’t gone unnoticed by savvy investors. 
Over the past month, NKN has increased 1,400 percent from a low of $0.052 on 8 March to an all-time high of $0.779 on 6 April.
The crypto exchange Binance has helped fuel that rise. On 11 March, they announced that NKN holders could earn 20 percent APY by depositing holdings into a Binance savings account.
The NKN network has increased its user base by offering innovative incentives for utilizing its technology. It has offered products including the nMobile messenger, a private messaging service competing with WhatsApp, and nConnect, a remote access solution that is built to maintain security and privacy.