Alts rock out

The altcoin market is soaring.

With Bitcoin snugly in a mid-$30,000 range, the largest upward swings are being seen across a spectrum of alternatives.

Looking at the largest alts, there are some 24-hour stalwarts: Cardano (ADA), up 17% as of 9 a.m. (EST); and Chainlink (LINK), up 8%.

One lumberjack-burly altcoin over the last 24 hours is Ox (ZRX). At one point earlier this morning ZRX was up 77%.

Assets connected with "Decentralized Finance," or "DeFi." also tend to fall under the even more enormous "altcoin" banner. Under any banner, many have kicked off the weekend in flight.

Maker (MKR), Terra (LUNA), Alpha Finance (ALPHA) and Ocean Protocol (OCEAN) all shot up by more than 30% (CryptoDaily).

In crypto, Bitcoin's dominance is a given. “Bitcoin Dominance” is something else altogether.

It’s the largest digital asset's share of the total crypto market. And as BTC metrics go, this one gets closely tracked and widely referenced.

The figure reached 73.5% at the end of December. These days, with alts making gains, BTC is still dominant but it is less so, as that apportionment figure today stands at a relatively more submissive 61.6%.

BTC's slow, sideways sachet hasn't bored BTC’s most dominating forces.

By that we mean the largest BTC address, or whales.

BTC whales are buying (Decrypt).

Bitcoin's carbon footprint sometimes gets compared to "all of New Zealand" in terms of energy consumption as translated into annually emitted megatons of CO2. New Zealand takes sustainability as seriously as any nation on the planet, so there could be worse comparisons. It’s not as if Bitcoin is being likened to the aluminum industry.

By unclean measures, aluminum is in a category by itself. A lot of power (much of it coal-fired) is involved in making it.

Aluminum production, start to finish, generates around 2 percent of the world’s human-caused emissions.

The Aluminum Stewardship Initiative, a group of producers and manufacturers, has been working to create industry-wide certification of transparent, sustainability-conscious supply chains.  

Rio Tinto just announced a blockchain-powered solution dubbed START.

The London-based aluminum maker says START will make it easy for end-users of its metals to verify whether the purchased products were sourced under sustainable and responsible conditions (Ledger Insights).

YouTube sensation Logan Paul has found a new means of self-promotion: non-fungible tokens. NFTs are crypto collectibles verified on a blockchain. Decentralized e-commerce platform Bondly announced it will create a limited edition of 44 NFTs featuring a "holographic" image of Paul in his boxing gear mocked up as a Pokemon card. The NFTs will be distributed to auction winners when a sealed box of Paul cards is opened up while collectors watch.

Easy Dapp Access: If you wind up painting, recording or writing something awesome during the pandemic lockdown, and you want to tokenize it, you'll want to access decentralized apps (Dapps) like Hashmasks and CryptoPunks.mobile and many, so many, more. But how to find them? Users can now access Dapps through various wallets and applications. My Ether Wallet has added a new dapp browser to its mobile app, culling the best-loved dapps based on user activity rankings and other metrics supplied by DappRadar.