A leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk (weekly crypto updates)

It is that time of the week, and I am back with our crypto weekly updates, mostly the ones that are somehow related to my portfolio. But not only them. What happened this week? End of the cycle or the end of the crypto world? Is FTX bankrupt and all the assets are lost somewhere into the void (at least $1B is missing, some said)? Let's explore, step by step, what the heck happened in the past week:

• Bitcoin: Bitcoin and Ethereum both decreased by over -20% on November 8 and 9, but retraced their previous levels on November 10. Bitcoin's price right now is $16989.

• Ethereum: Ethereum officially turned deflationary 55 days after the Merge, as the total supply of ETH declined by 400 and it is currently decreasing by a 0.001% rate annually. Without the Merge, ETH would have increased to more than 650.000 ETH by now (3.6% annually). Ethereum's price right now is $1262.

• Altcoins: Google Cloud becomes Solana Network Validator, running a node, and it will add a feature called Blokchcain Node Engine Service at the end of the month. A panic selling could be noticed on Solana (SOL) after their 30-day implied volatility surged to 190% compared with Bitcoin's 90%. The token lost 12% over one day, and 55% over the past few days, some believe that Alameda liquidated their SOL holdings. 31M SOL were unstacked earlier this week and Solana Foundation's plan to unstake some 28M was postponed, to help the SOL price recover.

• FTX: Yeah, this one got its own category this week. Started mildly, with Binance announcing that it decided to sell all of its remaining FTT tokens, after 'recent revelations came to light' to quote the tweet. Binance used to have a minority stake in FTX and received $2.1B in BUSD and FTT after they exited last year. The recent revelations hinted at a leaked balance sheet of Alameda Research. a crypto-trading firm owned by the FTX CEO, who will be called SBF. Alameda's balance sheet had $5.82B of FTT when the entire FTT supply was $3.3B. Somebody was creating money out of thin air, buying whole struggling companies with it. At this moment Binance had 23M FTT, worth a bit over $500M, and they expected the sale to take months. Alameda CEO, Caroline Ellison, offered to buy all Binance FTT at $22. Then FTT dropped 18%, as the market tried to contain the contagion fear. It is getting interesting, and BitDAO, the ones behind the Bybit exchange, noticed that the BIT price started to go down, indicating a massive sale, and asked Alameda to prove that they still hold the 100M BIT acquired in November last year, deal requiring them to hold it for 3 years. Or they will sell their FTT if this cannot be proven. Then, on the 8th of November, at 6.37 AM, FTX stopped processing clients' requests for withdrawals, on EHT, TRX, and SOL blockchains. Then, Binance signed a letter of intent to acquire FTX, and CZ announced that Binance will help FTX to solve 'a significant liquidity crunch'.Everybody was relaxing, thinking that the worst-ever crisis was avoided. FTT token starts to recover. FTX's stablecoin reserve declined by 59.4% over the past 3 days, the lowest level since November 2021. Everyone in crypto thought this was a checkmate move done by Binance to acquire FTX. And just like that, the twist, Binance walked out of the FTX deal citing concerns about the business practices and investigations by the US financial regulators. FTX CEO, SBF, told investors that the firm needed $8B after a bank run saw it halt the withdrawals. Justin Sun stepped in, saying that he would stand behind all Tron Holders on FTX and work with the firm to initiate a pathway forward. Then we found that Alameda suffered a series of losses from deals and SBF transferred at least $4B in FTX funds and shares in the trading platform Robinhood to support it (the problem was that those were customer deposits). SBF said that he plans to do right by customers. On November 7 alone, FTX saw outflows of 19947 BTC, the largest figure since September 10, 2021. This will be a major setback for crypto, as FTX CEO was one of the biggest and most connected billionaires in Washington, the leading voice of the industry. Contagion also spread on Solana, as Alameda was one of their early supporters. And for those who survived the Celsius crash, there is something worst. BlockFi, the other lending platform, halted its withdrawals amidst the FTX bank run, as they signed a $680M deal with FTX.US in July, for a 4400M credit line and an option for FTX to acquire the company for a $280M, deal done after the collapse of Terra (LUNA). Then Tether froze all the $46M USDT held by FTX, at the request of law enforcement, There are some investors, other than Binance, talking with SBF, and they announced an agreement with Tron to let TRX, BTT, JST, SUN, and HT holders to swap assets to their external wallets. FTX seems to need $9.2B in liquidity in order to recover (compared with the $1B needed by Celsius). And then, the final coup de grace, on November 11, FTX US and Alameda Research (and some other additional 130 companies) announced their bankruptcies. SBF resigned from his CEO position, and crypto, once again, is facing the major crisis of the last 10 years. This is even bigger than Mt.Gox. Alameda and FTX are linked to many major players in the crypto industry

• Blockchain games and NFTs: You can still mint Splinterlands Runi NFTs on Opensea, but the price increased a bit from the last week - they are utility NFTs with various features in the near future, including staking and most probably rewards of some sort. Another Riftwatchers airdrop card was given to the players who bought the first 500K packs, and only 4 card airdrops are left for the Riftwatchers collection on Splitnerlands. NFT platform OneUp teamed up with Get Maine Lobsters, the online seafood delivery company, to launch its own NFT-based club, coming in 4 different tiers, giving their holders some exclusive discounts, free shipping, and even free lobsters. Meow! Square Enix, the Final Fantasy guys, plans to create a new NFT-based franchise called Symbiogenesis, in early 2023, on the ETH blockchain. OpenSea launched a blockchain tool to enforce NFT royalties.

• Good news: After the FTX incident, Binance implemented Proof of Reserves, providing full transparency information about their funds. Kucoin Exchange just published their wallets and how much they got in there, at least for BTC, ETH, USDT, USDC, and KCS. It is looking alright. Kraken joined the party too, and a few more exchanges after that. Crypto.com now got some university courses, a bit basic I would say, but good enough for a beginner - average level and they pay you in Diamonds - Diamonds that you can use to buy NFTs or Mystery Boxes containing small amounts of their native token CRO.

• Bad news: US Court ruled in favor of the SEC against LBRY, after they claimed that its native LBRY Credits are deemed as securities. This is not good! Polkadot took that literally and cited that their native token, DOT, is no longer a security, as it morphed into a software, and it is now classified as a non-security. . Good for them. The US Department of Justice seized more than 50K BTC (approx. $3.4B at the time), from a serial scammer that used to operate on the black market Silk Road. UK bank Santander will block real-time payments to crypto exchanges next year, they said, according to Reuters. But this is a lie, isn't it, Santander is my bank of choice, and they stopped me from doing any transaction related to crypto more than one year ago? Naughty banks! US Treasury linked Tornado Cash to North Korean Nuclear Weapons Program. Big bad wolf!

• Joke of the day: You know all that talk about regulation and stuff, and the lobby made by tobacco, alcohol, sugar industries, and so on. Well, turns out that crypto people are that bad too, as crypto firms and their employees donated more than $73M into the 2022 elections, hoping for a friendlier Congress. up from a mere $13M in the 2020 elections. They also spent $15M on lobbying in the first 3 quarters of 2022, more than all the previous 8 years combined. The chip does not go far from the block, or what was the saying?

All the best,
George

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Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favorite blockchain games (Splinterlands- Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) and (Rising Star - Music creators game).

...get higher rewards for your investments using Blockfi (stopped withdrawals for now). Get crypto while writing on Publish0x blog, using Presearch search engine to maximize your income with PRE tokens. Use Torum instead of Twitter. I am also writing for crypto on Read.cash and Hive.

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