The week is gone, and even the month of June is almost finished. The market is is undecided, trying one too many times to raise over the 35K mark. What happened into the crypto-world in the last 7 days?
Bitcoin: PlanB created a stock to flow model for BTC with some outlandinsh numbers, like the worst scenario showing 47K in August, 43K in September, 63K in October, 98K in November and more than 135K in December. I will believe it when I see it. A dreadful dead cross appeared lately as a Bitcoin technical indicator, and the BTC Fear and Greed Index moved to an all time low 10 (Extreme Fear). In Salvador, a legal challenge was issued against adopting Bitcoin as currency, but shrtly after that the president announced a national 30$ airdrop to every citizen older than 18. This comes with some issues of its own, as the airdrop requires KYC, understandable, and the wallet promoted is using facial recognition instead of giving the access to your own private keys. The law is to take effect on September 7th. So, this is open to state control, so much for the cryptocurrency and decentralization. Anyway, this week was not that bad, after the Tuesday $28k, we had a rally next day all the way up to $34K, but the level did not hold. Few more attempts were made later this week, with no clear results. Satoshi Nakamoto has a $40B in BTC right now, and Coinbase and some others consider that unmasking him or him selling some BTC can negatively affect the market right after.
Ethereum: Three days ago we had $1.5B in ETH options expiring (45% of the total open interest in ETH options). Jim Cramer, the CNDC host, sold all his BTC, opting for ETH instead, warning about China not liking BTC. Well, newsflash, they only like the digital Yuan, because they can control it. A new Layer 2 scaling solution called Optimism was released in order to improve the ETH ecosystem.
Altcoins: Emrit, my Helium miner provider, informed me that I am eligible for the Coolspot performance bonus. Can I refuse free money? (To order your own free Helium miner check the links in my signature.) Karura is the first winner in the race for Kusama(KSM) parachain slot auction. Yield raised another $10M in a new funding round, aiming to expand the team and create the Yield version 2. SushiSwap is having Harmony (ONE) as their new partner. Euro CBDC is mentioned this week, and they will be privacy centered. Sure, no doubts! Bakkt is launching a Visa card, including support for Apple Pay and Google Pay, allowing you to spend crypto. Celsius is moving from UK to US, quoting 'regulatory uncertainty', but UK customers will continue to use the App with no changes at the moment.
Good news: At the moment there is a Mobox campaign on Coinmarketcap giving you 1 Key to open a Chest for a Free NFT, that can be used to mine their token, MBOX. Only if all your answers are right. At the moment 1 KEY = $16, so you can also sell it if you want. Coinmarketcap started to have some daily login rewards called Diamonds, and some cool hoodies are promoted with the event. NFTs were promised too. Mirror version 2 was succesfully released on 25th of June.
Bad news: Monday started with another China's province ordering to their electricity providers to not deliver power to BTC mining companies, and more than 5% price drop shortly followed. Hashrates also dropped by 17%. But I see this as a very bad thing only short term, as looking for alternative places instead of China is helping crypto long term. Then local banks were asked to stop supporting mining farms, with Agricultural Bank of China banning everything that is related to crypto. Miami called everyone to mine there, using cheap nuclear energy. Meanwhile, in UK, TSB joined Monzo and Starling in what they call a ''temporary ban'' on buying crypto. They did this as 1 in 6 crypto buyers are scammed, but what about other 5 that are not? Dogecoin sponsored Nascar racers are keep crashing their cars. Is this a subliminal message sent by gods? DOGE, crash, high speed? Using the same vulnerability as the one BurgerSwap has ($7.2M loss) Impossible Finance was hacked ($500K loss after the initial estimate). This hacking was described as being next to impossible. Oh, the irony! Bybit was warned in Ontario, Canada, related to their illegal operations trading derivatives and securities. Some hefty fines will follow. After their 4 months ban, Iran authorities keep 'finding' BTC farms, with the latest action in an abandoned factory seizing more than 7000 computer miners. They say Bitcoin, but to mine BTC you need rigs, not personal computers. One cryptocurrency stash of more than $158M was seized in London, UK by the London Met Police while they were tackling some money laundering operations. And researchers looking into Monero said that many free illegal copies and the newest games on the torrent sites have Monero malware miners included. You take away from copyright royalties, and some take it back from you. Robinhood IPO was delayed as SEC is looking into their crypto related activity. Fall instead of summer was mentioned. Norwegian regulators are working at one crypto legal framework lately.
NFTs: On July 24th NEAR protocol and Universal Hip Hop Museum are launching a NFT collection celebrating rappers from 1970-1980 (Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash, Lil Wayne, Easy E and some others). CNN and FOX are also doing some serious work with their future NFT collections. Decentral Games, a community owned virtual casino in Decentraland, just did a funding round raising $5M to upgrade their services. The latest NFT project selling into millions of dollars, Wicked Craniums, are a NFT collection of skeleton avatars with unique traits (think bony skulls cryptopunks). Aavegotchi (GHST) announced a gamified universe - Gotchus Alchemica, with NFT lands based on ERC-20, providing payments in tokens called REALM. Seems interesting. Beeple launched his own NFT platform called WENEW, and Andy Murray is one of the first celeb to release a collection on second of July. Binance NFT Market was also launched this week, with some nice NFT to check in there. The Genesis event had digital art from the likes of Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali.
Mass adoption: HEB supermarkets in Texas installed ATMs to trade BTC, ETH, DOGE, LTC and some DEFI tokens. You can trade crypto for cash and viceversa, and they have more than 400 locations in Texas and Mexico. MicroStrategy is still buying like there is no tomorrow, they must know something we don't, right? Sotheby's is selling some diamonds in Hong Kong, crypto payments accepted. If you have more than $15M, go for it. Brave just created a very good privacy focused search engine, and you can have it for free, supported by the occasional add, or ad-free, for a small price. FTX is now the official Major League Baseball sponsor, Sam Bankman Fried making a 5 year deal with them. Blockchain Capital raised $300M with support from well known names like Paypal and Visa. Coinbase is getting ready to register in Japan. , being allowed to trade BTC, BCH, ETH, XLM and LTC. Citigroup opened a digital asset group as part of their wealth management unit.
And one harsh choice, with people being nice or just plain rude, after McAfee extradition was approved to US, they find the controversial antivirus creator dead in his cell prison. Suicide was mentioned, with few call it a coincidence. We see conspiration theories everywhere lately. At least make some good ones.
This is all for the moment.
All the best,
George
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