What happened in the past week? Everyone is talking about BTC now, as the market was not really ready to see a bull market, yet, there we are. The ETFs, both BTC and ETH, are not here until 2024. Layer Zero will airdrop in 2024 too. Binance is looking for a way to stay out of trouble, but CZ may need to sacrifice for the exchange to improve and survive. What else? Read below:

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• Bitcoin: Grayscale Bitcoin Trust discount dropped to a two-year low of 8.6%. A spot Bitcoin ETF is still on the waiting list in the US, but in Brazil, there are already products that are 2 years old, with almost $100M in assets under management. Bitcoin broke the $40K barrier recently, for the first time since May 2022, going up to $44K, before retracing. Now everybody and their sister are predicting 60-100K for Bitcoin yesterday. Still, BTC ETF is the main cause for growth, and once approved, we may go there. Bitcoin futures open interest on CME hits all-time high. Some people are saying that an upcoming bug fix may stop new Bitcoin Ordinals and meme coins, which heavily congested the network. Check Jack Dorsey's new Bitcoin wallet, called Bitkey, available as an app or as a hardware device in 95+ countries, using some sort of multi-sig setup for security. Bitcoin's year-to-date performance is 151%, for the time being.

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• Ethereum: Arbitrum DAO approved a second round of grant funding for projects that missed out on its initial round. Brazil's largest bank, Unibank, recently announced a new trading service for ETH and BTC. Yet, they do have a 15% tax on crypto, most probably to incentivise the use of the Brazilian Digital Real. Grayscale ETH ETF was delayed to 2024, as a SEC Christmas special gift.

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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Circle joined forces with SBI to boost USDC use and adoption in Japan. Solana investment products assets under management rose by nearly 100% in November. Drift protocol and marginfi on Solana are the next airdrop candidates. Check them out! Layer Zero confirms its 2024 token airdrop. UK legislators recommended going slow on their digital Pound project, aiming to reduce instability risks, and to provide strict privacy controls and transparency. Two of the most prominent DEFI platforms joined forces to integrate the UX Chain directly into Osmosis DEX, on Cosmos blockchain, with separate governance. Elon Musk's AI startup banked $800M from undisclosed investors. Italy and South Korea are joining forces in their CBDC research, sharing notes. El Salvador BTC stash is now profitable, with a $3.6M net profit. Thorchain and Osmosis are the best performers in the DEFI space in November. The French banking giant Societe Generale is set to launch is own Euro stablecoin.

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• Blockchain games and NFT: Is anyone out there still not playing Golem Overlord? Wombat Dungeon Masters' current season is just starting. On Splinterlands, the Land 1.5 feature is available now, launched on November 28, and it seems that it will take weeks, even months, to get everything in place for the optimal rewards. Still, Land 2.0 seems to be even more exciting and complex. The team behind Blur announced they are working on a new L2 called Blast, aiming to reduce transaction costs and provide opportunities for NFT perpetual products.

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• Good news: UK Investment Managers encourage to tokenize funds on the blockchain, using distributed ledger technology. Standard Chartered joined China's digital Yuan trials. Standard Chartered-backed Zodia Custody, the crypto storage provider, joined Ripple's Metaco Network. FTX is selling, this time they got rid of some IMX, GMT and SHIB, for another $22M. It seems that they sold almost half a million crypto using OTC deals with the liquidators, and another $200M are pending approval. Crypto got the US spotlight in the 2024 US presidential race. Many, including Hashdex and BlackRock, believe that Q2 2024 will pierce regulatory barriers allowing mainstream wealth channels to access crypto. Lugano, a Switzerland city, will let residents pay taxes and city fees in BTC and USDT. Robinhood is now officially in Europe, and you can use it to buy and sell 25+ coins on its app. The CEO of Franklin Templeton, Jenny Johnson, revealed that her personal portfolio has stakes in BTC, ETH, UNI and SUSHI. Coinbase led the crypto stocks rally with a 55.3% gain in November. They have also introduced a new feature, letting you send money via WhatsApp, TikTok, Telegram, Facebook and iMessage. IBM launched a new technology able to secure digital assets in cold storage.

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• Bad news: Financial services platform SoFi is shutting down its crypto operations, new accounts are already disabled, and the users need to migrate their accounts to Blockchain.com, within a three-week window. Jamie Dimon still believes that crypto main use is criminal activity, but JPMorgan disagrees. Coinbase CEO mentioned that there are no plans for a native Base token. Poloniex, owned by Justin Sun, is on the UK warning list after their latest shenanigans. But if you look closely, only PayPal is greenlisted in the UK for now. Envision, HBAR Foundation and Swirlds Labs are working on a new open-source tech to propel climate change initiatives. Still, carbon credits are somehow dodgy, being mostly used now to do some money laundering under the umbrella of Shell and some Arab petrol countries. Spanish authorities arrested a man believed to have instructed North Korea on how to use crypto to avoid the US sanctions. Do Kwon may end up in the US, where he is facing 8 charges covering fraud and manipulation.

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• Joke of the week: In March this year Binance used to have a 57% market share, but since the settlement with the SEC, it dropped 32% from its peak, and they are required to appoint an independent compliance monitor for three years. Former Binance CEO, CZ, was ordered to stay in the US until his sentencing in February. Binance has seen nearly $800M in outflows after the DOJ announcement.

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All the best,

George

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Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands - Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) (Wombat Dungeon Masters NFT staking on WAX) and (X-Portal - Elrond all in one app, free NFTs, and more).

...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog, using the 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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