Another week in Crypto, with as much changes as an year in real life. We got all kind of news and updates, some good, some bad, some somewhere in the middle. Let's explore what happened in the past 7 days:
Bitcoin: Elon being Elon, tweeted that Tesla with accept BTC once more when more than 50% of the miners will use clean energy for mining. But, there is a lot of inconsistencies related to this quote, like who is measuring this and how, as I don't think we are yet able to do this. After El Salvador, Tanzania is looking into adopting BTC, and they got the firepower, as Tanzania is the country with the highest volume of BTC P2P trading. Funny note, International Monetary Fund (IMF) played possum when asked by Salvador for a bit of help implementing BTC. Nothing like this was made before, we have no idea how to do it. Really, you do it like any other currency ever adopted by another country! Monday started well, with BTC playing around the $40K resistance. Pantera Capital CEO is like, ya, noobs, this is the right time to buy BTC and to keep it until 2030. Thanks me later, aligator! In UK 2.3 million people own crypto in 2021, 400K more than last year. Most of them bought when the year started, so they made a nice profit. Except the ones who got Doge and Shiba Inu, those ones, not so much. But, the new Taproot upgrade had a huge support (more than 90% of the blocks in the last 2 weeks), and this is one of the most important Bitcoin updates up to date, as the new Schnorr signatures open the possibility for privacy, scaling and multisignature wallets. It will activate automatically at the block 709632.
Ethereum: Goldman Sachs restarted their trading desk, planning to offer ETH options and futures contracts in the next months. After Geth, the London hard fork is coming soom, with a lot of important changes. I will talk about this when it will happen.
Altcoins: There is a new stablecoin called UND, which can be gained as reward when you provide LP as collateral. Hmm, this is new. Nascar driver Landon Cassil, sponsored by Voyager, accepted his wages in crypto, but for some strange reason he wanted to be paid in Litecoin. Maybe he knows something that we don't. Serum keep getting mentioned around, and all that I know is that my brother @PVMihalache invested into is one-two years ago. Pylon Protocol on Terra (LUNA) is their newest project. Need Aditional Pylons! Sound familiar? This phrase haunted my nights as a teenager. You may know why! If you have nerves of steel, check OlympusDAO, 90.000 APY with their algorithmic non-pegged stablecoin. Coinbase listed Shiba Inu, but I do not know if this news should be here or at bad news. I consider all this Doge and Doge-clones just a death trap for uneducated investors. Convince me it is not true, long term.
Good news: SEC is focusing now on other problems not related to crypto, such as SPAC (special purpose acquisition companies), but this is reminding me of the shenanigans made by MicroStrategy 20 years ago (Check out this amazing post for more info - Investigative journalism - Is MicroStrategy the house of cards which will kill the crypto? ). Still, they did not approved the VanEck Bitcoin ETF, second time when they applied.
Bad news: After Colonial Pipeline affair, even G7 wants to combat and punish ransomware users, as the cases are up to more than 300% in 2020. South Korea is warning their local exchanges to stop trading certain assets, Huobi being one of the exchanges present of the government blacklist. Coinbase is under scrutiny after their open support towards Bitclout (you know, the guys who tokenized like 15K profiles from Twitter without asking permission). Iron Finance started well, but apparently their TITAN token went up to $65, and then, due to people selling and some sketchy arbitrage opportunity, went straight to ZERO, with the $1 IRON going to $0.69. Mark Cuban was one of the loosers, trying his hand on DEFI. Really Mark, where is your DoYourOwnResearch skill? You should have tried some 40-100% APY, not jump straight on the 5000% one. This is not a bad news per se, but kind of, Republican campaign are like ''crypto is bad, is not real money, and they are used by criminals'' but, just in case you have some, we accept donation in crypto via BitPay. Now I am sure that crypto is used by criminals to dodge tax and commit fraud.
NFT: A Doge NFT was just sold for $4M to PleasrDAO, an investor cooperative on Zora marketplace. Porsche is starting a new division called Fanzone, rumour has it that they will deal with NFTs, using LYXE blockchain. Never heard of it until now. Fox Entertainment is also launching a NFT division called Blockchain Creative Labs in collaboration with Bento Box (Bob's Burgers, Krapopolis). Even CNN is getting ready to make some NFT about their glorious purpose. Apparently there is a new big boss in town, called Yield Guide Games (YGG) a gaming guild that just got $4M, and their bussiness model is to loan NFT to players in exchange of their in-game rewards. They cover Axie Infinity, Illuvium, Guild of Guardians and Sandbox. A NFT land in Decentraland just got sold for $913K this week. Nice one, i can only hope my 2 lands in League of Kingdoms will reach $1k one day. Huh! Oh man, I keep saying that I would buy some Chiliz, and they are like 20 times more than the last time I checked the price, but I still did not do it.
Mass adoption: Charity:water, a trust announcing that they accept BTC at the Miami conference, raised more than $1.3M in order to continue their mission to provide clean water to low-income countries. They are not selling the BTC, instead it will be used to generated more income. Grayscale is adding Solana and Polygon to their investment products portfolio. Microstrategy wants to sell some $1B of their shares to buy more BTC, after they just bought $500M last week. I see, $30k is much better than $60k, right? Paul Tudor Jones recommended 5% of the portfolio to be BTC, 5% gold and 5% cash. In May he was like, yeah, I do not mind 1-2% in BTC. Spanish bank BBVA opened bitcoin trading and custody services for private clients in Switzerland. They plan to expand in other European and South American countries.
And the best for last, in his Spanish Jail cell, John McAfee swears that he got no hidden crypto waiting for him, the Bad Americans are oppressing the poor man, and he would never ever think at doing tax fraud. Just let him free and you will never hear of him bothering anyone. Better than him was just the Bank of England governor, saying that Bitcoin is not money, but stablecoins can be, if they are issued by a central bank. No kidding! A lot of wise man lately, even Federal Reserve checked their magic glove and said, we expect more inflation in 2022-2023. Really?
And one warning, if you had a Ledger and your data was stolen in 2020, chances are that you will receive a friendly update these days, for your safety, avoid it or your whole portfolio will dissapear like magic into the wind of change.
That's all for today,
George
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Breaking News ... crypto is volatile :D