Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop. (weekly crypto updates)
This week was a bit different, with some blockchains we know tending to halt, and others that just suffered an outage for the first time. Heck, even Coinbase stopped letting people send money to the bank for a short interval, pumping some extra adrenaline (do we really need this?). Celsius is not looking to good, with both co-founders leaving the sinking ship. What else? Check below:
Bitcoin: Bitcoin and ETH traded lower in a beta move with equities, for a lack of sector-specific catalyst, post-ETH Merge. New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG) raised $720M for its Institutional Bitcoin Fund, as an SEC filing was published last week. Crypto outperformed equities in the last 12 months, with Bitcoin being the best relative performer, down only -1.09%.
Ethereum: Interesting to know, 95.9% of the Ethereum Call Options expired worthless in September as many of them were betting on ETH prices above $1350. Fidelity adds to crypto offerings with Ethereum Index Fund, providing exposure to ETH. Lido launches Layer 2 Ethereum liquid staking on Arbitrum and Optimism, a wrapped version of its stETH, called wstETH. The Merge is not finished by far, as only 55% was completed, and there are other upgrades, known as the Surge, the Verge, the Purge, and the Splurge, which can even happen in parallel.
Altcoins: Solana suffered yet another outage, over a misconfigured node, and the network needed to be restarted, as the validators were stuck on the wrong fork. Even Coinbase had a technical problem, halting withdrawals involving US bank accounts. No extra information was given. Bnb Chain was exploited, and the BNB Token Hub was attacked, creating extra BNB, with an estimate of $110m, out of which $7M was frozen. BNB Chain was halted as a tweet announced irregular activity on the network. Revenue generated by the Web3 infrastructure declined 67%, with Filecoin and Pocket accounting for 91% of the overall revenue. Time to check these two ones. Tether is doing some interesting moves, with less than $50M worth of unsecured debt, and 58% of its total reserves in US Treasury bills, up from 43.5% in June. They are aiming to decrease their commercial paper holding to zero. On the bridge exploit in July on the Harmony blockchain, they decided to use funds from Treasury to reimburse the affected users, instead of minting new ONE tokens. This is good.MakerDAO invested $500M in US Treasuries and corporate bonds in an 80%/20% proportion, trying to not limit their exposure to a limited number of assets.
Blockchain games and NFTs: Splinterfest - the Splinterlands fiesta - the annual party is starting in Vegas, with some previews and a fancy airdrop. Bitwise Asset Management launches a Web3 ETF, with over 85% exposure to companies building Web3 infrastructure, finance, metaverse, and digital worlds. Yuga Labs created a community council composed of 7 BAYC NFT holders who are active in its community. Blockchain gaming studio Mythical Games announced a foundation, a DAO, and a token, along with other 22 partners like Ubisoft, Kakao, Animoca, and Klaytin.
Good news: Decentralized exchanges are growing faster than centralized ones over the past two years. Nice! FTX listed a perpetual future tied to the US dollar spot index. If you feel like betting for or against the dollar long-term, you can do it now. Telegram wallet launched a P2P crypto exchange, letting users exchange crypto with each other. The Swiss financial data expert SIX, one of the leading financial providers, partnered with CryptoCompare to make data available for its customer base, related to crypto. The DEX aggregator Transit Swap had a $23M exploit, and 70% of the stolen assets were returned after a joint investigation of Peckshield, Slowmist, Bitrace, and TokenPocket. Kim Kardashian paid $1.26M to SEC to settle charges after she promoted EthereumMax, which we can probably call a scam right now. Elon Musk may move forward with his on/off agreement to buy Twitter at the originally agreed price of $44B, after an immediate stay of the lawsuit Twitter filed against him. Coinbase is expanding its services in Australia, for retail crypto traders, with institutional products soon to come.
Bad news: Meta, or as you know them - Facebook, gave their users the ability to connect digital wallets to Facebook and Instagram, to share NFTs. Why do I consider this bad? Because in a future where confidentiality is the most critical issue, they will make money selling others the information linking your name to your wallet. I can bet on that, as this is what Facebook is doing for a living. No link to my wallet, thank you very much, Meta! The total assets under management across all digital asset investment products went down 12.7% in September, with the ones related to Bitcoin falling 10.7%, and the ones related to Ethereum 19.3%. Crypto lender Celsius had another co-founder stepping down, as Daniel Leon resigned one week after Alex Mashinski. Prior to the customer account freeze, Celsius was one of the biggest crypto lending platforms, with $8B in loans and $12B in assets, but they were lending users funds for higher yields. Some funny business in South Korea, with the prosecutors freezing almost $40M in crypto on Okex and Kucoin, and Do Kwon, the Luna guy saying that those are not his funds, as the prosecutors announced. SWIFT presented a framework for a global central bank digital currency (CBDC) system, claiming to have a solution for the interoperability between different networks. They partnered with the central banks of France and Germany, as well as HSBC, Standard Chartered, and Wells Fargo, in order to create it, using both CBDCs and fiat for cross-border payments through a single gateway. The banks are counter-attacking! Russia blocked access to Okx Exchange, with no reason given to the Okx website whatsoever. European Council passes a comprehensive crypto regulation, imposing reserve requirements on stablecoins and much more. Crypto.com is downsizing the workforce, again, and I just noticed that they are not paying anything for the tokens taken in the exchange unless you have something like 100K up to 5M tokens. So, I will choose to sell their tokens and buy something more profitable soon. You cannot expect to keep our money and use it and pay nothing in return. (They were always dodgy, I know). Millionaire crypto pyramid scheme busted in Brazil, with the 'Bitcoin Sheik' leader moving around $769M.
Joke of the day: Talking about the ones thinking that the Sun is orbiting around them and their own country, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (what a great villain group name), an organization led by the Treasury Department, created after the 2008 financial crisis, in order to find and mitigate threats to the financial system (did I say villain?), is warning that although crypto interconnections with the traditional financial system are currently relatively limited, they can increase rapidly and the widespread adoption should be avoided at all costs. I will say one word about this: Salvador (having a great financial year, the first time in decades, despite many financial giants trying to write them down and straightforward blackmailing them).
All the best,
George
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. 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.