Between a Doge and a hard fork, there is no spoon! (weekly crypto updates)

This week in crypto, everything is looking promising. We had just the right amount of drama, and a bit of salt and pepper, with good and bad news alike. US still try to regulate the world of crypto. Ethereum shows a lot of potential to become deflationary. The NFTs ecosystem started to check the copyright law. There are still X50 X100 potential tokens to be found even now. What more? Read bellow:

• Bitcoin - Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on the platform that he is actively mining Bitcoin, and that he is working of a service renting you fractions of a bitcoin miner. He is estimating that a single mining rig price starts at $8200 and the waiting time extends to May 2022. Well Fargo and JP Morgan both registered a Bitcoin Fund with US SEC, while also started to invest in emerging crypto startups. Blackrock ETFs also included Bitcoin mining firma like MARA and RIOT.

• Ethereum - $170M (55660 ETH) were burned so far after the London hard fork and Ethereum is getting a step closed to the dream (being a deflationary token). Microsoft, with the help of Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University, is working on Project: Argus, a blockchain based initiative to fight against piracy. I know few countries able of slow the ETH network, just by using the transactions needed to report every piracy case to Microsoft. True! Balancer (BAL) will work with Lido (LDO), in order to launch a MetaStable Pool incentive program, listing both staked ETH (stETH) and wrapped ETH (wETH) aiming to provide liquidity for ETH 2.0.

• Altcoins - Aave Arc was launched, and it can provide private liquidity tools to investors, enabling direct access to decentralized markets. The only problem is that, due to the regulations related to institutions using crypto, all these pools will require extensive KYC (know your customer). Polygon is merging with Hermez, after they paid $250M in a deal with Hermez 26 people project team, and they are exchanging HEZ to MATIC using a 3.5 to 1 rate. Acala is expected to be the DEFI hub of Polkadot, providing cross chain, open finance infrastructure for DOT ecosystem. 1inch Network is adopting ETH Scaling Platform Optimism, few months after they expanded to Polygon and BSC. They are also looking at Solana, Avalanche and Tron as potential future blockchains to be adopted. A new initiative on AVAX blockchain called Avalanche Rush, worth $180M, started, with projects like AAVE, CRV, QI and StakeDAO to join the scheme. Kusama will start their parachain auctions soon, did you load your bags on KSM?

• NFTs - Alibaba is working on a NFT marketplace, which will be launched soon, with many NFT auctions scheduled in September. SuperRare just launched a curation token aiming to decentralize the project, with 15% of the total tokens airdroped to early adopters of the platform, and more to come in the next 4 years. After Furie (Pepe creator) claimed that his own content is exploited without permision, the whole Sad Frogs District project, worth $4M, was removed from OpenSea. DeviantArt, yes, you know them, are in partnership now with OpenSea, in order to detect copyright infringement, with 86% of the total infringement cases discovered in the last two month following their initiative launch.

• Good news - In a surprising turn of events, the Dogecoin Foundation was ressurected, after 4-5 yeast of inactivity, listing Vitalik Buterin, Billy Markus and Max Keller as advisory team members. Is Elon summoned there too? Not personally, but his representative, Jared Birchall, is also present on board. A group of white hackers from Paradigm discovered and fixed a bug present of SushiSwap token fundraising new platform Miso, preventing a potential $350M hack. DAOs as self organized communities, with their own guiding principles and generating their own value seems to be the way to go, often supported by skilled people sharing same values or passions. UMA project is doing an awesome job supporting many of them, using their experience to rest assured that every transition will happen smoothly. If you do not have UMA in your portfolio, it is time to check them now, while they are still cheap enough.

• Bad news - Poly Network hackers returned the last $235M via a miltisig wallet, and they are not ready to give them the last private key, as he is not happy with Poly team efforts to improve their code. Japanese exchange Liquid suspended deposits and withdrawals after a security breach, and the hacker stole cryptocurrencies estimated at $80M at the moment (correction: $94M 2 days later, mainly in BTC, TRX, XRP and ETH). Salvador adopting Bitcoin seems to experience few difficulties, as Finch Ratings are worried that the insurance companies cannot cope with the changes. Binance is trying to raise $100M, but there are not many investors looking towards it due to regulatory concerns, especially after Brian Brooks left. Insted, they hired IRS senior agent of Criminal Investigations division, Greg Monahan, to head the anti-laundering compliance department. And to prove this, now all Binance clients need to provide proof of ID and picture, as part of KYC. Spain authorities warned Huobi and like another dozen crypto companies that they need to improve in order to fully comply with the national regulations, weeks after Binance was the target of a focused campaign sustained by US and Europe regulators. Or is this a good news? Dean Harmon, the one in charge of Helix crypto mixing service, pleaded guilty of money laundering after he was charged by US authorities and could go in jail for 20 years.

• Mass adoption - Walmart is looking for a ''visionary leader'' to work on a crypto product lead. Is this good? I don't know. Bitpanda raised a good $263M Tuesday, reaching a total value of $4.1B, three times more than the March evaluation. Certik raised another $24M in a BSeries funding round, from Tiger Global and GL Ventures ans main investors. Coinbase cash reserves are getting close to $4.4B, as opposed to $1.1B in December 2020. Are they waiting for the dip? Are they making happen the next dip? We will see. Talking about Coinbase, they are working with Mitsubishi UFJ, in order to start a cryptocurrency exchange in Japan. Former SEC chair Jay Clayton joined Fireblocks team as a member of the advisors board. TikTok is collaborating now with Audius, a music streaming app build on Solana blockchain. Now, can you tell me that you buy enough Audius to retire from work by now, right? (106% gain in one day.) Kakao, a big South Korean conglomerate, is using two entities, Klaytn foundation and Krust, to promote KLAY network. Twitter BlueSky is hiring, and they started with Jay Graber as project manager. Now, this remind me of a Marvel villains project called BlackSky, but I am sure this is only a coincidence. Asked about, Bank of Jamaica declared that only a court order can allow to track their CBDC spending. Facebook Novi wallet (Libra) is ready to be launched. Fractional art received a seed funding of almost $8M, with Robot Ventures, Flamingo DAO, Paradigm and Divergence Ventures leading the way.

• Joke of the day - US Treasury department swear that they will not do a witch hunt aiming at the crypto companies that are not defined by the broker definition from the infrastructure bill. The problem is, that everyone using crypto is basically a broker, by their definitions. Let's see how this will change in the next few months. 'Broker' is defined as any service effectuating trasfers of digital assets on behalf of other persons. I can think at blockchain games, NFT markets and few more. Also, to top this off, SEC thinks that they can regulate DEFI and even take part in their governance. Imagine that, like SEC trying to get 51% of UNI token, as an example. Finally they can make some positive change in crypto, and I can pump and dump whatever project they want to be involved. Oh, the dream!

That's all for today.

All the best,

George

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