It is Sunday today, which means it the right time for my weekly crypto updates article. What happened this week? NFTs are making people rich, but most blockchain games are decreasing their daily rewards. US wants your money from crypto, and people can hack 1 Billion for fun, if they don't get bored half way into it. Let's see the major updates?
Bitcoin - We are just in August 2021, and crypto-investments are double the amount used in 2020. This week we got BTC touching base with $50K, and many are hoping to see $100K by the end of the year. The total crypto market went over $2 Trillion as the whole market was dressed into a lovely green past few days. Could this be the reason why 32% of Nigerians currently deal with Bitcoin? Brasil base B3 exchange is launching a 'Green' Bitcoin ETF, buying carbon credits in order to neutralize the carbon emissions associated with the mining.
Ethereum - Pudgy Penguins, one ETH based NFT project, is taking the network by storm, with more that $13M sold in the last days. They are on average 2 ETH, compared with Apes (10 ETH average) and CryptoPunks (50 ETH average). Can you find the next one? In the first week after London hard fork, more than 16500 ETH were burned ($48M+ worth), with 2.63 ETH burned per minute, while 6.7 ETH is generated, so the token is not yet deflationary. Still, with 36% of the new supply being burned, the signs are positive. Digital Finance firm Kryptcoin filled for one more Ethereum ETF. Will this be approved, finally? Also, Chainlink oracles are now linked to Ethereum scaling solution Arbitrum One, getting the same data as developers building on ETH base layer, but much cheaper and faster.
Altcoins - Poly Network, a cross chain protocol, was just in the news, as a hacker just got more than $600M in ETH, USDC and MATIC. He even left a message saying ''I could reach one billion if I had moved the shitcoins''. And just like that, he returned most of it, except some $33M USDT blocked by Tether Management. 'I am an eternal legend now', the hacked declared shortly after. Helium did a $111M token sale backed by Alameda Research, Multicoin Capital, Ribbit Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Messi is going to PSG, and part of his contract, he will receive an undisclosed amount of PSG fan tokens, on Chiliz network. SuperRare is working on a Collector Royalties program, using SUPR tokens. Also, if you want to work in crypto, UMA project has 4 technical and 2 non-technical jobs available (check here for info). If you do not know what UMA is, check this @PVMihalache article to find more. He wrote some good stuff about them. The version 2 of Wormhole is operational (cross chain communication protocol bridge from Solana to ETH, TERRA and BSC). Mirror v2 is operational now on Luna, and you can mit, short, trade synthetic stocks, ETHs, options, commodities and much more. There is still the regulation issue, as we all witnessed that Binance had to deal with. But then, Terra (LUNA) is big in Asia, if they manage to do this, they will be wildly succesful.
NFTs - Such a bad day for people playing blockchain games for a living. Axie Infinity halved the rewards to 50 from 100 SPT for adventures and 25 from 50 for daily quests. Keep in mind that it will cost you around $1200 to start to play this game. The only good news is that now it costs only 2AXS instead of 5, but the value of 1 AXS ($66) also increased exponentially. The prizes for PVP top players increased, but you may need to have very expensive Axies to affort a place on the podium. Despite this, Axie just reached $1Billion in revenue, surpassing projects like NBA Top Shot ( $675M) and CryptoPunks ( $657M). As for the Binance Smart Chain sensation, Cryptoblades, the value of their native token, Skill, increased to $60 on 12th of August, only to drop almost half after they decided to decrease the rewards 5 times (so now it is only 20% of what it used to be, I do not know if you can even make a profit out of it). It will cost you about $100 initial investment to play optimally (check this article to find out more). Splinterlands is the only one that it is keep pushing the limits, with all their NFT prices increasing, native token increasing, good scaling to prevent a bottleneck due to massive number of new users and many new features to be introduced soon (Brawl improvements, Land NFTs and more). Long time ago, in 2017, it was an ETH NFT project called EtherRock, 100 images of rocks, with different colours, as a reminder of the 70s Pet Rock. Well, one of those, EtherRock #21, just sold for 45 ETH ($100k). Do you have some? Go to Opensea and check their prices then. Talking about Opensea, they just surpassed Uniswap in Ethereum gas consumption, with $1.9M spent just on 9th of August. Blockchain Heroes are launching a new series soon, it was time to do another one, right? Draft Kings launched a NFT featuring Tom Brady, planning to continue with Wayne Gretzky, Tiger Woods, Tony Hawk and Naomi Osaka for the next ones. Upland is trying a NFT approach, and soon we will have more than $1M earned by their players.
Good news - Hodlnaut service just released their IOS app, working on the Android one next. Iranian National Tax Administration proposed to tax crypto instead of banning them, as this is a much better option for everyone. If this is not done, a black market is more possible to emerge, with no benefits for the state. There are some impressive funding rounds, with FalconX raising $210M (total evaluation $3.75B) and Indian exchange CoinDCX raising $90M (total evaluation $1.1B). Talking about numbers, Coinbase profit from April until June was $1.6B, almost 5 times more than the same period last year.
Bad news - Binance US CEO, Brian Brooks, resigned last Friday, after differences over strategic direction, but Changpeng Zhao (CZ) reassured investors that they are going in a good direction overall. After Coinbase CEO, Elon himself urged the senators to take the time needed to research and adopt a proper cryptocurrency legislation. Poloniex exchange just paid $10M to settle with SEC after they sold crypto designated securities. Short version, selling shares as crypto (stonks) is regulated and unlawful, selling all kind of crypto like BTC or ETH is unregulated and lawful. At the moment. Serious thing, FinCEN just fined BitMex 100M for them failing to ID US citizens, as part of the anti money laundering regulations. In my opinion, they are trying to make the money from crypto via fines too, as the tax bill did get approved in Congress. Right now it is only the infrastructure bill, which includes reporting obligations for any corporation that is designated as crypto broker, so, basically, miners, validators, software developers and the list can go on, quite a broad term, trying to include everything. Maker had a serious hack, with more than 5000 accounts affected, all with more than 900$ in the wallet, and almost $7M were stolen.
Mass adoption - While some companies such as Anchorage try to get a banking licence, Circle (the ones with USDC) went all in and asked to be a full reserve national comercial banck, with FDIC coverage (nice!) and supervision from the Federal Reserve & Treasury Dept. They did released a report showing that most of their USDC are backed by dollars, unlike Tether, with only 10% backed by cash and cash like deposits, the rest coming from commercial paper and deposit certificates. Sound like 'we got USDT backed by USDT' to me. Even Coinbase page is now stating now that USDC is 100% backed by reserved assets. Jamaica just issued their first CBDC, as Jamaican Dollar, in a $1.5M pilot project. Well done, Jamaica! Kevin O'Leary is now an official spokeperson for crypto exchange FTX. Venmo just launched a feature letting you tyo convert their credit card cashback into crypto. ETH, BTC, LTC and BCH is available.
Joke of the week - That would be an ICON Network staker making 14 millions ICX tokens using a bug. At Icon Network request, Binance and Kracken froze his account, and now he is suing them, asking for his token back, not that they are worth $17M. The judge said that the lawsuit can go forward, but I do not think he will get nothing except his initial tokens back, and maybe some court expenses, without anything related to the bug exploit. Not to talk about malicious intent. (Yes, I am doing a Contract Law course right now, as you can see.) A close second place will be ''Our USDT is backed by USDT'' declaration, well, not using those exact words, but yeah, you got the drift.
All the best,
George
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Too much info ... gave me brain-ache