Cant's see because of that one tree, then do your best, watch the whole forest! (crypto updates)

We got a different week, with the ghost of war looming across Europe, Bitcoin and company going first up, then down, and 5 out of 6 sectors gained double digits this week, with DEFI being the best gaining 14%, and blockchain gaming the worst, with only 8.94%. The financial year is ending, and in many countries, the time to pay the tax for crypto will be here soon.

· Bitcoin: BTC uncoupled from S&P500, possibly as the Russia-Ukraine conflict may have increased its use, and after some initial surge of BTC being bought with Russian Ruble when the conflict started, now seems to slow down, from $4.5M to $400K today. Just to compare, in May 2021 the volumes were close to $33M per day. The Swiss city of Lugano partnered with Tether to accept Bitcoin and USDT as legal tender, along with the Swiss franc. Bitcoin miners brought in $1.06B in revenue sharing during February 2022, with $1.05B from block subsidy and $12.92M from transactions fees. Non-zero BTC addresses reached a new ATH, 40.2M, from a 2021 plateau of 35M, with 817K having more than 1 BTC in them. In terms of energy, BTC mining consumed 0.05% of all the energy consumed in 2021, with 39% of it being renewable.

· Ethereum: Optimism is adding the Optimism: Bedrock feature, expecting to reduce the fees by 30-40%. Ethereum miners generated $1.19B in revenues in February, with $1.09B from block subsidy, and $109M from transaction fees, decreasing by 15.3%.

· Altcoins: UMA has a 64% surge this week, supported by their improved activity, the increased use of the Across Protocol Bridge (backed up by UMA and Risk Labs), and the SuperUMAns DAO (which is related to Universal Access Protocol too). Or maybe it was just a direct result of one of their tweets offering jobs for people from Ukraine. The Polkadot founder also donated $5.8M in DOT, after the Ukraine official Twitter provided a Polkadot wallet address. Presearch has a new Rewards Verification System (RVS). The minimum token threshold for withdrawal is still 1000 PRE. Stablecoins supply increased by 29% from Q3 to Q4 2021. Andre Cronje is stepping down from his role at Fantom Foundation, and probably from Yearn Finance, Keep3r Network, and Multichain soon. We don’t know why, yet. Terra (Luna) is the second-largest DEFI network, with 22B, with only ETH in front of it, with $110B. But Terra got only 21 DEFI protocols, compared with 556 tracked for ETH. Third place, Binance Smart Chain, got 327 protocols. Leofinance team finally released PolyCub.com (which, as you may think, is a feature similar to CUB, on Polygon, with a different approach, as a Yield Optimizing platform, with some interesting opportunities, and the APY is still in 4 digits, between 2k and 9k%, still, keep in mind that it is just launched, and in few days, probably one week, they will decrease quickly to a normal rate). But if you are in it for a quick profit, good luck.

· NFTs and blockchain games: Ukraine starting to get donations in crypto, and million after million, they raised $20M in just a few days. After that announced an airdrop, canceled their airdrop initiative, as they revealed they plan to raise funds selling NFTs, because people tried to rig the system by doing many small micro-donations hoping to get a bigger share of the airdrop. The South Korean government will provide $186M to create a Metaverse ecosystem within the country. Japanese online retail giant Rakuten is launching an NFT marketplace called, can you guess, Rakuten NFT. Splinterlands is doing very well after they announced a partnership with Warner Music Group. On the Waka Flocka partnership, the limited Summoner NFT sold half of their NFT in less than one minute. These 500 were available in-game, the other 500 will be sold soon on the WAX blockchain. Splinterlands 8th card airdrop is coming soon, with one guaranteed card for every 525 packs bought and a 4% chance to be a gold foil. Final Fantasy publisher, Square Enix, is bringing the franchise into The Sandbox (SAND) Metaverse. Solana-based NFT platform Snowcrash is planning a feature of Bob Dylan and Miles Davis NFT drop after they announced Sony Music and Universal Group Music will be part of the platform. Cool news for music aficionados! On Solana still, Michael Jordan is launching 6 Rings NFTs on his engagement platform, HEIR. They are classified as founding items, giving access to exclusive content. Axie Infinity revealed the Origin Back cards, and they look interesting. Still, as the difficulty increased when is about making a profit on their blockchain game, I am staying away. By the way, if you liked the Chifibots game mentioned in the latest Oneup Cartel posts, there is a chance for you to get some NFT packs on this contest.

· Good news: Central Bank of Brazil is doing a CBDC competition, and Visa, AAVE, and other 7 applicants were selected for it. Investment brokerage firm Charles Schwab wants to create a Crypto Economy ETF, with indirect exposure to cryptocurrencies. eBay is looking into the possibility of adding crypto as a payment method, with more info coming after the 10th of March. FTX just launched their charitable fund, called Future Fund, aiming to distribute something between $100M to $1B to worthy causes. Hack VC, that venture capital, yes, started a $200M fund focused on financing early-stage crypto, blockchain, and web3 start-ups. Shake Shack is running a promotion offering BTC rewards for people using Block’s Cash App to buy items. I wonder how long will take for SEC to close this down. Talking about SEC, they are working on some custody rule requiring advisors to hold a client’s securities with designated custodians, and they are for now Coinbase and Anchorage Digital Bank, from what we know. Also, according to research, 33% of women are planning to buy some crypto this year. Well done! OKX, formerly OKEx, is Manchester City Official Crypto Exchange Partner.

· Bad news: US SEC is investigating NFTs to determine if they can be used to raise funds like traditional securities. Opening another can of worms, apparently. Ukraine's minister of digital transformation asked Binance, Kucoin, Kraken, and Coinbase to block Russian users, but the answer from all of them was “No can do, mate!” as ordinary citizens have nothing to do with this. The ones having all the money, the oligarchs, will not use crypto anyway, as this is way too easy to track on the blockchain. The US Treasury Department asked very nicely Binance FTX and Coinbase to block sanctioned individuals and addresses. The exchanges stated they will not do that. Interesting times to live soon enough. That being said, different US entities are currently acquiring blockchain analytics tools to follow the money. Ex-META coders want to raise $200M to bring back the DIEM blockchain. Why? Bitconnect’s founder will face 70 years of prison if convicted of all charges, as they allegedly defrauded investors of $2.4B in a Ponzi scheme. Treasure (MAGIC) the largest NFT marketplace on Arbitum blockchain, was exploited, and NFTs worth $1.4M were stolen. If you delist everything you have on the market, you should be safe.

· Joke of the week: It is not only ordinary people that can become Immunity and COVID19 virus experts or war analysts overnight, now we have Bank of America jumping from ‘crypto is bad’ to ‘we are crypto experts and we tell you that there is no crypto-winter on sight’ narrative as they predicted that everything will be super in the next 6 months. Coming from the same people that are experts in telling me what to do with my money, but don’t know what to do with theirs. Yes, I must to admit my guilty pleasure, every time when one of these super advisors is asking me to join them in some lifetime opportunity; I ask them how much they invested in it from their own money. Usually, the answer is ‘nothing yet’.

Best regards, 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 the higher rewards for your investments using Blockfi, Hodlnaut, and Celsius.network. _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.