What happened in the past week? Binance has some problems with the payments, and Coinbase is getting stronger. ETH ETF is here, but BTC ETF is not yet ready. What else? Read below:

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• Bitcoin: Coinbase's reserves are worth $25B in BTC, rivalling Satoshi's holdings. They were also thinking of buying FTX Europe before the bankruptcy but decided to not move forward. The SEC is doing its best to delay and dodge the question, as they delayed Ark BTC spot ETF decision to January 2024. No Christmas miracle, as some believed this to happen in December. Bitwise filed an amendment to its spot Bitcoin ETF, pushing back against the SEC's denials. The House lawmakers called for the SEC to approve outstanding spot BTC ETF applications "immediately". Texas is the number one BTC mining state, with over 28% of the national hash rate, becoming more attractive than New York and its anti-crypto measures. Bitcoin Ordinals creator proposes a new crypto experiment - Runes, as a UTXO-based protocol that could better align with BTC to avoid extra outputs. Following El Salvador's example, Argentina is working to convert excess natural gas emissions into electricity to power crypto-mining. MicroStrategy buys more BTC, holding over 158K BTC now.

• Ethereum: ETH's Dencun-Cancun upgrade, aimed to improve scalability, is facing a potential delay until early next year. Crypto exchange HTX hacked for nearly $8M in ETH. Some people think that we will have ETH ETF in the US next week, personally, I will believe it when it happens. Meanwhile, Valkyrie is adding ETH futures to its already existing Bitcoin ETF, starting on October 3. Arbitrum announced a $50M incentive program, while Optimism's third airdrop goes live. Vitalik Buterin raises caution around DAO-governed staking pools as they can expose large portions of the network to attacks if compromised. The amount of staked ETH is now bigger than 22%, and Lido's share is 33%, with some asking for the limit of the staked ETH growth rate, cap Lido share to 25% and the introduction of the financial incentives for decentralization via EigenLayer. VanEck prepares ETH futures ETF launch releasing two 'Enter the Ether' television commercials. They also planned to donate 10% of the ETH ETF profits to ETH developers.

• Altcoins and stablecoins: Celestia announced plans to allocate 6% of its native tokens in an airdrop split between public contributors, early rollup and IBC adopters on Ethereum, Cosmos Hub and Osmosis. Check it here: https://genesis.celestia.org/. Chainlink brings cross-chain protocol to the blockchain. BIS and central banks of France, Singapore and Switzerland successfully tested cross-border wholesale CBDCs. Google Cloud added 11 new blockchains to BigQuery, including Polygon, Optimism and Polkadot. After some enhanced visibility due to its inclusion in additional centralized exchanges, PayPal's stablecoin market cap went up 88% in September, from $2.12M to $9.29M. Binance exits Russia, selling to the new crypto exchange CommEX (want to bet this is somehow related to the government?) and loses EUR support from Paysafe, which stopped processing euro deposits for its users. USDC lost market share for the 9th consecutive month. Coinbase offers perpetual futures on non-US exchanges and added to this, they just received a major payment institution license in Singapore.

• Blockchain games and NFT: Arbitrum Odissey returns, after a year break, and you can find all the details here, with the next 7 weeks' quests. Is anyone out there still not playing Golem Overlord? They added some interesting features lately. By the way, did everyone get their free Fox NFT from Shapeshift? Wombat Dungeon Masters' season has just started, and now the potions have Wombat requirements added too. On Splinterlands, the Land 1.5 feature will be online soon, as it is already on the test server, and then we will see some interesting moves on the game market, as the Rebellion pack sale may start before the land feature is launched. I am slowly accumulating the needed DEC, but it is doing so well on Tribaldex in terms of SPS and BXT returns that I may as well keep it in there.

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• Good news: Tuesday, September 26, 2023, the BlockFi Chapter 11 Plan related to bankruptcy was approved, getting us a step closer to the moment we will get our crypto back. Gemini allocated $24M to expand its operations in India, growing its development centre in Gurgaon. The SEC chief, Gensler, got roasted over crypto accounting rules, BTC ETF delays and whether tokenized Pokemon cards are securities, for more than four hours at a House Financial Committee hearing. Buenos Aires is going full blockchain, letting citizens store official documents like birth certificates in digital wallets, powered by zkSync, to provide safer, faster services. Web3 developers earned more than $120K globally, with North America having $166K on average, and Asia and South America trailing at $75-90K. Kraken received new licenses in Ireland and Spain.

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• Bad news: JPMorgan's UK subsidiary bank is set to restrict crypto payments for its customers from mid-October. OpenSea revealed that a third-party vendor got hacked, exposing some user API keys. They quickly expired the compromised ones and told affected users to generate new ones. Phew! Hong Kong police seek Interpol's help to find the leaders of the defunct crypto exchange JPEX after they mysteriously disappeared. The SEC wants Do Kwon on US soil by October 13, but his lawyers in Montenegro said that this is impossible, and asked if they settle for a virtual meeting. Ripple decided to not buy Fortress, in the end, which made me think that this was just some pump-and-dump move made by some big players to get rid of some XRP. Co-founder of bankrupt Hedge Fund 3AC Su Zhu was arrested in Singapore while he tried to leave the country. The FTX exploiter transferred over $17M in ETH across various accounts. The CFTC charged crypto trading platform Mosaic and its owner, Sean Michael, for fraud.

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• Joke of the week: Former FTX US president Brett Harrison's company gets regulatory approval, despite his role in the FTX $8B epic failure. They can operate in the US, doing futures, options and swaps. Nothing dangerous here, and for sure we will see some people stupid enough to think that they can make money collaborating with them. Until it will happen again. This piece of news was almost taken over by Meta hyper-realistic Metaverse avatars, some virtual people almost indistinguishable from real ones. Problems, anyone?

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All the best,

George

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Why not...

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...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands - Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) (Wombat Dungeon Masters NFT staking on WAX) and (X-Portal - Elrond all in one app, free NFTs, and more).

...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog, using the 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.