In the last seven days we got a flashy Bitcoin Conference, Amazon hiring people who know ETH, first country to adopt BTC as legal tender, China telling crypto-miners to stop and much more. Just the right amount of craziness, another week in crypto for the rest of us:
Bitcoin - Michael Saylor is raising $400M selling corporate bonds, to, guess what, buy more BTC. Microstrategy stock slightly dropped after these news. One Miami luxury penthouse just got sold for $22.5M in crypto. David Guetta also put his penthouse up for sale, saying that he is accepting BTC and ETH too. And that one time when a bad news is in fact good, some central bank big guy from Banking Supervision comitee from Basel said that BTC is a HIGH RISK asset. In response BTC jumped from $33K to $38K. Apparently Jack Dowsey is looking into a way to integrate BTC Lightning Network into Twitter, or Bluesky, or both. Even Square is launching a $5M endowment in Bitcoin grants, with more to come later.
Ethereum - Amazon is hiring people with blockchain experience, especially and including Ethereum blockchain. What it is next? Vitalik Buterin was playing with Doge, when he was not working on Ethereum. He told us a story about how he bought $25K of DOGE some time ago in 2016, with less than 0.01$, and sold half at 0.07$, getting $4.3M, donated to charity. While BTC interest globally dropped by 25%, ETH interest is continuously surging, do we have a potential winner in the race? Just look at some numbers, BTC had a $141M outflows last weel (people sold it), while ETH had $33M inflows (people bought it). Shall I become an ETH maximalist? I was looking at a deep study about ETH based wallets. Conclusion in just few words: MyEthereWallet - Bad, Metamask - Good.
Altcoins - Elon latest fixation is on the Adult content crypto CumRocket (CUMMIES), with two strange tweets this week, one ''Canada USA Mexico'' a CUM acronym, another with emoji of sweat, rocket and moon (cummies to the moon), first increasing the price with 85%, second with 400%. Nexo is voting the governance proposale to pay interest daily, as opposed as once per year at the moment. It think this is a great idea, more compounding for us. The well known game Grand Theft Auto will accept crypto payments in game starting with their next GTA6, we don't know yet which crypto will be used. There is a lot of noise about Polkadot and Kusama parachains, they are limited and they are auctioned this week. Remember these two names if you want to make some profit: Karura and Shiden. The first parachain, called Shell, is already deployed. Thank me later. Solana, another crypto that i really like, just did a private token sale round, raising $314M in order to make an incubation studio meant to help projects build on Solana. Alameda, Multicoin and few other reliable names participated into it. Curve (CRV) added dynamic automated market making (AMM) to their algorithm, generating 5-10 times higher liquidity than Uniswap.
NFTs - If you are into blockchain games, you should know that Splinterlands shows bullish trends, with all the land NFTs sold, and all the Untamed NFT packs completely sold out too. Their Governance token airdrop will start soon, and it is a bit unusual, not happening one time only, but daily for 6 months. Boson Protocol (BOSON) just bought a $705K worth of land in Decentraland, planning to build a mall for global brands. This is thinking ahead, and you can find them in Vegas City. Billy Markus (the Dogecoin co-founder) is selling now a 3 tiers Doge inspired NFTs, with a value of 0.08, 0.8 and 1.5 ETH. Is he trying to make up for all his Doge he sold in 2015? Maybe. WAX, one of the main NFT blockchain platformsjust made some changes and went Carbon neutral, having a carbon footprint now as big as 5.5 people in one year. Awesome. We may have laugh when Elon did the bluster about BTC being not big on environment, but lately most of the miners are looking for renewable, clean sources of electricity for their rigs. Target achieved. What if this was what Elon wanted all along? (No, we know it was not that, not to worry about it). And do you remember when i was mentioning Arbitum to you, well, Uniswap v3 has been now deployed to Arbitum mainnet. Theta is streaming now to web 3.0, and Thetafuel had quite a pump lately.
Good news - Biggest one this week is the small nation of El Salvador addopting BTC as legal tender, announced at the Miami Bitcoin Conference, and apparently it was approved, and BTC will be used on par in El Salvador in the same time with the ol' dollar. Permanent residency will be offered to anyone investing more than 3 BTC in El Salvador economy. What's more? They plan to mine BTC in El Salvador using volcanic energy for 100% clean mining. Take that!Still IMF moaned and warned Salvador that BTC as legal tender has many risks. US recovered a $2.3M crypto ransom after FBI managed to catch the hackers behind Colonial Pipeline heist in May. And no, they did not hacked the Bitcoin, they just found the private key on some centralized server where they got acces, most probably. Coinbase was quick to state that they did not worked with FBI into taking down the DarkSide hacking group. Quick note: This is a fearless Eastern European hacking group, atacking many countries, but they have avoid by default computers using former Soviet countries languages; part of their blacklisted languages list being Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Tajik, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Uzbek, Tatar, Moldovan and Romanian. Honot among thieves? The state of Texas is also looking to become crypto-friendly, and now it allows state chartered banks to store crypto on their clients behalf, if they have the right protocol in place.GIC, the sovereign wealth fund managinf Singapore foreigh reserve invested $70M in a crypto-company, BC Group, listed in Hong Kong, the one managing the crypto exchange OSL, after they bought $300M worth of Coinbase shares in 2018.
Bad news - China is not a joke, on Weibo (Chinese Twitter equivalent) many high profile accounts related to crypto were closes, as they violated certain 'laws and rules'. Two of China coal intensive provinces were ordered to shut down the crypto mining operations. The market didn't reacted at all as once such a bad news. I think everybody knows by now what China wants. Trump decided that half of America hating him is not enough, aiming for the whole world, when he said that 'Bitcoin looks like a scam', and it is also competing with the dollar. Well, he got that last part right, at least. After Donald, quite few US regulator figures started to create FUD about how bad is the BTC. They are focusing at the moment on the DEFI derivatives, which probably will be classified illegal in US. A group of at least 6 Coinbase users are filling a suit against the crypto-exchange, as they claim their accounts were wrongfully frozen. leading to a loss in value bigger than $5M, as the market moved down.
Mass adoption - FTX got the naming rights for Team Solomid, but apparently there are issues with this, as the sponsorship by cryptocurrency exchanges like FTX have some restrictions, and cannot promote any brand placements in North America, for League of Legends and Valorant games created by Riot Games. NHL San Jose Sharks team aim to become a crypto-whale, using BitPay to accept 5 crypto as payment for season tickets, sponsorships and other large payments (they selected for the first try ETH, BCH, DOGE, USDC and BUSD). They are not the first team to dable into crypto, as Sacramento Kings offered BTC wages option and Dallas Mavericks accepted DOGE as payment already. State Street bank launched State Street Digital, a cryptocurrency division.
And the funny piece of news for last, in a bizzare turn of events, we got a streaker with a Shiba Inu picture on his skin jumping on the Bitcoin 2021 conference scene, shouting ''Dogecoin to the Mooon!'' before security grabbed him and sent him out. The attendants were booing masivelly.
That's all for today.
All the best,
George
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