Ho! Ho! Ho! The crypto-Christmas is coming, and there is nothing you can do to stop that. Everything is going up, some a little some a lot. Our lot, if we are lucky, they are mooning one more time. But not everything is perfect, and, in the shadows, things happen, like Binance getting upset on Norway, for example. Or maybe that's what we believe, and they may had some warning and negotiations that we do not know about it. Let's see what happened this past week in crypto-sphere:
Bitcoin: US Global Investors just bought $566K worth of Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust, representing 0.19% of the fund value.
Ethereum: One ETH address exploited a bug in some older versions of GETH, causing running nodes to split, as more than 75% of them were running on earlier versions of GETH. It was funded by a Tornado Cash client. The bug was also present on Virtual Machine compatible blockchains like BSC and HEBO. Most of the network was updated. We are all waiting now for Metis, which is a fork of Optimism, offering optimistic rollups with low fees under 1$, fast speeds, security, faster withdrawals on Layer 1 and improved usability of Dapps. The other star of the show, Arbitum One as the next best ETH scaling solution, was just launched by Offchain Labs, after a $120M funding roung. Unlike Metis, Arbitum one is a Layer 2 scaling solution, promising to handle much more transactions at a much lower cost. Sounds good to me. Many big names like Aave, Chainlink, MakerDAO and others 400+ projects are already building on Arbitum One.
Altcoins: Did you heard of Opyn? This is one of the largest DEFI options protocol, owning 94% of the volumes in August., as their main strategy is to encourage protocol integrations. Zilliqa had some difficulties after their Mainnet upgrade v8.1.0, as the final globe state after upgrade was not the same with the one before. The world is waking up. Metamask had only a bit over half a million users in July, but reached more than 10 millions in August. It is happening. Crypto is adopted all over the globe. Solana stablecoin UXD raised $3M in a funding round, from investors like Alameda Research, CMS Holdings and Defiance Capital. UXD is an algorithmic stablecoin, accepting BTC, SOL and ETH as collateral. SOL, AVAX and AUDIUS are the next hidden gem, waiting to pump up to the Moon lately. I am FOMOing and i decided to buy some AUDIUS tonight .
NFT: Splinterlands is becoming a global phenomenon, with 10 times more users signing in the past 30 days, and Land NFTs prices going from 5$ to 500$. 5 times more cards were minted in the past month, and their daily airdrop still has another 11 months to give us rewards. Larva Labs, the one behind Cryptopunks and Meebits, are now signed by United Talent Agency. The Hollywood giant wants to move the NFT craze into the movie, TV and videogames market. Vincent Van Dough, joining Su Zhu and Kyle Davies from Three Arrows Capital, is planning to launch a NFT Fund, aiming to raise $100M in funds. A Shiba Inu NFT sold with $4M previously is now evaluated at 225M after it was divided in 17B fractions called DOG, and sold in an auction. Sotheby's is selling 101 Bored Apes, having some $4.5M bids right now. Christie's is selling a Curio's Cards set, including 30 NFT, one of them being the 17b misprint. Meanwhile, Opensea surpassed $1B in weekly trading volume. Talking about Opensea, they seem to have scaling issues, and they are even paying 1 ETH if you refer some good IT engineers and designers to them. And in a heart warming story, a 12 year old boy made more than $400K this summer holiday, after he launched his own NFT collection caleld Weird Whales.
Good news: FTX just bought crypto derivatives exchange LedgerX, getting ready for a future friendly regulation. Twitter is letting now its users to add their BTC and ETH addresses to their profile. What better way to collect your wallets and link them with your name? Naomi Osaka, the tennis player, is looking ionto crypto, as she started with some Dogecoin, and also sold a $600K six pieces NFT collection.
Bad news: Binance stopped all their pairs and paiments involving Norwegian krone, and ended their Norwegian language support, just a week after they discontinued South Korean won. They are trying hard to tackle the regulatory challenges all over the world. Not only, they are also thinking about an IPO using their US Binance Branch, in the next 3 years. ''Crypto-Dad'' Christopher Giancarlo, the ex chair of US Commodity Futures Trading Comission (CFTC) is stepping down from BlockFi board, remaining only as advisor, if needed. BlockFi was targeted by regulators, due to its interest account. Dogecoin 2.0 was told to change their name, as it is misusing the Dogecoin brand, by the Dogecoin foundation. Uniswaps is under regulators radar at the moment. Bilaxy Exchange was hacked, with an estimate $450M missing from their hot wallet. That happened right after the Cream Finance hack, where they lost 'only' $19M due to some flash loan attack on ETH-AMP pair. In Venezuela. one financial advisor faked his own kidnapping and run away with $1M in Bitcoin. His clients BTC. And Trump is still alive, calling crypto a disaster waiting to happen in the dark corners of the web.
Mass adoption: Cuba government want to use and regulate crypto, with its central bank starting to teach the Cubans on how to use them. Their economical situation is not so good, with lack of food and medicine, high inflation and anti-government protests. Japanese giant SBI Holdings plan to launch first Japanes crypto fund, including BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, LTC and maybe others. The entry price is $9100.
Joke of the day: So, according to the new US bill, they don't want from the exchanges only US citizens data, they want all the data, so they can exchange it with other countries to find more about what the US citizens are spending abroad. Big Brother move? At least this one is possible, unlike the regulate the decentralized DEFI one. Meanwhile in Russia, people are just stealing their friends mining rig, as thereis not much of a regulation against that, still you can land for 3 years in prison for theft, normal theft, if you do that.
All the best,
George
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