Another week, another grinding, and all the changes, but not so much. Not even Elon stopped trolling much more than usual, or maybe is just us, getting immune to all the similar, repeating news. Let's see what happen!
I decided give a special line to our chief troll, Elon - SEC is warning him to stop violating the court order of no-tweet-without-adult-supervision. His 'Indeed' tweet knock down Bitcoin in May and almost had the bear market upon us. The market did not recovered completelly even today. He keeps playing with Dogecoin related tweets, and now the meme coin is in Top10 because of his actions. He is known now as the Dogefather, giving this title to himself. The latest hype: Anonymous hack group posted a video shaming him publicly, and exposing some of his wrong moves. Now, we do not even know if they are the right Anonymous, but many people in cryptosphere share thsese views and become tired of Tesla CEO online antics. The main argument was that he is destroying crypto holders life with one meme, that he is using children as workforce in underdeveloped countries on lithium mines, and that Tesla is surviving on government subsidies, this being the reason to distance himself from Bitcoin and not the coal energy used for mining farms in China.
Good news - On June 3rd, Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami is expecting more than 50k atendees, including Michael Saylor, Jack Dorsey, Vitalik Buterin, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, cryptopunk Nick Szabo and many more. Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is playing a game of cat and mouse, saying that they do not advise the banks to be against crypto dealing and the crypto ban from 2018 is no longer valid, being overturned by the Supreme Cout of India last year, yet, there is still not enough support for the regular people to access crypto using their bank accounts. The new Visa Card offered by Coinbase is providing 4% Cashback in XLM or 1% in BTC if you use either Apple Pay or Google Pay. Norton Antivirus is joining crypto, offering ETH mining service to their 10M+ customers.
Bad news - Belt Finance (BELT) is another hacked BSC DEFI that lost a bit more than $6M in BUSD, via flash loan exploit of CAKE, and they are currently working on a compensation plan. Withdrawals and deposits are soon to be resumed. IRS is focusing more lately on tax collection on crypto earnings, using a proposal requiring financial institutions (banks) to report any transaction bigger than $600, being that bussiness or personal. This may also include crypto exchanges and crypto-custodians operating in US. Do you remember Bitconnect scam? SEC is suing 5 people, but not for scamming more than $2B, choosing formal action for violating securities law selling the token and they want to force them to turn over any earning plus interest related to the case. Another funny situation, SEC is admiting that Ripple won the case, but they just do not want to publicly say it. ''You won, but I did not lose.'' Bank Of England and Bank of Japan Governors were joined by a Senior Irish Financial Authority official in a far cry about how bad can crypto be for you. They had crypto options and futures banned in England, though. Swedish Central Bank also is proving to adopt an anti crypto behaviour. Helium had a blockchain outage on 29th of May last month, and released a post mortem and an emergency mandatory update to fix that. Japan issued a warning to crypto derivatives exchange Bybit.
Bitcoin - If you did not heard them all, a Canadian electric car company , Daymak, is working on a prototype called Spiritus, which has an intregrated mining device for BTC, ETH, DOGE, ADA and few others. It is set tyo launch on 2023. P2P crypto marketplace Paxful is launching a Paxful Pay app, meant to allow bussinesses to accept Bitcoin payments.
Ethereum - The layer 2 solution known as Arbitrum is live, and they are using a rolling up technology for gas fee free transactions, before reporting to ETH network. The current amount staked on ETH 2.0 contract is 5.2M ETH ($13.5B) as ETH is $2630. As Ethereum is moving towards proof of stake consensus, the rewards rate is close to 23% APY, but you cannot use your deposits or rewards until phase 1.5 of the PoS upgrade goes live. On 3rd of July the first ETH node in space will be set on International Space Station, delivered by SpaceX.
Altcoins - The digital Yuan is out there, and the Chinese government swears that they will not use it to spy on their own citizens. Shall we believe this? I do not know. They are holding a huge lottery on Beijing, with a prize bigger than $6M in digital currency. US may use their own CBDC to do it too, if only they would have one. Ha Ha!DOGE is now on Coinbase Pro, and can be traded against USD, EURO, GBP, BTC and USDT. European Union is also worried that they are being left behind in the CBDC race. They are mentioning risks to stability if they will not issue an European equivalent soon.
NFTs - FTX released a NFT marketplace on both Solana and ETH, and OpenSea added Matic as NFT blockchain, with much lower fees. And, yeah, Justin Sun won the bid for the Golden Whale NFT, the most expensive Bitcoin NFT up to date. Also, if you sell or buy a NFT spending more than $10K on it IN us, you need to report this to IRS too. You little money launderer! You did not get any of them yet, try the Sotheby's virtual gallery in Decentraland then.
Mass adoption - Bank of America is hoarding more than 60 blockchain patents, but they did not anounced anything about crypto, saying that they are still evaluating the opportunities and risk involved. Circle, the company behind USDC, raised $440M in a private investment round, apparently this is the biggest investment taken by a crypto company up to now. Argentina decided to subsidize electricity used for crypto-mining, and more big projects are thinking to go in there, after the moved out from Iran, China or New York (Canadian company Bitfarms is one of the first building a 60 megawatt facility in Argentina). Uniswap adopted a DOTA eSports team - Team Secret, in a $112K sponsoring initiative. Google is making some noise, telling us that crypto ads are allowed from August, but, there is a but, only crypto companies registered with FinCen as a Money Service Bussiness can apply for it, if they met stricter criteria. Kraken just launched its Phone App, offering US bank account connectivity, fingerprint and face recognition and low limit of 10$ purchases. Release the Kraken! FTX made a 19 year naming rights contract with Miami Heat. British bank Standard Chartered is launching crypto exchange and brokerage services for institutional clients in UK and Europe.
All the best,
George
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Nice