Don’t pray for lighter burdens, but for stronger backs! (weekly crypto updates)

Everything is going down. What is happening? Are we going back into the bear traps? Bitcoin is under 20K, and the rest follows. Crypto-market in the UK is suffering for now, BTC ATMs are being taken down in East London, and Binance is stopping all their Earn programs interest in the United Kingdom. FTX continues the circus. What else? Read bellow:

• Bitcoin: Bitcoin NFT seems to evolve in a whole 4.5B market in the next 2-3 years. Arthur Hayes, a well-known Bitcoin maximalist, is coming back, promoting BTC once more. He was six months in home detention after Bitmex allegedly failed to implement an anti-money laundering program. Unlike SBF or Do Kwon, he never stole or misappropriated any customer funds. TwelveFold sales, made by Yuga Labs, reached $16.50M, being first of its collection on Bitcoin as ordinal. If we were to listen to Fed Chairman Jerome Powel interest rates in the US are going up l, by a possible 0.5%, and Bitcoin is not under 20K ($19973 at the current moment). Silicon Valley Bank dropped some, making BTC fall under $20K, losing close to $1.8B while doing it. UK authorities are taking action against Bitcoin ATMs operating illegally in East London. Biden Admin budged proposed 30% tax on crypto mining energy.

• Ethereum: Account Abstraction (AA) is a core Ethereum roadmap initiative aiming to replace externally owned accounts with smart contract accounts. ETH went as low as $1370 earlier today and it is slowly recovering for now. The SEC guy, Gary, said that ETH is security. The chairman of the CFTC said that it is not, ETH and stablecoins are commodities. Interesting to see where this is going. As the latest addition, the New York attorney general joined the party, saying that ETH is security, comparing ETH with LUNA. Somebody didn't finish their homework. Bitcoin and Ethereum both experienced a surge in assets under management, the highest since June 2022. Some Kucoin lawsuit was involved too. Even US Federal Reserve is forming a team of experts to monitor crypto, focusing on unregulated stablecoins.

• Altcoins: Ripple vs SEC match is still going on, and no verdict yet, or in the next three months. The fate of the whole crypto-system seems to be at stake, as Ripple's CEO put it on. Babel Finance wants to solve their $766M hole using an algorithmic stablecoin, called Hope. Sound totally legit, right? As long as it is not using the Luna/UST model, it cool. Vitalik had enough of people giving him 50% of their memecoins, and he just sold 500 trillions of Shitoku tokens for $0.59M, making it drop 77% in 25 minutes. He did that last year also, selling 1B Shiba and donating the money to support India during the latest COVID crisis. Twitter and Elon is working on their X Everything app, and I could swear that this was already done on Hive blockchain. Tether is fuming, after some Wall Street journal said that they used dodgy intermediares and shell companies to access the traditional banking system, using fake sales invoices and contracts for every deposit and withdrawal. Tether's CTO said that the report contains a ton of misinformation and inaccuracies, and that USDT and Bitfinex have world-class compliance programs. I do not know why, but I do not trust them. Pancake (CAKE) is getting ready to deploy version 3 in April improving liquidity provisioning and leading to more competitive trading fees. Kraken is planning to launch their own bank. Can they? BUSD market cap dropped 43% in the last 30 days, due to a combination of factors. As Binance stopped trading USDC, Coinbase (*affiliated to Circle - the ones with USDC) announced that they will suspend BUSD within the month. Yet, some good news, Voyager secured court approval to sell its assets to Binance for $1.3B. MakerDAO made a proposal to allocate $750M to US Treasuries.

• Blockchain games and NFTs: Bitcoin may be down, but in February alone, $148M were received by game developers alone to build their games. Leading video game engine Unity listed 13 blockchain based SDK. This week, the social and digital identity dapp Lifeform on BNB Chain registered 371K unique active wallets, becoming the second most used dapp. Blur grew its user base by 1%, but OpenSea dropped their unique active wallets by 44%, and its trading volume by 66%. Binance is adding Polygon to its NFT platform. Hermes goes for MetaBirkins, after a judge rules that they violated the trademarks, asking the artist behind the project to give them every penny they made selling the NFTs. Amazon is working to launch a NFT marketplace, with NFT s tied to real-world assets. Genesis League validator nodes are going to sale soon. Splinterlands Chaos Legion pack sale is coming to an end, with less than 100K left.

• Good news: Finally, some people having funds on Celsius, and not using them for the Earn accounts may be able to withdraw them, up to 6-7K, if I am not mistaken. Coinbase announced wallet-as-a-service, allowing any company to build their own fully customizable wallets.

• Bad news: A new crypto mixer, compliant with US regulations, called Privacy Pools, was just created by Ameen Soleimani. Wanna bet that this will get some extra attention from SEC or other US government bodies? India included crypto in their anti-laundering money law. Silvergate Bank is entering in voluntary liquidation.

• Joke of the week: The FTX circus continues. SBF will be limited to use a flip phone with no internet access, and a laptop with only Coinmarketcap, Netflix, Youtube, Spotify, NFL.com and Uber Eats. Too much, if you ask me. Meanwhile, Judge John Dorsey denied the appointment of an independent examiner to investigate the exchange collapse, at a cost of something like $100M, as the FTX customers would end up paying the bill. Isn't that doubling up on the work already done by the current management? You bet. Something like $307K was paid to FTX CEO just in February. and the law firm working with them was billed $16.8M in January alone. Their consulting firm was also paid $12.3M. And guess what, £1.4M was paid as bonus to 10 specific employees, vital to the succes of the Chapter 11 case. Hard to see anything left to be paid to the poor customers, if the bankruptcy process is taking more than 1-2 years.

All the best,
George

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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 Master - NFT staking game) and (CryptoBrewmaster - Beer factory sim).

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