Another week is gone, and the year is almost passed, in a blink of an eye. Time has no patience, and we are dying a bit with every second, hour and day. But until then, it is the time to celebrate life. What happen in crypto? Well, read it bellow:
Bitcoin: El Salvador bought another 150 BTC during the dip, reaching 1270 BTC, at $48.67K. The dip continued all the way to $42K. Some are still dreaming at the 100K for Chrismas. Good for you. As it is, one of the majoc cause of the latest drop seems to be the massive sellout of BTC by some big institutions, when $500M sold on Friday triggered more than $1.3B liquidations on long positions and had the market dropping from $21.6B to $16.7B, Now the market is recovering slowly. The trading volumes for BTC dropped in November, especially BTC-USDT. Is this a sign for Tether?
Ethereum: Some analysts, like Raoul Pal, are estimating ETH at $10K at the end of the year, more than twice from the $4K now. Personally I believe this is way to optimistic. Talking about Optimism, this is the second layer 2 integrated on ETH network, added by Across bridge, after only few weeks from Arbitum. If you are not aware, Across is a bridging sending ETH instantly from Layer 2 Rollups to Ethereum, in a secure, fast and almost feeless way. This was operational only moments after Vitalik Buterin came with some interesting proposals to change the future of ETH. We are talking about layer 2 staking, with low resource requirements, and distributed block validation (100 buckets split block validation with more than 67% validated buckets in order to be accepted), introduction of fraud proofs or ZK-SNARKs to let users to easily check the block validity, data availability sampling and secondary transaction channels to prevent censorship. I can't wait to see these ones implemented. Obviously this will make Across Protocol bridge quite useful in the future, so take a look at the project on their discord, you may even get a chance to participate in their DAO governance. Meanwhile, the ETH burned thanks to EIP-1559 reached all time high in November, with more than 350K ETH burned, a 19% month over month growth rate. Ethereum mining also surpassed BTC mining in revenue, for the 7th month in a row.
Altcoins: Avalanche (AVAX) reached an all time high of $144.96. I keep hearing about Serum, a long lost Solana based DEX, trying to reinvent themselves. Polygon (MATIC) just acquired MIR protocol for $400M.
NFTs: Talking about Opensea, they sold more than $12B worth of NFTs until now, in 2021. Even Jimmy Fallon and VISA created their own NFTs. And now a whole world knows about Bored Ape Yacht Club, Pak, Beeple and XCOPY. Other than that, Ubisoft is now the first major gaming company to launch in-game NFTs , on their Quartz platform. We got NFTX, a market letting you to deposit a whole NFT in a vault and mint fungible tokens - vTokens for the NFT value.
Blockchain games: Splinterlands is going we with the second phase of the Chaos Legion packs sale, with almost half of them already sold in few days from launch. Their first Chaos Legion Legendary card Airdrop, Doctor Blight, is already here, and I got enough of them to upgrade one to max level (which is 4). At the moment the vouchers needed to buy cards with a bonus in packs are dropped at double rate, until 8.1.22, when they will decrease from 66.666 to 20.000 per day. Axie Infinity, the breeding fee was updated, now costing 3 times more SLP, but only half the previous amount in AXS. They are talking about launching lands as NFT, with different games to be played, as Project K, expected on Q1 2022, and something like Body Part upgrade feature. After few bumps on the road, they have reached 3 million daily active users. Splinterlands is right there behind, with 1.5 million daily active users at the end of October.
Good news: There is a decentralized travel website now, called Dtravel, which is a DAO, and uses crypto as a payment for more than 250.000 destinations. Time to get your Carribean holiday, you punk! Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group is offering now crypto , including micro ETH contracts sized 0.1 ETH. Amex, Visa and Citi bank are all backing a $60M funding round at TRM Labs. And yes, this is the first time I hear about them too. And there it is, Visa Crypto Advisory Service, a new consulting arm of Visa, wanting to facilitate mass adoption of cryptocurrencies. Whatsapp just launched a pilot program letting people to send and receive money within a chat, using crypto. Not bad. This is the first real life application of Novi, that Facebook, pardon me, that Meta digital wallet. Kickstarter is starting a crowdfunding platform based on the blockchain (specifically Celo blockchain). Coinbase lauched a DEFI yield product, different than Lend, using Compound platform to earn interest on DAI.
Bad news: Bitmart lost $196M in the latest breach, as the hacker used 1inch to exchange the stolen crypto in ETH and Tornado Cash (TORN) to make the funds hard to track. They announced that they will use their own treasury to reimburse the victims. There is something in my Sushi(swap), as their CTO wanted to leave the project if core team is not given more authority and a higher pay. Hashed, a leading Web3.0 venture capital firm is investigated in South Korea for tax avoidance, after they raised $200M recently. Celsius CEO, Alex, confirmed that he personally lost some funds in the recent hack of BadgerDAO, we are talking about 594 BTC, but the customers will not be affected, they say. dYdX went down in a widespread outage due to Amazon Web Service. I think it may be related to the recent bad weather. Solana was attacked using an DDOS - distributed denial of service, but was not taked down. However, some slowdown was noticed. Somebody used a coordinated number of devices trying to overwhelm the network with fake traffic.
Mass adoption: Rumos has it that Sam Bankman Fried, FTX CEO, want to raise $1.5B for worldwide BTC derivatives exchange and FTX.US. Once done, the evaluation for FTX will reach $32B, and for FTX.US $8B. Gemini Exchange is partnering with Banco Colombia, the largest Colombian bank, planning to expand in South America. The bank customers would be able to trade BTC, ETH, LTC and BCH. There is an one-year pilot program to start. OpenSea is trying to go for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) , even if the community is thinking that a DAO will be more adequate. So, they are after the money after all. On Wednesday, we had some crypto CEO talking about crypto in front of the US congress. Right boys and girls, teach them about that bitcoin! We are talking about FTX, Coinbase, Bitfury, Stellar and Paxos.
Joke of the week: Like the ghost of Christmas Past, if that was the 1970s Christmas, we have Fabio Panetta, a member of European Central Bank executive board, telling us that crypto has no reason to exist, no value ( if 3 trillion dollars has no value, I wonder what kind of money this guy has to play around), and that they only make the environment worst, and criminals use it, and there is no regulation of the market. And that crypto pose a significant risk to the global banking system. Well, the last part is true, but this is not a bad thing, right? But there is a solution, he said, and this is called CBDC (central bank digital currency), as this is the safest and the brightest. Oh, come on man, I almost believed you, and now you are just another one trying to blame the others and shill your own token. Bad Fabio, bad, bad Fabio!
That's all for today.
All the best,
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) and (CryptoBrewmaster - Beer factory sim).
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