Every investor says they're long-term,and they are until the market takes a hit!(few crypto updates)

A quiet week, with everyone waiting for the 8th wonder of the modern world (read ETH Merge), and some even trying to capitalize on this (no names mentioned, cough, ADA, cough). Even OpenSea is supporting the PoS, well, they follow the money, but yeah! Chiliz and Socios go national with Argentina and its tokens. Helium tries to stay relevant but really, out of all the blockchains, you find Solana? What else? Read below:

· Bitcoin: SEC delayed VanEck’s third spot Bitcoin ETF application by 45 days. The Crypto Fear and Greed index is currently scoring 24/100, extreme fear, while the most recent rally only raises it to 47/100. Bitcoin was under $20K as the weekend started, going down from a peak of $20401 to $19779.

· Ethereum: Ethereum once again dropped under $1600, from $1643 on Friday, to $1542 24 hours later. Compound Finance accidentally froze its ETH borrowing and lending market for 7 days, when updated its Chainlink price feeds with a code error included. Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group launched euro-denominated Bitcoin and Ethereum futures sized at 5 BTC and 50 ETH per contract. Ethereum products seem to increase in August by 2.36%, while Bitcoin ones declined by 7.1%. Arbitrum, one of the best Layer 2 scaling solutions for ETH, upgraded from Arbitrum One to Arbitrum Nitro, vastly increasing the network speed and reducing transaction costs. Strangely enough, OpenSea is planning to support NFTs only on the Proof of stake version of the ETH Mainnet, once the Merge is completed.

· Altcoins: Cardano (ADA) is getting ready for the Vasil hard fork, sometimes in September, depending on crypto exchanges. MakerDAO co-founder released a blog post talking about decentralization, as always being the intent and purpose of DAI, mentioning Tornado Cash as an example and possible reason. Socios is teaming up with Argentine Football Association, to be the sole distributor of the ARG token for the next 4 years, while building a gamified engagement and rewards platform. Helium is moving out from its own I0T blockchain to Solana, citing scalability issues. Aave's outstanding loans dropped 50% in the last quarter. What is happening in there? I just learned that Klaytn (KLAY) was created by the South Korean giant internet messaging corporation Kakao. Interesting!

· Blockchain games and NFTs: I am still waiting for the SPS rewards for Splinterlands nodes, as they first mentioned the end of August as the initial date, but I presume everyone is busy with the Splinterfest in Vegas. I am looking at one interesting Wrestling Play2Earn game on Hive, trying to find out if it can be profitable long-term. It is still in the beginning, but the concept is cool. Brewery and distillery-focused DAO, Barrel DAO, launched a collection of 333 NFTs, costing 1.35 SOL, each of which can be used to redeem a 16-pack of Solana Summer Shandy (not an official product of Solana). The Team behind Art Blocks launched a new product, in two versions, Art Blocks Engine (for creation and storage of generative assets on-chain, and Art Blocks Engine Flex, for asset creation and storage using decentralized solutions like IPFS. Digital collectibles company Veve partnered with Marvel to release 3 comics featuring Spiderman and Black Panther, using silent auction, on Friday, September 2nd. Proof Collective, the ones with Moonbirds, is working on a new NFT initiative, and planning for a token, apparently. There are talks about Moonbirds Mythics, a 20.000 NFT collection to be released in 2023. Good news: FTX CEO claimed that the crypto exchange has no plans to acquire Huobi, amid speculations from Bloomberg. Crypto lending platform Nexo allocated $50M to buy back its native token, over the next 6 months, for more stability, and the tokens will have 12 month vesting period. Hermes is getting ready to enter the NFT market, with a trademark including crypto, metaverse, and NFTs. Ticketmaster will use Flow blockchain, by Dapper Labs, to produce NFTs for selected events. Voiced by Adam Draper, founder of Boost Capital, users can now request custom videos of his Bored Ape talking about life advice and other motivational stuff, with the starting price of the clip being $25. OpenSea adds Polygon support to Seaport Protocol. Pegaxy looks like it had its better days, and there is no money to be made in there anymore.

· Good news: Triall, a blockchain-based platform for clinical software, partnered with the non-profit Mayo Clinic, optimizing the design of clinical trials and bringing up to life a new blockchain use to the main public. Singapore is intensifying the surveillance of digital asset firms, trying to protect their citizens from disasters like the ones related to Luna, 3AC, Zipmex, and Hodlnaut. JP Morgan's head suggests that real crypto use cases are yet to surface, once the market matures. It seems that Credit Suisse held more than $32M in digital assets for its clients at the end of June. In a strange turn of events, Celsius started to pay back some of its clients, allocating $50M out of the $200M needed, for the custody accounts, if the users have no outstanding loans. No news for the Earn or Borrow accounts yet, where we talk about more than $4.2B held in the interest-bearing accounts.

· Bad news: Over $3B had been stolen from the overall DEFI system, with 2/3 of it related to bridge hacks. SUI blockchain creators' Mysten Labs Discord server has been hacked, with a link posted, informing about an alleged airdrop. OptiFi accidentally shut down its Mainnet, when they tried to update its Solana code, leaving $661K in user funds inaccessible. Kyber Network was attacked and lost $265K due to code vulnerability, but only 2 addresses were affected, and the exploit was sorted in less than 2 hours. Babylon Finance, a DEFI management platform, announced its closure, after the Rari Fuse exploits back in April, with 87% of the TVL lost after the event. Apparently, SEC created problems for Grayscale, when they filled for XLM, ZEC, and ZEN. How is this working out, that once we send to a wrong address, our crypto is lost forever, but Crypto.com send $10M instead of $100 and noticed only after 8 months, and now they sued the client, asking for the money back. Two-faced rules, different for the rich, and punishing the poor? District of Columbia is suing Microstrategy and Michael Saylor for allegedly never paying taxes after he lived there for more than 10 years. Apparently, he lost more than $1B after his BTC bet, stepping down as head of the company because of this issue.

· Joke of the week: Facebook, I mean Meta, just announced that Facebook and Instagram users can now post NFTs, just by linking their wallet once. What a shameless way to collect data linking names to wallets. This is exactly the opposite of what Satoshi wanted. Beware of the Greeks bringing gifts (or as the original quote from Aeneid said: Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes!).

All the best,

George

Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favorite blockchain games (Splinterlands- Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) and (Rising Star - Music creators game).

...get the higher rewards for your investments using Blockfi. Get crypto while writing on Publish0x blog, using Presearch search engine to maximize your income with PRE tokens. Use Torum instead of Twitter. I am also writing for crypto on Read.cash and Hive.