Between some groceries shopping and some cinema trips (Dune and James Bond needed to be seen), another week is flying away from us. The market is as lively as ever, with some good news incoming soon. First BTC ETF was approved, every company in crypto and not only is working on their own Metaverse, and Facebook is told off as they try to grab some money from their users. Let's see what happened:
Bitcoin: We got the Proshares Bitcoin Futures ETF trading live, from 19.10.21, and most probably those among the others just pushed BTC to an ATH this week ($66950). They reached $570M in assets in Day 1. Investco chose not to pursue the launch of Bitcoin Futures ETF, now that they are not first on the market to launch it. Grayscale also applied to convert his Bitcoin Fund into an ETF ( this is the world largest fund, with almost $40B in it). We also have VanEck Bitcoin Strategy ETH to be launched next week, most probably under the ticker XBTF. In the real world, we got now BTC ATM in Walmart, even if I am sure that there is a hefty fee if you buy it from there. Some funny fact, there was a flash crash of the BTC, from 60+K to $8.2K, a surprising 87%, apparently caused by a glitch in the trading algorithm. I wonder if the losses and ins were trigerred by this one. Kazahstan, after many BTC miners moved in there, seems to suffer an energy crisis right now.
Ethereum: After the first BTC ETF were approved in US, everybody's thinking that the ETH ETF will be next. Will they? As a matter of fact, ETH is beginning its transition to ETH 2.0, as the Beacon Chain’s deposit contract, one essential piece of ETH’s Serenity upgrade, is live. Check this tweet comments to see the latest achievements towards ETH 2.0.
Altcoins: Polkadot is expected to go up a lot in the next few months, as the parachains auction will start soon. Binance burned 1.3M BNB, in order to contain the coin inflation. Cosmos (ATOM) is following Polkadot example with Kusama, getting ready to launch a canary network called Sagan, to be used as testnet. Compound governance is quite active now, trying to recover after their first major exploit event. Polygon just avoided a $850M hack, as a white hat hacker identified a critical vulnerability, getting a $2M bounty for his work. The issue was with the transaction burn, that could be used to exit multiple times. Sorted now. In terms of TVL, BSC has 11% dominance, with SOL 6%, LUNA 5% and AVAX 2% for now. ETH is still the main one, with the rest of it. FLOW is now more decentralized, with Dapper Labs running less than a third of the active consensus nodes (32%). I was a bit surprised to see UMA going to their August high of more than $14. They are doing a good job lately, supporting an incredible number of projects, mainly DAO related. Check them too. (They have a very active discord, with a SuperUmans initiative - a lot to learn there).
NFTs: The Mekaverse, a collection of 8888 Mekas sold out via a raffle system at 0.2 ETH, and subsequentely reached a floor price of 6-8 ETH, and the most expensive one to sell was 125 ETH ($440k). There are rumours that the raffle system was not quite fair, as some users got more luck than others, with one getting 59 Mekas valued 110+ ETH. Axie staking seems to be a success, but the interest into the game seems to slow down now. Splinterlands launched their new Chaos Legion packs presale, with some cool advantages, so if you buy 100-2000 packs you get another 10-20% bonus, if you buy 1000+ packs you get a Legionaire title, worth 100.000 airdrop points, and their airdrop is still on daily for another 8 months, and also, most important, for every 50 packs you get a Airdrop card every time, for 1000 packs you get a gold Airdrop card (on the last set Untamed, the Gold airdrop cards have a price range between $2000 to $100K - Legendary summoner one). Coinbase was impressed by the reaction received on their NFT platform announcement. As a side quest, Coinbase also signed an agreement with NBA, WNBA, NBA G NBA 2K and USA basketball league to sponsor them in a multi-year deal. Animoca Brands, the famous blockchain games developer, doubled their valuation, up to $2.2B, after another investment round (with Ubisoft, Sequoia Capital and Dragonfly Capital being some of the investors). Mojito, the c0mpany supporting Sotheby's with their NFT Metaverse project, raised $20M with their first funding round. Everyone is doing some Metaverse this days, after they started an NFT platform or market last week. Tencent is starting a gaming studio, believed to be the foundation of their metaverse project. And, if you fancy a Punk on BSC for 0.1 BNB, mint them in here.
Good news: Galaxy Digital raised a $325M investment fund, aiming at projects that combine content, finance and technology. FTX raised $420M from 69 investors in a Series B funding round, and one of the names was BlackRock. Are them big investing names making a move? Zilliqa got a new CEO, Dr Ben Livshits, ex chief scientist at Brave Browser, also worked for Microsoft, Netscape and MIT, and he said he is focusing now on DEFI, digital content creation and distribution and NFTs. Bakkt goes public on New York Stock Exchange on Monday. Huobi Japan is the 7th crypto exchange allowed to offer derivatives, as a Type 1 financial instrument bussiness.
Bad news: New York Attorney General Letitia James ordered two cryptolending platform to cease their activity (no names given but the general idea is that they talk about Celsius and Nexo), and three others were asked to provide information (Blockfi, Crypto.com and another one). Indexed Finance, an ETH based initiative to create tokens related to the market indexes, was hacked, exploiting a flaw in the smart cxontract protocol, with a total loss of $16M. Estonian regulators want to revoke licences for all the crypto exchanges in the country and make them re-apply. They revoked already more than 70% of them until December 2020, and still ,there are about 400 fully licenced companies now, more than the rest of the Europe alltogether. Fitch Ratings warns about stablecoins creating havoc on securities market (cough* with a hint towards USDT being backed almost 50% by commercial paper *cough). Obviously, they did not learn about the meme coins yet. Shall I tell them?
Mass adoption: Global Brokerage company Interactive Brokers just launched crypto trading for registered investment advisors (RIA) and they started with BTC, ETH, LTC and BCH.The fixed inocme giant Pimco will start to invest more in digital assets. Houston Firefighters Retirement Fund invested $25M in BTC and ETH, via StoneRidge. Good for them. A mexican startup is using blockchain to avoid counterfeit and fraud with their COVID19 testing. Russia and Belarus are considering adding extra taxes for miners electricity. Blockfi VISA card managed 2 billion dollared in annualized spend in just their first 90 days.
Joke of the week: This is not necesarily bad, but still, the US Senate stated that Facebook made quite often business decisions that harmed its users and the economy, and they cannot be trusted to manage a payment sustem or digital currency, as Facebook started their Novi wallet as a pilot in US and Guatemala. Facebook need to be stopped, whatever name his project has, Diem or Novi, and this was the Senate friendly advice to the giant tech company. Basically Elizabeth Warren and a comittee of another 4 senators demanded Facebook to cancel the project. While they can look high and mighty in US, I don't think they can stop Mark to test the wallet outside United States, and just not offer the feature to Americans yet.
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).
_...get the higher rewards for your investments using Blockfi, Hodlnaut and Celsius.network. Get ETH while writing on Publish0x blog, using Presearch search engine to maximize your income with PRE tokens. Check my Lbry.tv channel in here and use Torum instead of Twitter . I am also writing on Read.cash.
How's the new Dune?