Fear never builds the future, but hope does (weekly crypto updates)
What happened in the past week? Well, this time it is mostly about the BTC ETFs, as 11 of them got approved by the SEC, which means more institutional money is to come into crypto-assets. Not much extra, except Gary Gnesler talking to himself on Twitter. What else? Read below:
Bitcoin: The fees for ETFs are announced, with Bitwise the cheapest at $0.24 and the first 6 months gratis, followed by Ark, VanEck and Templeton at around $0.29. None of them bought BTC yet. The Blackrock dropped to 0.25%, and ArkInvest, 21 Shares, Bitwise and Valkyrie dropped their fees to 0.2% or lower. They really want our money. Only Grayscale is still sleeping on it, with 1.5% fees. The SEC approved 11 BTC ETFs, unlocking billions (or maybe trillions) of fresh capital and mainstream accessibility. In a surprising move, Vanguard chose to ban all the BTC ETFs, from day 1 and decided to not offer BTC ETFs on their platform. CleanSpark secured a stack of 60.000 Bitmain units to be received between April and June, almost 50 Exahashes/sec, increasing its mining power by 400%. Bank of England governor and dinosaur in charge, Andrew Bailey, said that BTC is an 'inefficient' payments innovator, with no intrinsic value. (Did you learn that from Gary, Sir?) Ark Invest CEO said that BTC may reach $1.5M by 2030, but once the ETFs got approved, the price dropped instead of going up. The market is full of surprises like MicroStrategy shares losing over 20% as BTC went up 10% in January. South Korea said no to ETFs. Fidelity picked Jane Street and Cumberland DRW to handle Bitcoin trades, while the other ETF issuers are using Coinbase. On the first day of trading, sport BTC ETFs saw $4.6B in trading volume just in the US.
Ethereum: Are the ETH ETFs next? Departed EVMOS co-founder Akash Khosla resurfaced bearing gifts of 59M EVMOS tokens worth $7.6M, to distribute to the core contributors. ETH co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a gas limit increase to boost network performance.
Altcoins and stablecoins: Some people are thinking that the AI coins and meme coins will be the thing this year. Ripple Labs plans to use $285M to buy back shares from early investors. Near Protocol decided that it was time for a makeover, and 35 employees got fired. The core engineering team is still the same. Paypal's stablecoin PYUSD is now powering the third largest liquidity pool on Curve, with $135M on FRAXPYUSD.
NFTs and blockchain games: X/Twitter go back instead of evolving with times, as they removed its support for premium users top use a verifiable NFT as profile picture. Wombat Dungeon Masters' The current season has just started. On Splinterlands, the Land 2.0 latest features blog post is available now on PeakD. The project looks solid, and the changes are many, one more impressive than another. You may want to buy some land on Splinterlands.
Good news: Upbit joined Coinbase and Crypto.com in receiving official clearance to operate in Singapore. BitGo may be next. USDC issuer, Circle, filed to go public soon, but the number of shares Circle would offer and their initial price at the ICO is not yet determined.
Bad news: There are talks about a public airdrop in Thailand, to all its citizens, but the opposition party aired concerns about the legal source of funding for it. Bitfinex started to restrict its services to some UK customers.
Joke of the week: Mr. Gary Gensler from the SEC wanted to remind all of us, right before the ETFs, about the scam alts, Ponzi schemes and brute force hacks, all wanting to get your hard-worked crypto. A bit of FUD, right before them crypto going up. My friend, you are so helpful! Shall I point out that the SEC pretended to be hacked when they published the 'BTC ETF approved message' a day earlier, denied it, just to confirm it 24 hours later. Was this some kind of mind game, to check how the market goes? Then Gary strikes back, telling us that the SEC doesn't endorse BTC, as this asset is very volatile and used by terror groups, while gold and silver are much better, and less volatile, except that they are not as profitable.
All the best,
George
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