Harvesting Sunflowers is bad for your health, said Polygon (MATIC) - (+other weekly crypto updates)
This week Bitcoin is going down, despite some good news, USDT (Tether) is showing how centralized they are, by freezing one ETH account with more than $1M USDT in it, Solana blockchain is slow, MATIC blockchain is also slow and you should have a Mutant Serum from BAYC NFT collection to make a lot of money. What else? Read below:
Bitcoin: On January 3rd BTC celebrated 13 years from the mining of genesis block, and the hash rate went up reaching a new record of 203.5 exahashes per second. In the last 12 months, the BTC hash rate grew 49%, from 136.5 exahashes per second, after a dramatic decline to only 68 EH/s in July 2021, after the China ban. Banca Generali, an Italian bank with $87B in assets, will organize a trial letting 300.000 customers buy and sell BTC, using Conio, with a BTC wallet present in their bank account. There is only one problem with the small print, as they keep a third security key on behalf of the customer, to retrieve the funds in case of need. Goldman Sacks told clients that gold may lose some of its market shares as BTC is rising in notoriety. Salvador is moving forward with the bitcoin adoption, starting the process to issue their BTC bonds, in order to build a tax-free enclave using geothermal energy from nearby volcanoes. Bitcoin started to drop after the Federal Reserve meeting, as they discussed shrinking the balance sheet and raising interest rates.
Ethereum: Did you know that, in fact, Proof of Stake was mentioned in Ethereum's original whitepaper, the one from 2015? Talking about ETH, while having issues, Proof of Work is usually more secure than Proof of Stake, adjusting difficulty based on the hash rate levels. And you can see some potential danger looking at how often a PoS blockchain like Solana has gone offline in the last 12 months. Well, if ETH starts to do this, a lot of people will be unhappy. Even if initially the ETH team was looking to create another 64 blockchains called shards, to run in parallel with mainnet, the idea is now abandoned, in the favor of Proof of Stake. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) offered some answers, as well as the adoption of many of the Layer 2 solutions like MATIC, but the final aim is always the Proof of Stake, and this seems to be ready to be achieved in 2022.
Altcoins: On Grayscale DEFI Fund AMP has been added, and UMA and Bancor(BNT) have been removed. Tether (USDT) froze an ETH address with more than $1M USDT balance, stating that they cooperate with the authorities. That was good enough for me to promptly liquidate all my USDT, exchanging it in DAI and USDC. Early morning of 4rt of January Solana started to slow down and was offline for 4 hours, a DDoS attack is suspected, but was not confirmed. A wallet for the electronic renminbi - e-CNY - was released in China, and can be downloaded from Apple and Android app stores there, with residents of test cities allowed to register for a trial. Foreigners can also use the app at the Winter Olympics next month. One of my favorite less-known gems, IoteX, had a 2000% increase in wallets addresses, went up to 100+ positions on CoinMarketCap, increased 40x in Market capital and now it is working on something new, with great potential: MachineFi, a mix between AI, blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT). They were also listed on Coinbase and Crypto.com. Tezos (XTZ) is now in a 3-year sponsorship deal with Team Vitality, one of my favorite League of Legends teams. Go, go XTZ! Terra (LUNA) is looking to deploy their stablecoin - UST - across ETH, MATIC, and SOL blockchain, and this is big news. Got your LUNA stash? Binance invested $12M in WOO network, a liquidity platform connecting exchanges, institutions, and Defi with their users. WOO. Check them right now. I tell you only this - zero-fee trading both on and off the chain. AAVE launched a permissioned lending and liquidity service (AAVE Arc) in order to help institutions to participate in Defi while maintaining regulatory compliance. Polygon (MATIC) was almost brought down by a resource-gathering blockchain game called Sunflower Farmers, raising the transaction fee cost from a fraction of a cent to 0.50$ on average. Many of the 200.000 new accounts are believed to be bots farming NFTs on the game previously mentioned. On Hive blockchain, there are two incoming airdrops, one from the Ragnarok game, getting 1 card for every 10 Hive you own, and one from SPK(video platform) on a 1:1 basis, needed to be claimed monthly.
NFTs: Mega Mutant Serum is part of the BAYC Chemistry Club collection and has 3 tiers, reaching record sales in the last week. Opensea secured $300M in a Series C funding round led by Paradigm and Coatue, being evaluated at $13.3B now, up from $1.5B in July 2021. There is also a rumor that Opensea is negotiating with Dharma Labs to buy them for $100M in stocks and shares. This will allow them to support every step, from traditional bank withdrawals to NFT purchases. The Australian Open is releasing 6776 NFTs, also hosting a virtual event of Decentraland (MANA) platform. Did you know about Fractal, an NFT gaming marketplace started by Twitch co-founder Justin Kan? It is a Solana-based platform supporting 15 games at the moment. According to a report made by Chainalysis, you have more chances to make a profit with NFTs if you buy a few higher-quality NFTs, rather than lots of lower-priced ones. If you can afford this power move.
Blockchain games: On Axie Infinity, Project K (land-based NFTs) are introduced soon. SLP emission rates for the daily quest, PVP, and PVE may be reduced, and AXS rewarded through gameplay may be changed also. They are also working to find a way to reduce SLP collected via non-skilled/automated techniques, such as doing the Adventure every day for the daily quest. They are also looking at more ways to release, burn or consume AXS tokens. Splinterlands is almost done with the second phase of their sale for the Chaos Legion card packs, and the airdrop for the second and third cards will be done in less than 4 days. After that, you can buy the packs for only 4$, and while some people think that it will be sold right away, I am thinking that it will take some weeks, even months to sell all of them.
Good news: Samsung Electronics America partnered with Veritree for 3 months to plant 2 million mangrove trees in Madagascar. Veritree manages reforestation and verifies each tree using blockchain technology. They are also partnering with Decentraland to enter into the Metaverse, launching their own shop inside of it. Gamestop is looking to sign deals with crypto-startups, to expand their NFT plans, considering ETH as a potential platform for their main application. Livepeer raised $20M in a Series B funding round. Moneygram now owns 4$ of the cryptocurrency cash exchange Coinme, founded in 2014 and operating in 48 US states.
Bad news: Crypto-betting website Polymarket has been fined $1.4M by the regulatory body, as they allowed customers to bet without registering. They let you bet crypto on simple yes/no questions on various topics like US inflation rate and presidential nominee, for example. Kazakhstan is trying to control the information and stop the protesters to organize cutting down the internet connectivity. Several mining pools located in the area were severely hit (1THash, OKExPool, KuCoin Pool). Certik analyzed Arbix Finance (ARBX) on BSC and is warning everyone that is a rug pull as the contract features mint() with onlyOwner function and 4.5M ARBX were minted to one single address. Estonian Ministry of Finance explained that they do not ban crypto, only decentralized finance, and non-custodial wallets. With this move, trying to force the decentralized entities to ask their customers for KYC, they almost made it to the joke of the week. What is next, an Estonian CBDC? Mozilla halted the crypto donations feature launched in 2014 after a lot of pressure from the investing community.
Joke of the week: Another DAO with another (dumb?) idea, LinksDAO, is selling the first batch of their NFT collection, aiming to achieve $10.5M in order to purchase their own golf course. Well, if you like to play golf, this is another story!
That's all for today.
All the best,
George
Why not...
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