This week was mild, without too many emotions, at least for me. Everything is increasing slowly and it is consolidating, with minor ups and downs. Let's see what happened in the last 7 days:
Elon Must is kind of infatuated with Doge, and nobody can understand why. He was asking Coinbase to add it to their supported cryptocurrencies even. Even Mark Cuban played into his game, becoming a Dogecoin adopter. What is wrong with the world? Not only, but now Elon started to tokenize his Tweets as NFT, for the fun of the game. Somebody bided more than 1 million dollars on it (625 ETH), only for Elon to change his mind and not selling it.
Ethereum is trying to appeal to its miners, raising the block reward to 3 ETH and dropping 0.25 every three months over the next 2 years. Some like it, some didn't, me personally see this as a mistake, slowing the introduction of P0S and ETH mass adoption. Ethermine mining pool also created a software improving mining rewards with 1-10% while they will allocate only 80% of the new software profits to the ETH pool. HK company Meitu bought another 16000 ETH and 386 BTC (estimated total value $216M).
Korean people are quite bullish about BTC, after the recent $61K peak, even if the local government is trying to take measures against it (banning privacy coins for example). Bitcoin went down to $53K, only to recover up to $61K this week. By the way, do you remember Russel Okung, the NFL star asking for half of his wages in BTC? He made an $8M profit in just 3 months. NYDIG CEO hinted that many important companies are getting ready to achieve some BTC. We believe that he refered to VISA, as their CEO, Al Kelly, wants to enable BTC and other crypto to be instantly converted in fiat as a payment method. Or maybe was Morgan Stanley offering 3 funds owning BTC to their clients (2 from Galaxy Digital and one from NYDIG). Grayscale also launched 5 new investment products ( BAT, LINK,FIL,MANA,LPT). Blockfi completed a Series D equity raise, collecting $350M, which means that their total valuation is close to $3B. I may need to increase my savings in there. I always liked their in-app swap option. But keep that in mind, this is fully centralized, not DEFI, whatever they may try to say. Crypto Exchange Kraken goes the other way, considering stock market debut next year - 2022 (suggested value $10B). March 14 was the best day for BTC miners, with more than $64M daily earnings in fees. Are you jealous on ETH much, Bitcoin?
WHALE, PICA & RARE suffered a security breach, and 2% of the coin supply was compromised. The hacker used Tornado Cash (TORN) to launder hundreds of ETH - this one is a tool used by hackers to cover their tracks and get the money out. This was not the only hack this week, with PancakeSwap and CreamFinance suffering a DNS hijack (allowing hackers to reroute users to a fake website asking for Metamask private keys and seed phrases). The damage is unknown. On a interesting turn of events, Russian president Putin said that he wants to ''suppress the illegal cross-border movement of funds of digital financial assets''. Are they preparing a ban soon? We will see. Bank of America seized the opportunity to say that indeed Bitcoin is impractical as payment mechanism or as investment. Meanwhile, in Europe, the Central Bank is worried that Facebook's DIEM will steal their thunder, decreasing the European Central Bank involvement (read meddling) with other states affair. I do not see the danger, even their co-founder left the project, in order to join Planet Labs, and he is not the only one. US Federal Reserve Chairman is thinking that digital dollar can coexist with cash. But no, they are not doing it yet.
The week started with Holo, Enjin and Vethor increasing with more than 30%. Tuesday we had Beefy token increasing with almost 170%, all the way up to $3400. Siacoin too, with more than 45%. Wednesday BAT and Filecoin increased with more than 25%. Livepeer increased with 250% after its own Grayscale fund was announced. Chiliz cryptocurrency, the one dealing with fan tokens, also increased with 136% this week. Anchor protocol increased with more than 85% at the end of the week.
NFT-wise, the biggest volumes traded are from the following four collections: NBA Top Shot, CryptoPunks, Mooncats and Sorare. Beeple $69M NFT buyer, MetaKovan, plans to build monuments in the virtual worlds. Whatever that means. After Christie's, now Sotheby's is the second major auction house to plan a NFT sale, with the crypto-artist PAK, the first one to earn $1M in December 2020. And my brother @PVMihalache is a noob, as Charmin created a tokenized toilet paper NFT (his idea long time ago). If you didn't know, Grumpy Cat died in 2019, but even from beyond the grave, it is helping the fellows pets, with a charity NFT being sold, raising $70K (44 ETH) for an animal shelteR. A coin was also created to help animal shelters ($GRUMPY). Even Tron added a NFT standard to their blockchain (TRON-721) fully compatible with ERC-721. Copy-paste? You may need 350 TRX ($18) to issue a NFT, STARTING FROM
ADA (Cardano) is the most recent token added on Coinbase, and their team are making tremendous effort to expose the coin into the DEFI space. Sushiswap DEX is trying a similar move, building on Avalanche.
Fiat (the car company) is working on a solution to give crypto rewards to the good respectful drivers (the estimate amount is $178 for 10.000 km per year). Maybe some insurance companies will adopt a similar strategy. FTX Exchange wants to rename Miami Heat NBA's stadium, in a sponsorship deal. Multicoin Capital invested in Helium (and i just sold all my HNT last week to buy some TRON, quite funny timing).
The world is changing, as now Decentraland casinos are hiring real-life hosts for their roulete, blackjack and slots, full virtual job, paying 500 DAI (500$) per month.
Opensea ( the NFT marketplace company) raised $23M in a new funding round, being backed by the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz.
Funny news of the day, Robin Hood want to expand its crypto service, in order to provide competitive presence on the market. Right, without any meddling or dodgy movements (like Coinbase server dropping when the price increase or decrease suddenly). They were made famous for their approach in Gamestop share trading, when they suspended the share trading due to 'unknown' reasons. Well, in theory, as most of us kind of know why they did it. To support the Wall Street giants to cut their losses, damaging their clients trust forever.
That's all for today, see you next week!
Yours truly
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands - Hearthstone-like card game) and (CryptoBrewmaster - Beer factory sim)
...get the higher rewards for your investments using Blockfi 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.
...the most lucrative faucets that I use: ZEN, ZEC, DOGE. Start mining Helium (NHT) for free on Emrit.io.
Thanks for the updates