I find nothing more depressing than optimism! (weekly crypto updates)
I was busy with the Job, so now, two weeks in one, coming right away...
What happened in the past week? The Conflicts Airdrop points on Splinterlands continue to add to my guaranteed card drops. Bitcoin is acting weirdly, going up when it should go down and vice-versa. The ETH ETFs are now the talk of the town. Jupiter has an airdrop on Solana (check the link below). What else? Read below:
Bitcoin: Instead of boosting the BTC, the launch of the US spot BTC ETFs triggered a crypto sell-off, pushing Bitcoin under $40K. Arthur Hayer, the crypto billionaire, thinks that BTC will crash to $30K this year, despite its value rising above $40K. As this was said, wallets with more than 1000 BTC added more than $3B this week, as the rich getting even richer. Bitcoin miners are on thin ice, and at least 10 listed miner companies may go bankrupt if the price stays at $40K post-halving. Scaramucci is seeing Bitcoin going up to $170K instead by late 2025, with some optimistic views going even further. Top Bitcoin financial services provider Swan Bitcoin has emerged with its own mining unit, Swan Mining, aiming to list publicly within a year. Ark Invest sold its entire stack of BITO shares, using the $45M to buy its own spot BTC ETF that just launched this month. Talking about a movie idea, Amazon is preparing a Bitcoin heist movie about the Bitfinex hack, and how two hackers laundered about 94643 BTC. After a disastrous performance, Investco ETF rates are now down to 0.25%, but it may be too little, too late. Bitcoin is on track for its fifth straight month of gains.
Ethereum: ETH's Dencun upgrade was deployed on Sepolia Testnet. One top regulator believes that there is no reason to stall multiple pending spot ETH fund applications any longer, but will the SEC agree with this one? Probably not, as they delayed the BlackRock ETH ETF application from January to August 7. We will see soon enough. Standard Chartered projected that ETH ETFs are to be approved by the end of May 2024, sending Ethereum to $4K, but personally, I find this hard to believe (the $4K, not the ETF approval). Vitalik talked about using AI in crypto, with broader applications improving prediction markets and creating user-friendly guides to assist us.
Altcoins and stablecoins: We have major outflows from ETH and Solana, over $20M, as the inflows for BTC ETFs are increasing up to $4B. Avalanche Foundation sets standards for a $100M memecoin investments. Spanish Telecom is using Helium Network now, integrating it to stretch coverage in Mexico City and Oaxaca, in Central America. Solana-based memecoin Dogwifhat had a 50% pump after the crypto exchange Bitget added support for the asset. Solana is doing quite well lately, with or without the meme coins. Interesting times in L2, where Base struggled to survive, while Polygon added over 15M new users, almost matching ETH's 15.4M new users. Yet, Polygon had 19% of its employees laid off this week. A Solana-based DEX, Jupiter, just got on the top, dethroning UniSwap, with $480M, versus $470M swaps per day. Did you get your airdrop in there: https://lfg.jup.ag/ . FLOKI staking got flagged by Hong Kong's watchdogs, as they lack a license to operate in the region. Wordlcoin was also red-flagged, quoting serious risks to personal data privacy. This is the one with the iris scanning, right? One of my least favourite stablecoins, USDT, posted record profits of $2.85B in Q4 2023. Well, even PayPal's PYUSD is not in the top 10 stablecoins by market cap. BNB SmartChain achieved notable milestones, as revenue grew by 26% QoQ, and the active validators increased from 32 to 40, as in the DEFI sector Venus Protocol surpassed PancakeSwap, with 39% of the BSC total TVL, versus 37%.
NFTs and blockchain games: Magic Eden is launching an NFT token, looking to transform gradually into a DAO. On Splinterlands the first round of Conflicts airdrop activity started, and I just wanted to say good luck to everyone who is participating. One wagon can be bought with 50 Vouchers (around $2.30) and deposit up to 5 cards and 100 Rebellion packs to get Airdrop points. You may also want to check Holozing - a soon-to-be-launched Pokemon-like game on the Hive blockchain. The "Genesis Cat", a Bitcoin NFT was just sold for over $250K at the auction house Sotheby's. Are the NFTs coming back to the front page? There is a new augmented reality star in town - Hunger Games, but this play2earn game needs to upgrade its servers, as it was overwhelmed after the early access launch on Monday.
Good news: This is big: VISA is joining forces with web3 infrastructure company Transak, allowing users to withdraw funds and make payments in crypto. I am in, when do you start? OKX users will be fully compensated by the exchange after OKX prices crashed 48% out of nowhere. A Shanghai zone will pilot the digital Yuan, with a five-year-long project looking to transform Pudong New Area into a world-leading hub of finance, trade and innovation. The crypto bank Sygnim got another $40M contract, bringing its valuation to $900M, almost at the doors of the $1B club. Google's new policy allows cryptocurrency ads to target US users now. The European Securities and Market Authority is looking for feedback regarding its crypto regulation, trying to find out how a crypto financial instrument is defined and how can they police external asset managers courting EU clients. Hard work there! The Spanish embassy in Bosnia and Herzegovina is hunting crypto airdrops. What is next? Celsius is making a comeback, with its mining startup working hard to get its creditors paid, and I cannot be happier, as I am one of those shmucks. Mt. Gox started to verify creditor addresses for their BTC repayment. Even the FTX creditors may get fully refunded soon-ish. Singapore Court also ruled that 3AC need to pay the victims, sorry, its creditors, too. Coinbase recruited a former British finance minister as an advisor, and I do not like it. The UK Treasury is holding a digital pound consultation amid privacy concerns.
Bad news: If you are a MacOS user, bad news is coming, there is now one trojan malware distributed via cracked software downloaded from sus sites, stealing login passwords and wallet private keys, specifically targeting newer MacOS versions, compromising wallet apps. It can even replace legit apps with infected duplicates. Apple users, beware! Judge Richard Mosley determined that the government's use of emergency powers to block funds given to the Freedom Convoy in Canada was unreasonable and unconstitutional. The protesters raised millions in crypto before the government halted the flow of the funds. Somebody got scared of what crypto can do! Blockchain game Gamee was exploited, after hackers compromised a Polygon address to steal 600M Gamee tokens and instantly convert them into $15M worth of MATIC and ETH. Talking about hackers, North Korean ones seem to be involved in 20 major exploits in 2023 (compared with only 15 in 2022) with a net of $1B, down from $1.7B the previous year. According to PeckShield, $2.61B in crypto were stolen in 2023, with $674M of it being recovered. Seems that Ripple itself was hacked and $112M disappeared, yet its chairman said that everything is under control. But is it, for real? India is playing it safe and did not change its controversial crypto tax regime, with quite a big 1% fee applied to every trade made. Genesis settled the SEC lawsuit for $21M in its bankruptcy deal. German authorities seized $2.1B in BTC from German and Polish nationals operating piracy websites. Binance and the SEC faced each other in court, over the lawsuit filed by the US regulators.
Joke of the week: Meta is alive, even if for a short time. They abandoned its stablecoin and wallet projects, at least officially, but they were quietly restarting them low-key. The US lawmakers think that ongoing Web3 and digital asset efforts contradict Meta's past statements, as they filled trademarks for crypto-trading, payments and wallet services. Who is afraid of Facebook? This is almost as funny as the research to find if the AI can predict the next crypto winner (Answer: No, it cannot.)
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) (Upland - real-life virtual land) (Holozing - Pokemon-like game)and (Rising Star - Music creators game).
...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog, using the Presearch search engine to maximize your income with PRE tokens. Use Torum instead of Twitter. I am also writing about crypto on Hive.