In the game of life, survival is only part of the battle! (weekly crypto updates)

What happened in the past week? One British bank is a Chinese CBDC trial partner. The dodgy HEX guy disappeared from the US. The gaming tokens are having a field day, going double digits up in percentages. What else? Read below:

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• Bitcoin: BTC's dominance is up 0.14%, to 51.68%. Over $300M flooded into BTC investment products last week, marking the ninth week of inflows. MTSC shares are going up again, as they bought another $5.9M worth of BTC, reaching $6.6B total holdings. Former Twitter CEO leads seed round in firm looking to promote decentralized BTC mining. Bitcoin price right now is $38687.60.

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• Ethereum: The assets under management for digital asset investment products surged 120% year-to-date. The Optimism Foundation maintains control over Optimism's sequencer, governance, and upgrade keys, but 2024 may be the year when they become truly decentralized. ETH value right now is above 2K, at $2089.56.

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• Altcoins and stablecoins: The TVL is DEFI space increased by 29% over the past week. The DEX value is almost $75B in total volume, the highest month since February 2022. The crypto bank SEBA is rebranding as Amina Bank, looking for a global expansion. Binance offered cautious institutional crypto-traders a new collateral custody pilot, letting them park assets with vetted banks, instead of the exchange itself. Solana (SOL) is one of the best-performing altcoins, with over 500% surge, due to the initiation of a DEFI airdrop and increased app development on the network.

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• Blockchain games and NFT: The gaming tokens are back, with double digits, RON has a 27% increase, APE 5%, and ILV 123% in the past month, after an Epic Games Store listing scheduled for November 28. Illuvium is also collaborating with the eSports group Team Liquid via a Web3 partnership, unlocking a $100.000 tournament prize pool. Is anyone out there still not playing Golem Overlord? Wombat Dungeon Masters' current season is just starting. On Splinterlands, the Land 1.5 feature is available now, launched on November 28, and it seems that it will take weeks, even months, to get everything in place for the optimal rewards.

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• Good news: Fear and Greed index is now 69 (Greed). Standard Chartered, a prominent British bank, joined trials for China's e-CNY digital currency. Are they owned secretly by the Chinese government? Maybe. And then, Standard Chartered analysts predicted a $100K Bitcoin price for December 2024. One European Central Bank board member asked for crypto services that mimic banks to get similar oversight. A Singapore central banker even suggested that private coins, like BTC, will fade away, as CBDCs and tightly regulated stablecoins are the future. Yeah, right, and the marmoset was putting a cover on the chocolate bar! (See next what I meant, you may need to be Romanian to get the joke!)

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• Bad news: Hong Kong's grace period expires next June, yet scams persist, as the government wants consumers to exercise personal responsibility. Retail trading goes live in Hong Kong, once again, with a license given to the local exchange OSL. Talking about it, I fell for a social engineering hack last week, as I clicked on a fake email from DappRadar (I got an account there) and logged in, instead of going separately to their website. Lost 0.12 ETH, which was transferred out of the wallet under the label Claim Rewards. As you may expect from them, Coinbase shared some users' account data, in a subpoena connected with the Bybit exchange. Unrelated to it, Ark Invest dumped $5M worth of Coinbase shares and bought RobinHood shares instead. Leading crypto exchange Upbit's parent company Dunamu saw profits decrease by 81% last quarter. Spain required its citizens to disclose crypto holdings stored abroad. FTX gets court approval to liquidate $873M in assets ($807M in Grayscale shares, and $66M with Bitwise). Record$363M in crypto stolen in November 2023, with Poloniex ($131M) and HTX/HECO bridge ($113M) being the biggest, one single victim also getting an honorary mention with $27M lost in a phishing attack. And here I was, complaining about my $300 stolen last week. The US Treasury was dreaming about additional sanction tools and expanded authority over dollar-based stablecoins, including overseas dollar-backed stablecoins. I am really curious how they plan to do that.

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• Joke of the week: Another one bites the dust. The HEX founder is accused of a $1B securities violation from the SEC, as he continuously evaded the US authorities. He may have (he did it for sure) committed fraud by aggressively promoting his HEX token to investors. Some think he is hiding in Finland.

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All the best,

George

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Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands - Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) (Wombat Dungeon Masters NFT staking on WAX) and (X-Portal - Elrond all in one app, free NFTs, and more).

...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 for crypto on Read.cash and Hive.

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