We got an interesting week, even if this one was not as volatile as the previous one, still, we got some ups and downs coming up. Let's see how it was going, step by step.
On Monday, Google launched a dedicated cryptocurrency tab, and you can find more about here. This is surprising, given all Youtube recent anti-crypto policy. They have a limited number of crypto on it, altought. They are also introducing a new system of ad marketing called Floc, and they say this is anonymous, protecting users data. Power move on Apple? Maybe. Paypal wants to buy the crypto-custodian company Curv, with a potential $200-300M, after their attempt to buy BitGo didn't work. (Latest add: Yes, Paypal is definitely buying Curv for $500M, according to latest sources.) Amazon made a move into crypto also, with the recent update for Amazon Web Services supporting Ethereum nodes and Hyperledger. A side note for Brave, who acquired Tailcat, looking to develop their own search platform.
Tether, which is a responsible company, never allegedly involved in anything dodgy, received a ransom note asking for 500 BTC (Wow, that's a lot of money) or information damaging crypto will be released. Just think about, they paid recently into an agreement with US attorney general Leticia James, after an investigation was launched related to the $850M loan made to sister company Bitfinex to avoid potential bancrupcy. The keywords in here are ''Tether's claims that its virtual currency was fully backed by US dollars at all times was a lie'. The US attorney general words, not mine.
Monday we had Fantom (FTM), MATIC and AAVE having the biggest increase. Tuesday, the daily gainers were Chiliz, XEM and Enjin. Enjin and Chiliz continued to increase for the second day, on Wednesday, with VET being also in the top 3. Elon is having fun buying DOGE for his 9 months old son. Not only that, DOGE is now available at CoinFlip ATMs. Bitpay also started to accept DOGE for payments. Crypto.com is sponsoring Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One team. , promising some exclusive experience to their clients.
Coinbase latest numbers: 2.8M monthly active clients and 43M verified users. $456B trading volume all time with 42% of this in 2020 ($193B). Binance is trying to keep up with them, becoming a partner of the well known hedge fund Multicoin Capital. Bitfinex is testing a crypto payment system, supporting BTC, ETH, USDT (ETH and TRX version), with an easy to add widget for the Bitfinex Pay button.
Goldman Sacks restarted its crypto trading desak, aiming to trade bitcoin futures, blockchain technology projects and central bank digital currencies. CBOE - a well known global equities and derivatives exchange, is looking up to approve VanEck BTC ETF in US. Canada launched their own local Bitcoin ETF last month already. Now Evolve Funds is working to launch their second Canadian ETF, this time for Ethereum. Grayscale started to buy most of the Litecoin, looking to launch a new product. With this, LTC, with is better and faster and cheaper than BTC, may finally get some traction and awareness in the crypto-market. But Charlie Lee, the Litecoin founder, is continuing to bash the NFT market, seeing no utility holding into it. MicroStrategy is 9000 BTC away from reaching 100K BTC. They are still buying. Bitcoin is right now hovering under and above 50K. We got all kind of surveys, predicting prices starting from 100K up to 1M for 1 BTC in 5-10 years time.
Despite ETH high gas fees, the DEFI sector is continuosly increasing. Some activity is also starting to develop on Binance Smart Chain, even if they are far from catching up with ETH network. But on BSC the fees are almost inexistent. Compound Finance, to name one big name in DEFI, is working to develop CompoundChain, to solve the fees problem.
Chiliz blockchain, known for the fan tokens collaboration with Barcelona, Juventus, PSG and 20 other teams, plans to launch in US, with 5 major league names in there.
Polkadot decentralized insurance project Tidal Finance raised $1.8M in a private token sale. The final working product will be most probably launched next month. Keep an eye on this one.
Vitalik Buterin, nicknamed V-God in China, was having some fun with a AMA, answering to the questions about ETH2.0, staking and EIP-1559, in Chinese. Yes, of course he speaks Chinese.
Damien Hirst announced that he will accept BTC and ETH for his latest print, priced at $3000. The musician Grimes sold his NFT collection Warnimph with 45.8M in less than 20 minutes. We also had the Homer Pepe NFT sold for 205 ETH ($328K) this week. It will get even crazier than that. Somebody bought a Banksy art called 'Morons' and the NFT linked to this, and then they burned the physical piece, so the art piece will survive only virtualy. King of Leon dropped a NFT album. Did you get your Dr.Who NFT cards? (a nice BBC backed project with daily login rewards). Same goes for Smighties
Cardano is having a hard fork, transforming into a multi-asset blockchain. Yes, you may guess, that means also NFT on Cardano. SushiSwap launched into 5 other additional chains (xDAI, MOONBEAM, BSC, MATIC and FANTOM).
In UK, selling Bitcoin for profit will be soon a taxable event. Capital tax right now is 10% for basic tax payers (up to 50k) and 20% for higher rate (over 50k), while income tax is 20% for basic tax payers and 40% for higher rate. At the moment you are liable for capital gain tax only on gains above £12300. But there are rumours of this amount going down by half, to become 6-7.000 only. Certainly will be some changes, with the British Government needing $270B to support workers, unemployed and fight the pandemic.
Torum is working hard to deliver a working product soon. But i would dare to say that their product is somehow superior to noise.cash at the moment. You can get some of their tokens being active daily. 1 TLM is evaluated at 0.05$ before launch. I keep an eye on the project.
To end in a happy mood, i was just paid for my first month mining HNT. Not bad. My free Helium miner just made 77$ in February. Get one here if you are US, Canada,U.K. and other accepted 33 countries. My treat! On Emrit.io.
That's the past week resume. Read it and learn from other people mistakes. Or not.
All the best, George
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