The Altcoin season is here, and my portfolio almost tripled, getting awfully close to the limit i choosed to witdraw from the market. I can feel the FOMO in the air, but i can also imagine a healthy correction coming soon, and this is making me a bit fearful. So, let's see what happened lately:
Monday, Mike Shimoda (Linkin Park) auctioned his first piece (One Hundredth Stream) on Zora and the highest bid was 18k DAI (18k USD equivalent). Crypto- art market reached $80M at the end on January, with the most of the value on ETH network (ERC-721). First month of the year had a $12M volume, and most probably more than that will be traded in February. In fact, according to the latest news, the highest price ever paid for a NFT was $1.5M+ few days ago, for a Genesis land NFT on Axie infinity blockchain game. Lindsay Lohan was the latest to join NFT promising alure, selling one non fungible token on Rarible for 33 ETH and declaring moment later that 'Bitcoin is the future'. Just imagine, managers telling her that she was paid and the ethereum is on her wallet. Tweet about this Lo, they said. Next moment, she will have a sip of her dring and be like: Oh,yes, Bitcoin is the future! with them shouting on the back: Ethereum LiLo, Ethereum, not Bitcoin. Mike Saylor of Microstrategy launched a 12 hours course 'Bitcoin for Everybody' in order to educate more about crypto.
Nigeria government choosed to oppose crypto, and all banks were told to cancel the services and close accounts used to buy, sell and trade crypto. They were blaming crypto for the hyper-inflation of the native currency - Nigerian Naira. Funny thing, as this country is actually the second-largest trader in BTC volume worldwide. I can see a lot of potential to grow for cards like Crypto.com and Binance, if they choose to offer them in there, but with the government opposing this, they may use the financial services from neighbouring countries like Ghana or even South Africa. India is also fast tracking their cryptocurrency bill, trying to avoid the parliament and to present it straight to the President. They aare almost finishing the work on the draft called ''Cryptocurrency and Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill 2021''. It is looking like a complete crypto ban, and this is hard to believe, seeing how much India will benefit from the crypto surge. I said India. as in the common people, not the government, and this level of corruption will make them pay dearly long term.
Enjit network started to dwelve into real estate tokens, Labs Group planning to creat NFTs for fractions of real estate assets (apartment units, hotel rooms or even entire buildings. Did you see this @Teodor ?
Matic, Elrond and Avalanche had almost 50% increases on Monday. This is probably a result of Chainbridge bringing DEFI to Avalanche. Next day Wink got a surprising 85% increase, and Bittorrent a stunning 180% increase. It this the start of Tron network being finally relevant? Litentry shows potential, but it is still fluctuating wildly. Then Binance Coin (BNB) started to increase, and kept doing it until more than doubled in value. Heck, even EOS is pumping. As i said, there is not the altcoin season yet, not until ETC is going up. Ha ha! And a personal note, i predict that Mirror.finance will be some kind of a unicorn, they got the potential to be massive.
One of the long most expected piece of news was announced on Monday also, Telsa bought $1.5B BTC, creating one incredible long green candle, but not without consequences. Elon Musk is known to talk more than is needed, and it is not first time when him tweeting landed Tesla a hefty fine. Some people even commented that there is a conflict of interest between electric cars and energy intensive assets like BTC. SEC is talking about market manipulation and other similar BS, yet they did not complain that much when the big corporations tried to block the Gamestop trading for the retail traders. Asked to give advice to all the beginners in crypto, Elon just said: ''Not your keys, not your crypto''. Miami Mayor is on the news again, as he is trying to make his city a crypto-friendly hub. He is often seen holding meetings with prominent names on the blockchain market (Winklewoss, Peter Thiel and few others). On Wednesday we reached $48k, and everybody was thinking that 50k mark is on view. Even Apple is working on something related to its blockchain division, and they will be a major player soon, i believe. The Mastercard joined the party, informing us that they are ready to support crypto soon (end of 2021). Twitter is also thinking to get some crypto and even pay its employee in BTC. America oldest bank BNY Mellon announced that they will add support for BTC for their clients too. Amazon is working quietly in Mexico, hiring blockchain specialists, for a project enabling users to exchange money for crypto, to spend online. How huge is this! Meanwhile, 35 leading cryptocurrency platforms and wallets (such as Crypto.com, Binance and Blockfi) are issuing Visa cards. Blue Ridge Bank went even further and introduced the Bitcoin ATMs in their Virginia banks. What you need to know today? BTC and ETH together are bigger than the top 5 US banks combined or top 5 Chinese banks combined, or to 10 rest of the world banks combined, or all public companies except Microsoft Apple Google and Amazon. Binance is bigger than the NYSE intercontinental exchange, and BTC is going places, being bought by the 1 trillion market cap club.
Talking about Binance, their January trading volume was $500B, just compare this with Uniswap for example ($30B).
Ethereum futures are finally here, and they were greeted with mixed feelings. 19400 ETH were traded in 2 days, over 400 contracts being made. Even if we are talking about Canada and their Purpose Bitcoin ETF launch on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Great move Canada, you are much better and open-minded than US right now. But most people did not forget that BTC futures were launched in December 2017, and then the price was free-falling, takin 2-3 years to recover. But ETH needs to solve his problems soon or his #2 rank will be overtaken, as ADA and DOT are now ranked #4 and #5, with Binance Smart Chain closing the gap fast. Curve Finance reached Polkadot lately, and this is good for DEFIs and fees too. Until now, both Layer 1 ADA, DOT, ATOM, AVA, SOL, ALGO, NEAR and Layer 2 MATIC, SKALE, LRC , xDAI outperformed ETH network. But middle of the week found ETH reaching $ 1800 and kept reaching record highs 3 days in a row. And MATIC is changing its name to Polygon.
Doge is the latest yo-yo meme token, going up and down few times per day. For a short time was even in the top 10, ranked #9, and even Snoop Dog, also known as Snoop Lion, was thinking to change his name into Snoop Doge. The only one missing out with the Doge pump was its own creator: Billy Markus, who sold all his Doge in 2015 for next to nothing, when he stopped working on the project. Sportsbet.io teamed up with English club Southampton to offer a better matchday experience.
Blockfolio signal feed was hacked, and some nasty messages were published, with company apologizing and telling us that the users funds are SAFU. Talking about hackers, United Nations warned North Korea claiming they hacked an exchange for almost $281M to fund their nuclear research. Not hard to find out which one, as Kucoin attack on September 2020 was estimated to be $275M+.
I will stop here for today, check again next week for the latest news and trends.
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.
What if ... this is the correction?