Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all! (weekly crypto updates)
What a week! I had Covid19, now negative once again, the only side effect being geting tired a bit quicker, need a mitochondria boost soon. Other than that ETH seems centralized enough now to censor Tornado Cash, at least partially, in US, USDT and USDC add more blockchains to their collection and some CryptoPunks sold with $4.5M. US seems to work hard to create FUD around crypto, a concentrated government effort, as it looks. What else? Check below:
Bitcoin: Blackrock launches iShares Blockchain Technology UCITS ETF, offering direct exposure to bitcoin. They have also created a private trust offering US-based institutional clients exposure to spot Bitcoin, and it is using Kraken's CF Benchmark for its index pricing product. Right now BTC is $19.289, paying 1.55% fee in reward per block.
Ethereum: Right now ETH is $1314, paying 3.1% fee in reward per block. Almost 23% of the total ETH blocks are complying with the US sanctions , using a service called Flashbots, which is censoring all transactions originating from Tornado Cash. Other MEV relay operators including Manifold, Blocknative and Bloxroute are still producing blocks that include Tornado Cash transactions. Tornado Cash was blacklisted in August by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Ethereum scaling solution Aurora paid $2M to a pair of hackers who identified critical vulnerabilities, as the issue was fixed and no users funds were lost.
Altcoins: That 'Sifu' guy, the one who run with everybody's money founding QuadrigaCX, launched a new project, UwU, a fork of AAVE. They already have $57M in TVL, so there are still plenty of people giving their money away without any kind of research or awareness. Do your own research, or remember that a fool and its money will soon go different ways. US Securities Regulators go after Nexo (NEXO), for offering the Earn Interest Product, similar with the ones offered by Celsius and BlockFi, filling lawsuits across different states. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has a real issue with DEFI regulation, and try to create some FUD around the subject. Circle announced that they will make USDC available on five additional blockchains (ATOM, NEAR, OP, DOT and Arbitrum). USDT launched on Polkadot, a bit of the conundrum, as there are no smart contracts supported on the main blockchain, the relay blockchain, but other blockchains connected to it can support them. Cosmos is creating a new ATOM token, focusing on interchain security. Robinhood launched non-custodial crypto wallet with Polygon, beta-testing with 10.000 waitlisted customers. SAFE token airdrop is live, with 43K users eligible to claim it after they used Gnosis Safe. Sweden, Norvar, and Israel are exploring cross-border payments with retail CBDC. Uniswap is looking to raise $1-200M in a funding round, which will raise their valuation to $1B, with Singapore investment fund and Polychain tied to the deal.
Blockchain games and NFTs: Facebook and Instagram users can share now ETH, FLOW and MATIC NFTs (translate: Facebook is gathering data linking people real name and their wallets, do you really want them to make money providing this to other third parties?). Disney seems to quietly invest and research into metaverse and Web3, looking to hire a principal councel specialized in NFT, metaverse, blockchain and dDEFI. Opensea will include Optimism NFTs from Tuesday, but Optimism trading volume remained the same since the listing. Warner Music partnered with Opensea too, granting early access to artists tied to the company. (Warner Music has many famous musicians, including Cardi B, Madonna, Dua Lipa, Ed Sheeran and few others. Cryptopunks #2924 sold recently with $4.5M, the fourth-largest all time sale for the collection.
Good News: Funny enough, the World Economic Forum decided that the blockchain tech is useful to fight against climate change, and they adopted a Crypto Sustainability Coalition, looking at the impact of its energy consumption, how to put carbon credits onto the blockchain and how to decarbonize current activities. Apple will let you to sell and buy NFTs, with a 30% commision fee (not gonna happen, ever), while most of the decentralized solutions got a standard fee up to 2.5%. Greediness to its highest level. One more time FTX is buying, this time Voyager Digital was being sold for peanuts. They seems to make an offer to Celsius too, which they apparently refused, and Alex Mashinsky resigned as Celsius CEO in the same day. Chris Ferraro, the company chief financial officer, replaced him, and he seems to have a plan, even if it looks like a long term one. Brett Harrison resigned from his president of FTX position, moving into an advisory role too. What is happening there? Swift partnered with Chainlink to work on a proof of concept project allowing traditional finance firms to transact across blockchain networks. This is HUGE! Twitter former CEO Jack Dorsey was thinking to transform Twitter into a DAO, as some text messages between him and Elon Musk revealed during the legal dispute. The European Central Bank is preparing for broad crypto adoption scenariolooking to integrate decentralized ledger technology into the existing payment settlement systems. Telefonica, Spain's largest telecommunications company, is enabling the purchase of their products with crypto. , adding a payment feature provided by Spain's largest crypto-exchange, Bit2Me. They also have its own NFT marketplace on Polygon, integrated with Metamask. Kazakhstan is getting ready to pilot a mechanism to convert crypto into cash.
Bad News: Interpol has issued a Red Notice to request law enforcement worldwide to locare and arrest Do Kwon, Terra (LUNA) co-founder. South Korea asked Kucoin and OKX to freeze 3313 BTC they believe to be tied to Terra and Do Kwon, but Luna Foundation denied the allegation, saying that they did not create new wallets or moved BTC since May 2022. US Department of Defence hired crypto intelligence firm Inca Digital to develop tools to understand the markets and help crack down on any digital asset posing a risk to the national security. What is with all this US centralized FUD lately, I wonder if the digital dollar is coming soon? Veritaseum is suing Coinbase for infringing on a patent relating to its blockchain technology, asking for $350M in damages. A hacker stole$950K from crypto vanity address, using a tool called Profanity, the same one used for the Wintermute $160M exploit. As many of these vanity addresses (like vitalik.eth) were created using Profanity, they are easy to breach using brute force attack, and while this is quite expensive, some wallets can make it worth the effort. Other smaller wallets were hacked using the same method in September, with $3.3M being drained from various addresses.
Joke of the day: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission settled charged against BZX protocol founders, Tom Bean and Kyle Kistner, fining them $250K for illegally offering leveraged and marginal retail commodity transactions in digital assets. , as well as failing to adopt customer identification requirements - KYC. But what is more surprising, they are extending their violations over Ooki DAO, as the two founders made it in order to decentralize the control of BZX protocol. So they are seeking penalties against the DAO, determining liability for DAO token holders based on their participation in governance voting, and this is ridiculous per se. Even if they know the founders, I would really like to know how they will go after the individual governance token holders. They do not have the knowledge or the resources to do that. But, this being said, I will make a new, completely unrelated wallet to be used only for governance voting, Meanwhile, can someone explain to the CFTC what uncorporated association mean. Is being a DAO member in the US a dangerous bussiness, or we just see a senseless muscle flex?
All the best,
George
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