Interesting week in crypto, with ETH eing the main star, but BTC is also the sleeping giant waking up, trying to reach the 60k this weekend. Will they do it? Will they not? We will see soon.
ETH - started strong this week, going above the previous ATH (3000$) all the way to 3200 mark. Vitalik Buterin reached the billionaire status thanks to this turn of events.
BTC - I think that a rare event happened this week, for the first time ETH went up 5%, and BTC dropped 5%. The BTC-ETH correlation is there no more. This is something you need to think about.
NFTs - Larva Labs, the creators of CryptoPunks, started a new set of NFTs called Meebits (they are 3D avatars with volume - voxels). May 4th is Starwars Day, and we had some nice NFTs created to celebrate that, each of them being paired with a physical collectible from the movie. Genies is a digital avatar developer close to launch their product on Flow blockchain along with a NFT marketplace. This is second time i hear about Flow in a very positive context, I think i will check this one!
Bad news - Berkshire Hathaway wants to declare war to Bitcoin, after they realized they are up 'only' 50% in the last year, versus Bitcoin more than 500%. This time Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet second in command, was the one to declare that Bitcoin success is ''disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilizations''. I have no ill thoughts towards him, but his mindset is stuck in the 20th century. Bill Maher joined him, making fun of Dogecoin and quoting Warren Buffer with his famous ''Bitcoin has zero value'' quote. Also, there is a bot trying to send Metamask users to a so called 'portal' where you are asked for your seed phrase. Keep that in mind, give seed, say bye bye to your money. Sparta Protocol lost $30M in an exploit attack, where the hacker used flash loans to inflate the pool balance and withdraw the funds. Meanwhile, in US, IRS gained permission to find out about Americam taxpayers using crypto on the Kraken Exchange. Mark Cuban is dreaming about a $1 Dogecoin, in the far away future.
Good news - Doge overtook XRP as market cap and I see nothing funny in that, as both DOGE and XRP should not be where they are. Yes, I said that. Doge, Doge, Doge, everywhere, this is hilarious, I literally spend my week telling my technically challenged collleagues to buy just ETH and BTC, not DOGE, if they are in crypto for the first time. At $0.68, this is no joke, and I am still crytong inside thinking at one of my friends who sold millions of Doge when it reached $0.01. HODL for ever and ever, right? Carole Baskin, the Tiger King, created a CAT token to compete with DOGE, but what is next is bit unclear. OpenDefi is a decentralized finance alliance created to support DEFI globally. They got 20+ members, some of them quite well known (AAVE, BAL, SNX). Also, the Internet Computer, a blockchain computer with infinite capacity and performance, similar with the traditional cloud, just launched today with the tag TIC. with Polychain and Multicoin Capital backing it up. They want to offer uncensorable DEFI app frontends, fully decentralized. Skew, a company dealing with professional data analytics and trade execution services for crypto markets, will be acquired by Coinbase in the coming month. Talking about Coinbase, they just created their own charity, Coinbase Giving, focused on increasing education and access to crypto, helping women and under-represented minorities to break into STEM workforce and speeding up the crypto development. God for ya, Coinbase, give something back! Helium is another one who get a lot of positive reviews right now, and just in case your are lucky enough to live in a country covered by Emrit support, ask them for your free Helium miner. Their link is at the end of this article. They have also solved the latest issue on Helium, related to Consensus Group not producing blocks. Polkadot v0.9.0 was released, as a high priority upgrade, with a host function for DOT node operators.
Institutional adoption of crypto - S&P Dow Jones got 3 new tickers, Bitcoin Index (SPBTC), Ethereum Index (SPETH) and a combination of both (SPCMC). eBAY is considering crypto as payment, and it is open to NFT market, after they just introduced Apple Pay and Google Pay. Crypto.com will be the sponsor of Italy's football cup, and we will have even some nice NFTs thrown into the mix. Mercado Libre, a south American EBay equivalent, invested $7.8M in BTC this week. Nokia just launched their own blockchain. Fully centralized and permissioned, but still this should count with keeping up with the times. Galaxy Digital (Mike Novograts' company) just bought the cryptocustodian BitGo for $1.2B
Major gainers, on Monday we had Trust Wallet, Alpaca and Alien Worlds, the last two being blockchain games, with 40-60% increases. Tuesday we had Waves with 60% gain, Dogecoin with 26% and ThorChain with more than 20%. Uniswap V3 launched with all the fuss this week, saying words like efficiency, improvement, customization etc, but when i tried to exchange $20 ETH into AAVE,asked me for 223 dollars fee. Not cool, Uniswap! Even in these conditions, they traded $150M in their first day. The curious ones said that they are roughly 20% more expensive than v2. By the way, AAVE will soon launch they Tamagotchi inspired game called AAVEgotchi, which i think is similar with Mobox.io as DEFI gamification approach, all of it on MATIC blockchain. Wednesday we had some Old Guard figures going up, ETC 37%, EOS 28% and Bitcoin Gold 47%. ETC kept going up, with OMG and LISK being the latest additions. Multicoin just announced they will focus investing in Solana, so this will pump up soon. Keep an eye on it. Funny enough, despite being the best performing asset last week, Solana was not performing well this one. Avalanche also had some major improvements this week, with its Apricot Phase 2 changes.
Secret Network with their own token SCRT, is a privacy-firts smart contract platform, with some nice work in progress, last of their launched projects being SecretSwap, a front running resistant crosschain AMM with privacy protections.
To close with one funny piece of news, Andre Cronje (the guy behind Yearn Finance and other very succesful projects) is having a boxing match with Crypto Messiah (a well known twitter figure representing crypto) as a modern 21st century duel. The winner will get $1M worth of Fantom token, to donate to a charity of their choice.
All the best,
George
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