Opportunity is missed by most people because it looks like work! (weekly crypto updates)
This was a fun week. Bitcoin broke the $21K limit, altcoins started to go up, NEAR almost repeated the LUNA incident with their own stablecoin, and WOO (Wrestling Organization Online) is having their NFT packs sale on 31.10.2022 at 9 UTC. What else? Check bellow:
Bitcoin: Bitcoin broke above $21K, and more than 87% of the short positions were liquidated, topping $1B, October has been historically positive 10 times out of 13, but Bitcoin is still moving between $19K and $20K mostly. Bitcoin Miner Core Scientific has announced that they will declare bankruptcy by the end of the year if their resources are depleted, due to the increase in electric price, bigger global bitcoin hashrate, and the litigation with Celsius. Their stock price dropped by 70%. Costa Rica is lowering taxes on crypto and wants to make the country crypto-friendly, but they will see it as a private virtual currency and not as a legal tender, as in El Salvador. Cash App users can now send and receive Bitcoin through the Lightning Network. Multi-billion asset manager Stone Ridge launched a startup accelerator focused on the Bitcoin Lightning Network, called Wolf, with each participating team receiving $250K in funding.
Ethereum: Crypto-friendly bank SEBA is launching an Ethereum-based NFT custody solution for institutions. Google launched a cloud-based node engine service for ETH developers and projects.
Altcoins: NEAR Protocol stablecoin, USN, became undercollateralized, in order to prevent a Luna-similar scenario. Serious stuff, now you cannot mint USN anymore, and you can exchange it into USDT, thanks to the USN Protection Programme, backed by NEAR Foundation. A16Z crypto-fund had 40% losses in the first half of 2022, but they included Aptos (APT) lately, and are waiting for Flowcarbon delayed token launch. Apparently, Lens and Farcaster are the most engaged web3 social protocols. Did you hear of them? Binance launched a native blockchain oracle service enabling smart contracts to run on real-world inputs and outputs. BlockFi decreased interest rates for ADA, DOT, HBAR, LRC, XTZ, and OMG.
Blockchain games and NFTs: Tomorrow is the sale for the remaining NFT packs for WOO (Wrestling Organization Online). This looks like a fun game, with a couple of ways to make a profit (staking WOO token or Hive, NFT mining, and airdrop if you hold unopened packs). On Splinterlands, they want to burn 25K Chaos Legion packs daily from December to finish with the current stock, and this may rush the sale a bit if FOMO is present once more. Also, you can mint your Runi NFT on Opensea, if you got one. Trading volume for Reddit's collectible avatars reached $1.88M, a 799% increase, with over 3 million wallets minting the NFTs. Luxury phone company Vertu launched a Web3-focused mobile phone, Metavertu, which can run its own blockchain node as well as turn photos into NFTs with one click. The entry-level model price starts are $3600. Looksrare NFT marketplace announced that they will no longer reinforce royalties, so now you can opt-in to pay them, if you want. Twitter implemented a new feature called NFT Tweet Tiles, allowing you to trade and display NFTs directly through tweets, on ETH, SOL, FLOW, MATIC, XTZ, and IMX.
Good news: MakerDAO HAS $1.6b USDC in custody with Coinbase, earning 1.5% interest (and this represents one-third of the Treasury backing the Peg Stability Module. FTX founder Sam Bankman Fried announced that the company will compensate the recent victims of a phishing attack up to $6M, but this is a one-time-only move. The attackers gained user account API keys, which allowed them to conduct unauthorized trades. Filecoin Green, a Protocol Labs initiative to reduce Filecoin's environmental impact, has launched a web3 solution for carbon offsets. Ark Invest bought some more shares on Coinbase, Block, and RobinHood. Is this a sign that the bear market is over? Seems that Western Union is getting ready to offer crypto-related services. A survey found that 50% of the Gen Z and millennials want crypto in their retirement funds. Revolut bank added a crypto payment feature to their cards, with 1% cashback for a limited time, right after they introduced 29 new tokens, including SOL, AVAX, and SHIBA.
Bad news: Meta's metaverse division had a $3.97B loss in Q3, $600M more than expected. If Facebook is bankrupted by crypto and blockchain, is this an added bonus? Chinese officials linked to Huawei tried to bribe a US double agent with Bitcoin, using mixing technology for a total of $61K. Come on, and you wonder why the US official was a double agent? For that amount of money, I would not even be a single agent. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic found all the transactions quite easily. In the UK, a draft bill was made, covering extensions for existing regulations placing bitcoin and other digital assets under existing financial law. FTX is raising more cash, in order to make more acquisitions. They go big, right?
Joke of the week: Equifax, the credit reporting giant, and Oasis, a privacy-focused cloud company, partnered to offer privacy-focused KYC solutions for Web3 companies. The thing is, the world's largest data breach in history happened in March 2017 to, you will never guess, a company called Equifax, and a few hundred million people's data was leaked. You may think they learned and improved. Or they will never learn?
That's all for today.
All the best,
George
Why not...
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