Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody's looking.(weekly crypto updates)

Not a very eventful week, but there is still hope for a pump before the end of the year, I would say. There are also a few things happening that I would enjoy next week too. Check Across Protocol token launch, Metamask Infura RPC collecting your data, and why Salvador may be the future place to go to enjoy your crypto. What else? Read below:

• Bitcoin: Bitcoin Core v24.0 has been released, including new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. Check their release notes. Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust shares are now trading at a 50% discount amid fears that Genesis Trading may file for bankruptcy. Digital Currency Group CEO Barry Silbert told shareholders that they are fine, despite owing its own Genesis Trading arm around $575M, $350M to Elridge Industries, and a $1.1B promissory note connected to the collapse of 3AC. Australian mining firm Iris Energy unplugged their miners, as they were producing insufficient cash, and they lost much of their mining power after defaulting a $108M loan collateralized with mining hardware. They were making £2M in BTC per month, but could not cover the £7M in debt obligations. US Senators Elizabeth Warren, Tina Smith, and Richard Durbin signed a letter asking investment giant Fidelity to scrap its 401(k) Bitcoin plan after the collapse of FTX. New York says no to carbon-powered Bitcoin Mining. Some are talking about updates on the legislative front after midterm elections and the collapse of FTX, planned for December.

​

• Ethereum: Across Protocol, one of the cheaper and most secure bridges from and to Ethereum Blockchain, is launching next Monday their native token, $ACX, and they do have an airdrop (check here for it) and some cool campaign ideas. Ethereum core developers signal support for proto-darksharding, being included on a list called "considered for inclusion", it could be deployed sometime next year. We still do not know if this may happen before or after the Shanghai upgrade (the one opening staking withdrawals for validators).

​

• Altcoins: Hooked (HOOK) is the next token launched on Binance at the beginning of next month, and it seems potentially profitable. The Binance recovery fund has more than $1B, growing towards $2B, with Jump Crypto, Polygon, and Aptos Labs being some of the projects who contributed at least $50M to it. Bank of England warned that DEFI do not yet produce an effective way to manage risks and they are only as good as the rules and policies organizing their operations. Chainlink announced that Chainlink Staking is planned to launch on the ETH mainnet on Dec 6. Polkadot launches the Anti-Scam Bounty initiative to help fight its ecosystem scams, paying USDC rewards. Trust Wallet Token (TWT) is bumping up, as Trust Wallet is a decent open-source wallet, amid the Metamask privacy fears. Litecoin (LTC) is also increasing, for various reasons, and it may lead to wider adoption.

​

• NFTs and blockchain games: After OpenSea announced that they will enforce royalties, X2Y2 declared that they would do the same. Magic Eden expands support to Polygon (MATIC). Splinterlands layoffs impacted the value of their ecosystem tokens, although minimally, leading to some of its users liquidating part of their in-game assets. But the DEC token seems to be disinflationary now, slowly decreasing in volume. Wombat Dungeon Master developers seem to improve the game a lot lately. Alien Worlds will soon launch the Thunderdome feature, where you can use your NFTs to fight each other as part of a team (8 vs 8 and so on). Pegaxy seems quite dead lately, despite their team trying to get back there. The PsyberX shooter game looks good and is being tested by its Founders right now. Wen beta test?

​

• Good news: El Salvador is doubling down on crypto, working on a Digital Asset Issuance Law, which would facilitate operations with any crypto assets, but they exclude transactions with CBDCs. I wonder if they need to learn more about Hive blockchain? India is preparing to launch the retail pilot of its digital rupee in December. The bank of Japan is working on a CBDC, with three megabanks. waiting for a digital yen trial next year. Interesting to know, but 62% of institutional investors who had prior exposure to crypto are increasing their allocations, while 12% decreased them. The best thing happening in crypto, though, is that the spot trading volume is decreasing on centralized exchanges and increasing on decentralized ones. Not your key, not your crypto indeed.

​

• Bad news: FTX "hacker" or not, being the 27th largest ETH holder after the hack, dropped 10 positions from the top after he started to sell ETH (over 50K ETH was sold last weekend). More bad news, insolvency lawyers think that it could take decades to retrieve all the funds and distribute them, added to the fact that FTX users are in the queue with everyone else, including creditors, investors, and VC founders. They finally admitted too, in a bankruptcy hearing in federal court in Delaware, that a substantial amount of assets were stolen. The crypto sector laid off 4695 employees. which represents 4% of all tech layoffs up to date, a negligible number if we compare it with Meta and Twitter layoffs. Almost half of the layoffs were accounted for in 3 cities: San Francisco, Dubai, and New York. Hashflare founders were arrested and charged for their involvement in a $575M Ponzi scheme. They were a cloud mining company that started in 2015 and allegedly shut down a portion of its mining operations in mid-2018. Singapore police are checking the crypto lender Hodlnaut after they got reports about them downplaying its exposure to certain digital assets (we are talking about Luna and USTC here). UK Bank Starling banned transactions related to crypto, citing 'high risk'.

​

• Joke of the week: A crypto wallet belonging to the shutdown, for now, crypto exchange BTC-e, suspected to launder Mt.Gox linked crypto, moved 10K in BTC (worth $165m) to various exchanges, as blockchain analytics firm Cryptoquant noted. Then, in a surprising move, Chainalysis said that Mt.Gox was way worse than FTX, in terms of its effect on the crypto industry, and we will bounce back stronger than ever. Wishful thinking I say, as there are much more common people involved, who put their savings in crypto, and digital assets are much more widely used now. The FTX exchange managed $9.5B of the trading volume per day, owning approx. 10% of the global perpetuals market. To make it even worst, now Amazon is working on a mini-series about what went wrong with FTX, with the Russo brothers directing the movie (yep, the guys behind the Marvel franchise). This piece of news was only competing with the finding of Consensys, the Metamask creator's revelation that they are collecting user data, after Uniswap made a similar update to its privacy policy, basically collecting users' IP and Ethereum wallet addresses when you use the default Infura RPC. Using another RPC, the financial data will not be collected. Both Infura and Metamask are products offered by Consensys.

​

That's all for today.

All the best,

George

​

Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) and (Rising Star - Music creators game).

...get crypto while writing on Publish0x blog, using Presearch search engine to maximize your income with PRE tokens. Use Torum instead of Twitter . I am also writing for crypto on Read.cash and Hive.

​