This week was funny, with the prices still dropping and the high APY harder and harder to find. Bitcoin mined until now reached 90% and ETH is working hard to stay relevant. The blockchain gaming hype seems to slow down, even if you can still make a living wage out of it in some parts of the world. But nothing is free, in the end, even if it seems to be. You always need to pay something, even if this is 'just' some of your time. I do not like to pay with my time, I would rather use money instead. What else?
Bitcoin: One number to think about, 90%. This is how much of the Bitcoin total supply was mined until today. Took only 12 years to mine 18.89M BTC, and the last of it is estimated to be mined in February 2140, based on the actual data. You could buy BTC with $0.10 in 2010, and by the time half of it was mined, the price was $7.50. The research suggest that 3.7M BTC are lost forever. Out of the remaining 15.2M, there are move or less than 1M held by Satoshi Nakamoto, which according to my research died aproximate 3-4 years ago, you know, by the time someone else started to say that he is the real Satoshi. But then, this is my opinion. Valkirie's brand new ETF is investing in companies with large BTC holdings like MicroStrategy, Square, Tesla and few others. BlockFi got some interesting promotion, with everyone trading more than $10.000 on their platform getting a share of 5 BTC.
Ethereum: The Ethereum fundation lauched a Client Incentive program to ensure the future of the mainnet granting 4608 ETH to 144 validators. A bit of Ethereum education, in few words. Optimistic Ethereum, backed by Ethereum fundation and Andreas Horowitz, was launched on January 2021. Arbitum, made by Offchain Labs, was in beta on Mainnet in May. There are 12 decentralized exchanges on Arbitum, 7 of them having more than $50M TVL. On Optimistic ETH there are only 3, one of them being Uniswap, and this one is completely dominating the market, with 73% of the transactions made on Mainnet, 56% of the ones made on L2 Arbitum and 97.5% on l2 Optimism. Uniswap of L2 Arbitum has higher fees than Mainnet or Optimism (0.3 to 1% higher), while on Optimism the fees were only 3-4% of their Mainnet L1 levels. Just to tell you now, Optimist decided to cancel the mandatory developer whitelisting on this L2, so now everyone can deploy smart contracts in there. Interesting thing, at the beginning used to take one week to transfer funds between L1 and Arbitum, for example. That was, until Across Protocol bridge came along, with a novel bridging method that combines an optimistic oracle, bonded relayers and single-sided liquidity pools to provide decentralized instant transactions from rollup chains to Ethereum mainnet (we are talking 3-4 minutes in here). They got ETH, WETH, USDC and UMA (as UMA project team was the one backing up and supporting Across Protocol when they started).
Altcoins: Polygon (MATIC) is stepping closer to worldwide domination, acquiring MIR, a promising ZK (zero knowledge) cryptography start up. This is one important bit, could even be the reason to keep ETH alive on the long term, in terms of scalability. They just launched Nightfall on Ropsten testnet, a privacy focused ETH rollup aiming to improve product traceability and data synchronization. , The fees are also estimated to go down by 86% due to this one. BitDAO (BIT) just created EduDAO, and funded their initiative with $11M yearly, using an initial capital of $33M, in collaboration with eight of the best universities worldwide (Berkeley, MIT, Harvard and Oxford being some that I heard about it). If you had a Presearch account, and/or a Masternode with PRE, check them, they are giving away some NFTs to people. And of course, what will be a week without mentioning Elon Musk, as he just announced that he will accept Dogecoin for Tesla merchandise, to test the waters. More than 55% of the AAVE community toted to get a Bussiness Licence to prevent hard forks. The Graph Foundation granted a $48M fund to The Guild, to develop new subgraph features like subgraph composition, analytics and mutations, improving the API also, in the next four years.
NFTs: Be careful when you sell your NFTs, always check twice and click once. One tired Bored Ape Yacht Club owner sold his most valuable NFT with $3015 instead of $301.500. Wll, he still made some profit, as he bought it with $2290 in May. Nike bought RTFKT, an NFT start-up, as they try to establish a presence into the Metaverse. Coinbase wallet got upgraded to have NFT support now, and you can see them or access marketplaces like Opensea to sell them. Nexo is launching a NFT Lending Desk, letting you to borrow stablecoins and ETH in exchange of BAYC and Cryptopunks NFTs.
Blockchain games: I just discovered this game on WAX, still on Alpha stage, reminding me of Red Alert 2, a game that made me lose so many nights as a teenager. Splinterlands, the Chaos Legion packs are driving the overall price for all the other cards down, and their daily airdroped governance token is now $0.258, much lower than the $0.5 at the beginning of the month. Other than that, the second phase of the sale is going on, until 8th of January next year, with double drop rate for vouchers (you need one voucher and 4$ to buy a card pack at the moment. On Axie Infinity, SLP token went down too, from $0.048 to $o.031, and the AXS is $95 now, down from $114. You will need less ASX and double the SLP to breed more Axies, after the last update. Other than that, get your free Ethermons NFTs, if you did not claim them until now (from here). And last of it, I am thinking to stop playing PetKingdom, as it is only paying around $1 per day, even if you need only one minute to play it.
Good news: Seems that Russia is working hard to introduce the digital ruble, with their wallets aiming to be ready sometime between 2022 and 2024. Unlike China, it may seems that you can buy digital rubles with any kind of money, even from outside Russia. Comments on that? Until then, the Central Bank of Russia decided to not allow mutual funds and banks to invest in Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrencies. Germany Savings banks seems to look into crypto as the interest into offering a crypto wallet is huge (we are talking about 1 trillion euros in savings accounts in here as a response to negative interest rates - you know, when you pay them for the privilege to have your funds safe with the banks). Brazil only stock exchange B3 is looking to enter into the crypto market in 2022. Using smart contracts and token incentives, Braintrust network will remove the intermediaries and make it possible to offer decentralized, transparent jobs, being built, governed and by the community. Interesting stuff, Avalanche is thinking to try a SushiSwap takeover, on their governance forum. Well, this will be fun to watch, as I presume Alameda Research is quite involved into Sushi governance. Robinhood introduced a new feature - crypto gift digital cards, with 14 days to accept it or decline it. ROSE (Oasis Labs) is a token I keep reading about. Is it all hype?
Bad news: You know that exchange called BitMax, AscenEX by its new name? Just got hacked, and the attackers dissapeared with more than $77M ($60M on ETH, $9m on BSC and more than $8M on MATIC. Not funny, after just one week before Bitmart exchange got more than $200M stolen by hackers. Not even NFTs are safe, with more than $100M in PYR stolen by hackers from the marketplace Vulcan Forged. One day later, the final number was $140M, and it was paid to investors using the funds from the Vulcan Forged treasury. Is US, Ohio, their senator stated that stablecoins are misleading, as they are not stable, decentralized or transparent. Well, if you are looking at the USDT, this is true, but there are other stablecoins that are really transparent and decentralized. I swear! Kid you not, Tether was subject to yet another class-action lawsuit, in New York this time, stating that Tether claims that their USDT tokens are backed by US dollar 1:1 were deceptive. And yes, all of us know that this is true, but you cannot prove it. Tether response: ''All that is nonsense!''. I could enjoy more something along the lines, hey, here is the proof that we are not lying, but you cannot have it all, right? More than that, Myanmar government was like, what the heck, all that US drama is nothing to me, and they decided to adopt USDT as their official currency. Close to them, in India, not even the prime ministers are safe, as the Twitter account of Narendra Modi was offering some suspicious pay me one bitcoin to send you back two offer. Of course. Scams in crypto space are rising by 81% in 2021, being close to $7.7B, with DEFI rug pulls being 37% of it, up from 1% in 2020. Yet, they are lower than 2019, when they reached $10B
Mass adoption: Binance Singapore will close their platform on 13Th of February next year, after they withdrawn their licence to operate a crypto-exchange in there. Registration, deposit and trading are suspended in there already. However, they started a collaboration with MDI Ventures to for a joint venture in Indonesia, to develop blockchain technology even further. In US, Binance hired one of the Intel compliance chief as the exchange risk officer. Wells Fargo and HSBC are using blockchain now for their FOREX transactions, as they provide the much needed speed and privacy. I could swear that it was HSBC last year warning people that all crypto are scams and all this blockchain stuff is just a fad, meant to dissapear when the bubble will burst. Elon Must, well known in the crypto-sphere for his tweets related to the Bitcoin and Dogecoin, it is the Time Magazine Person of the Year 2021. Animoca Brands invested in one $130M funding round to raise funds for Brinc, a venture accelerator helping DEFI, gaming and other projects using Web3. BCB Group, a crypto payment service provider, bought Sutor Bank, a 100-year old German bank. Lambda265, a division of the South Koreean exchange Dunamu, raised $60M looking to create Blockchain as a Service (BAAS) products. Anchorage Digital, one of the best crypto custodial bank, raised $350M from the likes of Goldman Sacks, Black Rock and Alameda Research. Ukraine is also working on their central bank digital currency, courtesy of Tacombank.Blockchain analytics firm Nansen raised $75M in early stage funding round, from Horowitz and Tiger Global.
Joke of the week: And of course we have here the one and only, Bank of England, who realized that the rapid growth of the cryptocurrency based assets may lead to stability risks to the financial system. Well , this is the main reason why the crypto was created, you know. But after detailed assesments, the officials declared that they believe the risks are quite limited. Wishful thinking, dear officials, we can talk about this in 3 years, let's say January 2025, and see if you were right or not. Not to mention that UK Advertising Standards Authority called Papa John Pizza ''misleading'' and ''irresponsibly taking advantage of the customer inexperience'' as they dared to offer crypto as bonus for whoever buy their pizza. The ads are bad because do not show clearly the dangers and risks of the cryptocurrency. Well, it is risky to get free gifts, right?
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 (CryptoBrewmaster - Beer factory sim).
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