What happened in the past week? Bitcoin ETFs are getting a lot of attention lately and got $4B in inflows in a week. Everybody is waiting for the ETH ETF now. First Conflicts Airdrop on Splinterlands. Quite a few airdrops happening soon. What else? Read below:

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• Bitcoin: We've seen $1.4B inflows into various BTC ETFs in the first 2 trading days. After 1 week, BlackRon's iShares Bitcoin Trust surpassed $1B in assets. After 1 week we got more than $4B in inflows and the number continues to go up. Is this good for BTC? As the 2024 Halvening approaches, it is estimated that the electricity costs for mining will rise from 68^ to 71% of the operating budgets, reducing the profit even further. Texas cold wave forced BTC miners to shut off rigs, crashing the total network hash rate by 34%. Virginia adopted a bill aiming to help miners and validators. Bitcoin miner Core Scientific successfully emerged from bankruptcy.

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• Ethereum: BlackRock CEO predicted a bright future for the ETH ETF. Dencun Testnet is here, and the upgrade was successfully deployed on the Goerli testnet. Some very risky strategies on Pendle let you receive over 26% yields on eETH, purchasing eETH yield tokens and also earning EigenLayer Points and double the Ether.fi points on your leveraged position. The only disadvantage is that you can lose 99.3% of your investment if the Yield Tokens value goes down or if the airdrop is delayed. The Total Value Locked - TVL - on Ethereum grew by 35% in Q4, with DEX volumes growing by 26% and NFT volumes by 31%.

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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Hong Kong's crypto benchmark pushed out XRP to make room for Solana. Hedera unlocked 4.2B HBAR worth $389M, channelling these funds into developer grants, community initiatives and critical adoption drivers. TrueUSD lost its peg, dipping as low as $0.984, resulting in over $130M overflows. USDT has been red-flagged by the United Nations, as it is broadly used among Southeast Asian scammers and money launderers, illegal online gambling and romance fraud operations. Venezuela's Petro token experiment ended this week, after 5 years of controversial activity. Check ONDO Finance, a platform that tracks unutilized USDC and USDT in our wallets, making you eligible to earn Ondo Points via its Wasted Stablecoin Interest Competition. What can go wrong? JUP airdrop on Solana will begin on January 31st. Blast also announced its airdrop. SAROS on Solana also announced the qualifying criteria for the first wave of its community airdrop. Local currencies are coming to Argentina, some of them being cryptocurrencies or stablecoins. Some people are thinking that DOGE will become X's payment method very soon. No one confirmed this, yet the DOGE value went up 18%. Fantom Foundation slashed validator staking requirements by 90%, from 500k FTM to 50k FTM ($17199).

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• NFTs and blockchain games: GameStop will shut down its NFT marketplace next month. Nifty Island is launching their own points system for its Play-2-Airdrop campaign. Ronin Wallet got upgraded with some very interesting features and its token value went up, of course. On Splinterlands tomorrow 23.01.2024 around 20.30, most probably, the first round of Conflicts airdrop activity will start, and I just wanted to say good luck to everyone who decided to participate. One wagon can be bought with 50 Vouchers (around $2.30) and you can deposit up to 5 cards and 100 Rebellion packs to get Airdrop points.

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• Good news: CoinShares acquired Valkyrie, as its BTC fund won regulatory approval with the other 10 lucky ones. Celsius shifted over $125M worth of ETH to exchanges, so its creditors may finally see some repayment drips. Through a joint venture with Gulf Innova, Binance Thailand was born, already integrating local bank transfers and Thai Baht trading pairs, for regional adoption. OKX also expanded to Dubai, through a VASP license from VARA. Gemini Exchange is registered as a digital-asset service provider in France. HashKey exchange from Hong Kong achieved the billion-dollar valuation mark. Switzerland and Lichtenstein created regional crypto projects worth $383B so far. Fidelity forecasted a surge in DEFI and stablecoin interest with the potential 2024 Fed Rate cut. The IRS delayed businesses's crypto transactions reporting rule.

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• Bad news: Canada proposed new crypto rules, designed to bring clarity and risk mitigation measures to public investment funds. Manta Network was hit with a DDOS attack, after its successful listing on major exchanges, including Binance and Kucoin. The ex-OpenSea manager challenged his wire fraud and money laundering convictions, raising questions about the legal definition of the property concerning digital assets and NFTs. Crypto advocacy group Coin Center rejected Senator Warren's claims of obstructing crypto legislation.

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• Joke of the week: After he said that Bitcoin was a scam, a few years ago, now he is up to date with crypto, and now Donald Trump is saying that he will never allow the creation of the CBDC, as this is a 'dangerous threat to freedom' and has nothing to do with the spirit of crypto. Really? Another pro-crypto candidate, Ron DeSantis, dropped out of the 2024 presidential race.

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All the best,

George

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Why not...

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

...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog, using the 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.

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