Interesting two weeks, at the price of one, as I was in a short retreat far away from computer. Everyone is betting on bitcoin, almost every one outside crypto world. Others are waiting Ethereum second coming, the day when the number one crypto will be challenged. Axie is paying less. Splinterlands is paying more. What else? Read bellow:
Bitcoin: Bitcoin White Paper is 13 years old now. Wow! Second step for the Salvadorian Bitcoin project, the profits will be used to build schools. Bitcoin schools paid by the State BTC trust account. NY mayor declared that he accepted his first 3 salaries in BTC, with Miami mayor tweeting that he intends to do the same, in bid to put both Miami and New York on the cryptocurrency map. Glassnode believes that BTC is still undervalued. What do you think? Twitter BTC tips are live on Android now, in a test version. Now everyone is looking at Taproot, the next serious BTC upgrade since SegWit in 2017. We believe this will make the transactions more efficient, private and most important, smart contracts will be introduced. This alone pushed BTC close to 70K. This made Microstrategy BTC holdings close to 7 billions. Funny enough, less than 13% of all the BTC is now present on the exchanges.
Ethereum: On Reddit, Karma points are changing into ETH based points, for all their 500M users. They plan to use Arbitum network's Rinkeby Testnet. Talking about similar things, last week we had Across bridge protocol succesfully launched, and while a am a bit biased towards their work, as one of their co-founder, I can tell you that Across is a bridge between ETH Layer2 such as Arbitrum and Optimism, without waiting the average 7 days, and with no big fees. Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is becoming a DAO too, and there are some airdrops if you already own a .ETH domain. By the way, check out Rocket Club pool. They are hot. Also, Ken Griffin believe that eventually ETH will be more expensive than Bitcoin. I hope so! Another record, at the beginning of this month, for two days in a row, more than 30.000 ETH were burned daily. Still whoever is not happy with the fees increasing 2300% since June, clap your hand. What’s that, thunder?
Altcoins: Avalanche announced Blizzard - a fund providing more than $200M for developers using AVAX network, with USDT, SUSHI, LINK and GRT joining the party. USDT seems to bet big on AVAX especially. Enjin established a $100M fund too, named Efinity Metaverse fund, helping developers to bring games and NFT on ENJ blockchain. Kucoin launched a virtual office inside the decentralized metaverse Blocktopia Skyscraper, and the virtual structure has 21 levels, nodding at BTC 21M supply, with MATIC and Avax rumoured to join soon. KCS (Kucoin own token) increased more than 30% lately, despite world level regulatory issues. It was a rumor this week that Kroger, the biggest grocery chain in US, will accept BCH, but this turned out not to be true. HiveFest 2021 - the annual meeting for all the HIVE enthusiasts accros the world - was virtual this year, on Altaverse, and it was still full of surprises, and brand new ideas. On Polkadot parachain auction, ACALA seems to be one of the main players with more that 8.5M DOT raised. Crypto.com introduced missions, as a way to get even more rewards. Solana is ticking all the right boxes, and their NFT market is booming. As a general trend, DAO are increasingly adopted all over the world. And one of the projects supporting them and providing solutions is UMA. Their SuperUMAns initiative is also slowly transitioning towards DAO. Check their discord for more info. The total value locked in Chainlink related projects increased 10 times in the last year, un to $75B. Total value locked in DEFI now is $250B. AAVE v3 is coming.
NFTs: Nike patented their brand and tagline 'just do it' to be used for online and online virtual world items. Some NFT coming soon? Quentinn Tarantino is releasing 7 unique NFTs featuring some original parts from Pulp Fiction. Hybe (K-Pop band BTS agency) and UPBIT partnered offering NFTs on Weverse very soon. It is also known now, official NFT collections from the next Matrix movie are coming, on Nifty's, most probably on December 22. UFC is coming to the NFT, finally via Crypto.com. Even the International Chess Federation is working to release a NFT platform in order to immortalise legendary moments forever. Now, this one I can understand. Beeple Discord account was hacked, and more than 38 ETH were collected by scammers as payment for some non-existent NFTs. Four Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs (BAYC) made a virtual band, and they got Snoop manager to check on them. Opensea NFT marketplace total volume dropped 12% in October. And this is the beginning of the end. So many NFT marketplaces all over, every day! Ever Presearch search engine will prepare some NFT for their node beta testers.
Blockchain games: Axie Infinity, the Play2Earn model that transformed overnight from a blockchain game to a job saving lives in some parts of the world (so popular in Philippines that the local government is taxing players earnings, to give one example) started to lose value for few months after some All Time High in May, spiked again in July, and now it is decreasing for the second month in a row, with a 45% down in October. This make some wonders if this model is sustainable on the long run. On the new season, we got criticla and skill formula updated and rebalanced. To add to this, the entry price for one Axie is around 0.2 ETH, you need 3 Axies to start, and the Ethereum price is increasing lately. Trying to rebalance the game, we now have liquidity pools offering nice rewards on Ronin blockchain, and Katana - the Ronin DEX - was launched, letting you to trade between AXS, SLP, USDC and WETH. This is good for Axie as less fees means more profits, but it is also making it easier to make the funds flow out of the game ecosystem. Katana will reward RON for liquidity providers, with the Ronin blockchain model moving from free towards small RON transaction fees in the future. The SLP token value jumped 74% after the DEX was launched. Sandbox metaverse, the Hong Kong blockchain game, just raised $93M in a funding round. Splinterlands, one good news after another, two more days until the new Chaos Legion packs are released. All those Legendary and Alchemy potions will finally pay off. And I have reasons to believe that their Lands NFT are the next to be introduced end of this year. Still 8 months of daily SPS airdrops, are you in?
Good news: Vitalik Buterin introduced the term of crypto-cities, where local governments can experiment and use crypto technology to build cities, using a DAO similar mechanism. Miami Coin is one of those tokens, with a RenoDAO coming soon. He mentioned that decentralization can do much more good to a crypto-city, and he mentioned CityDAO project from Wyoming as a step in the right direction. Coinbase is now the first, most downloaded app on Apple Store, and Crypto.com is the third. They also announced that Coinbase will pay somewhere between $40-50M for Agara - an Indian AI-powered customer service startup. And they are a standalone browser plugin now, similar with Metamask. Commonwealth Bank is the first Australian Bank to offer crypto services, giving access to 10 different assets (including BTC, ETH, BCH and LTC). Some big names like Alameda research, Jump Capital and few more raised $50M for AscendEX, a crypto trading platform from Singapore. Huobi is literally sending you to the moon, with a ticket for an actual space trip, amongst their other many prizes, on their 8th birthday party. Celsius is expanding acquiring the cyber security firm GK8 for just $115M. Huobi Global is moving to Gibraltar, outside the Chinese influence. Brave browser integrated Solana Blockchain to its infrastructure.
Bad news: AnubisDAO, a new DEFI project, raised $60M on the first day, and then lost it all in a phishing attack. BZRX lending protocol was also hacked, losing $55M as their private key on MATIC and BSC was compromised. Post mitten on CREAM attack discovered that it was a mix between economic and oracle exploits that clear them of $130M. How can something like this still happen, i do not know. Bank for International Settlements ( BIS) reported that stablecoins and CBDCs are a challenge to the market, introducing new risk. Do they? Squid token, a scam? Probably yes, as you can buy it, but you cannot sell it, and after a 45000% increase, went down hard. They said anti-dump mechanism, I say scam, if the project team is still selling but you don't. Even a Binance spokeperson confirmed that they are investigating this token. So, do your own research before losing your money. And Biden administration seems to focus on stablecoins regulation. Like really, those are the more secure ones, the less volatile. The competition for CBDC too. You get that!
Mass adoption: Amazon Web Services is hiring a ''Financial Services Specialist to engage with major and emerging fintech in order to change how they transact crypto, stablecoins, CBDCs and NFTs''. Do we have Amazon token coming soon? Even Gamestop is creating their own NFT Platform, looking to hire at least 8 crypto-experts in connection to this initiative. Ardana (Cardano based ADA DEFI) raised $10M in a funding round. Some data is suggesting that Tesla may accept Shiba Inu as payment for their cars soon. Is this true, Elon? Dallas Mavericks are sponsored now by Voyager Digital, in order to increase the crypto awareness. Burger King partnered with RobinHood to give anyone spending more that $5 in US some random crypto, mostly DOGE, with few lucky one to win even a full ETH or BTC. Mastercard integrated cryptopayments via BAKKT, helping customers to collect loyalty rewards in crypto, on the Asia Pacifc region, to start with it. Brazil is working on a bill to let emproyers pay in crypto. Team Liquid, the legendary League of Legends team, just signed a 4 year sponsorship deal with Coinbase. Thailand oldest bank just acquired 51% of one of their big crypto exchanges.
Joke of the week: Tim Cook, Apple CEO, confirmed that he own crypto, in his personal investment portfolio, as this is an opportunity to big to miss. What about Apple fighting so hard agains crypto? How do you deal with this hypocrisy? Sounds as cool as Twitter initiative to create a crypto team looking to promote decentralised apps. Hard to believe.
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 (CryptoBrewmaster - Beer factory sim).
_...get the higher rewards for your investments using Blockfi, Hodlnaut and Celsius.network. Get ETH while writing on Publish0x blog, using Presearch search engine to maximize your income with PRE tokens. Check my Lbry.tv channel in here and use Torum instead of Twitter . I am also writing on Read.cash.
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