The end of the world, and the birth of a new one? (weekly crypto updates)

What a week! Everything kept going down, again and again. You know that meme: I bought the dip, and it is still going deeper. Signs are good if you watch the big picture, as you can read below, with Bitcoin market dominance going down, and the altcoins market getting more mature. NFTs are not the buzzword anymore, but there is still some money to be made in there, especially if you learn about blockchain games. What else?

• Bitcoin: Bear market? What bear market? Bitcoin hash rate and mining difficulty are currently at an all-time high. On top of this, all the wallets aged 12-18 months that are HODLing are now raising to a new 2 years high. The old school is not selling. Fidelity did research about BTC adoption, and they reach the conclusion that countries adopting it earlier will do better long term than the ones banning it outright. Rio de Janeiro decided to allocate 1% of the city's treasury to BTC. So, as you can see, even cities can be better than countries, if needed. One year and the difference is massive, as in December 2020 the BTC market share was 71%, and in December 2021, just 39.8%. Compared to ETH, they increased from 11.1% to 19.9%, with USDT, SOL, and BNB going from 11.1% to 32.7%. iTrust Capital raised $125M to expand BTC retirement options. Intel just released a new ultra-low-voltage BTC mining chip called Bonanza Mine, as Nvidia is making plans to make cards less desirable for ETH miners.

• Ethereum: Some data in here, looking good actually, despite the market. Users paid close to $10B in fees in 2021, nine times more than Bitcoin ones. Just last week a solo-miner managed to mine a BTC block, this week another solo-miner managed to mine an Ethereum one, being rewarded 168 ETH for his odd defying feat. Creators on ETH received$3.5B in revenue, outweighing both OnlyFans and Patreon. Layer 2 solutions are increasing their transaction numbers, as the network is scaling up. A notable mention is Accros Protocol, now the fastest, cheapest, and most secure bridge between L1 and L2s, as they added USDC to their Weth, ETH, UMA, and wBTC, moving them between Mainnet, Optimism Arbitum, and Boba. There are 3 new promo codes on the Celsius app, giving you $20, $200, or $600 in ETH if you transfer $500, $5000 0r $20K on the app.

• Altcoins: Finally, the total supply of USDC on ETH surpassed the USDT. This is good for crypto overall, in my opinion. THOSchain announced that they will support Dogecoin, and the price slightly went up for a moment. ADA surged in the last week, with more than 30%, and we have even seen the first Metaverse project on ADA, Pavia, with more than 100.000 plots of virtual land pre-sold in 2021, the most expensive being $150K. Is Cardano (ADA) going to the moon this year? Acala (ACA) tokens will become transferable soon, and ready for staking. Acala was one of the winners of the Polkadot Parachain Auction. There is an issue with the Strike app, as they only allow USDT on their Lightning Network, and not BTC, as in all the other countries they cover. Presearch is letting you deploy One-Click masternodes now using Flux and StackOS. Check VitaDAO, an early-stage longevity research collective seems a very cool place to be. On January 14, Harmony blockchain halted, during a network upgrade, but the issue was quickly solved. Polygon (MATIC) implemented EIP 1559, bringing a burn mechanism for MATIC, and better fees. Binance also destroyed $750M in BNB, using an auto-burn program. They burned 35M tokens, committing to destroying 100M of them in total (half of its original supply). If you are using BlockFi, you may want to know that they added a BlockFi wallet, where you buy, sell and store crypto, but this one bears no interest, and you need to use the Interest Account for that.

• NFTs: Opensea just set an all-new All-Time High for monthly trading volumes, with $3.5B in ETH. Keep in mind that the Ethereum price is much lower now than in the previous months. They are also buying Dharma Labs, shutting down their app, and giving their users one month to move the funds. Walmart is getting ready for their own Metaverse, filing patents for their own cryptocurrency and NFT collections. LooksRare is still doing a vampire attack, targeting Opensea users that traded more than 3 ETH, offering consistent airdrops in order to lure them on their own NFT marketplace platform. WAX is celebrating the 10 million accounts mark with a historic NFT drop (of a magnitude that never has been attempted before - 10M NFTs). The total volume of NFTs traded on Solana reached $1B in January, as the fees are reasonable, but there is still a lot of catch-up to Ethereum. Facebook users, pardon me, Meta, and Instagram ones will be able to show off with their NFT collections soon, they said. Twitter Blue - their NFT profile verification is now live. Metaverse Startup Animoca reached a $5B evaluation after their latest funding round. Coinbase and Mastercard are teaming up in order to allow consumers to purchase NFTs smoothly and safely.

• Blockchain games: The second round of Axie Esport grants is live, with 7500 AXS allocated for more than 75 community tournaments. Everyone can apply for it. Axie seems to be very active lately, trying to show that they are not last year's news, with another interesting initiative, called the Axie Builders program, where you get help to develop tools and projects related to Axie Infinity, providing grants worth 5-400K dollars in SLP or AXS. Also, there is a Lunar New Year event right now, where you release Axies into the wild, losing them forever, but you receive Land Items instead. Not a bad deal, with the price for one Axie being around 35$. Especially if you manage to get some Legendary items. There is also a raffle, with consistent prizes, a ticket for each Axie released. On Splinterlands, more than 80% of the Chaos Legion packs were sold, and some important summoner cards airdrop are coming soon. Next to the list, they are working to release the land NFTs. You can also try this silly game if you are a Red Alert 2 fan. Pegaxy trial went well, and one week of renting my 3 horse NFTs for races resulted in almost 500$ in rewards after 7 days. The game shows potential.

• Good News: FTX launched a $2B venture capital fund called FTX Ventures, focusing on blockchain and Web3 technology. Australian Football League partnered with Crypto.com to support their women's league, for $25M (the previous deal was with Toyota for $18.5M). Binance partnered with Gulf Innova to launch a crypto exchange in Thailand. Crypto-related jobs are surging, with a 395% increase in numbers in 2021. Google is expanding into financial services, hinting at cryptocurrency debit cards. RobinHood crypto wallet beta is live now.

• Bad News: The profits from the NFT sales are to be treated as ordinary income, IRS said, so you need to declare them, and pay your taxes adequately. I think other countries will follow the US soon, in regard to this issue. Crypto.com got hacked, with more than $15M in ETH (4500 ETH) being stolen, and they are laundered on Tornado Cash right now in batches of 100 ETH. Around 400 accounts were hacked after the company's security was breached, but the losses were reimbursed on the same day. Singapore bans all the public crypto ads, but not the ones made by the banks. Microsoft bought Blizzard with a mere $69B, and they are now the owners of some well-known game franchises such as Call of Duty, Candy Crush, World of Warcharf, and many others. I consider this bad, as Microsoft will always find a way to mess them up. One of my favorite platforms, Anyswap (now called Multichain) got hacked and lost $1.34M (keep in mind that they got more than $8B crypto in their system. Russia is approaching a total crypto-ban choice, most probably. Pakistan is also exploring the same option, both aiming to ban crypto trading websites. Good people from both countries, those websites are called crypto exchanges. The UK government is bringing crypto ads under scrutiny and it is checking them in regard to misleading claims.

• Joke of the week: The Indian Prime Minister wants all the governments to join and take a uniform approach to crypto regulation. He is feeling that this is the only way for the government to 'control' crypto. Obviously, he did not hear of DAOs. And he really believes that this is doable. Some advisors in the Indian government clearly are not doing their own research. If there are any advisors. A close second is the Federal Reserve's idea that a digital dollar should use the existing commercial banking system in order to be successful. Come on people, do your homework and learn about this stuff, once for all.

On another UNRELATED subject, did you notice the markers of a global crisis, starting once again from US? If you read the whole article and reached the bitter end, you may as well participate in the contest. Comment with any important piece of news that I missed and your Hive/Splinterlands account and the one that I like will be rewarded with 10 SPS.

All the best, George

Why not...

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