The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the front of an oncoming train! (crypto updates)
A new week and Operation ChokePoint is going on as usual, with the US government realized that they cannot control crypto, so they are trying to block the withdrawal from blockchain to a bank account. Unintended consequences law activated, most probably other countries will become crypto-friendly, get lots of money in their economy, and use another fiat ramp than the dollar soon, more probably. The USA will lose the tech and blockchain race, as many other times when they ignored emerging technologies. Not an ideal world, but we can roll with it. The next 20 years will show us how this will happen. What else? Read below:
Bitcoin: BTC was once again above 28K lately hitting $28.619 on Wednesday, very close to the last 90-day highs of $28.803, and it has appreciated 71.4% since the year started. Last year had suffered losses every single quarter. MicroStrategy buys another 6455 BTC for $150M, at the average price of $23.238. Not bad!
Ethereum: Shanghai and Capella's upgrades are scheduled on April 12, and you will be able to withdraw your staked ETH, at least in theory, with a possible long queue being introduced. The upgrade was tested already on three testnets: Sepolia, Zhejiang, and Goerli. The maximum bounty was doubled, up to $500K being offered for identifying vulnerabilities on the network.
Altcoins: RON (Ronin) staking is now live here. starting to reward you from 12.04.2023, with 22 validators to delegate your staked RON. Arbitrum airdrop pushed the ARB price to $14.86 in just 4 minutes, after it launched at $0.18, stabilizing at $1.11-1.57 after just one hour. Polygon launched zkEVM Layer-2 Network, compatible with EVM, permissionless mainnet and anyone can bridge assets and use them in zkEVM native apps. MakerDAO approves a new 'constitution' formalizing governance and trying to prevent hostile actors from taking over the protocol. They should get Justin Sun to test it, as he just finished with the lawsuit related to Steem's take-over attempt.
Blockchain games and NFTs: On Splinterlands we have the cards that are on the lending market for more than 30 days, without being rented, removed from the market, and the card transfer cooldown is extended from 1 to 2 days. Minor tweaks were made to the Secret of Pretoria Land Whitepaper. Disney is no longer working on its Metaverse project, as they cut 7000 jobs in the next 2 months. At least 50 people from the Metaverse unit are leaving too. The UK plan to release an NFT collection in the summer of 2022 was delayed and finally scrapped, blaming the bear market. Careful if you do high-value transactions, always check twice, and execute once, as one NFT trader found out the hard way, sending a CryptoPunk worth 77ETH to a burn address by mistake. Magic Eden formed a web3 collective with Yield Guild Games guild network, Game7 DAO, and Fenix Games gaming publisher.
Good news: Kraken sponsors the William Racing F1 team. CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) claimed that Binance broke US derivatives rules and should have registered with the agency years ago, while CZ describe this as unexpected and disappointing, pointing out that they were the first global, non-US exchange to implement a mandatory KYC program, and that they never engaged to manipulate the market. The thing is, they point at ETH and BTC as commodities, while the SEC is treating them as if they are not commodities. No official action has been announced. We will see more of this, I am sure. Meanwhile, Mike Novogratzis pointed out that governments should fear AI, not crypto. And now Gary Gensler, the SEC dude, is appearing for the first time in front of the Financial Services Committee to discuss his approach to crypto policy. When he was asked to justify his actions, some of them quite controversial, he declared that existing rules regulate crypto, legislation unnecessary. Chaos is needed by the banking system to fight against crypto. Nothing good out of it, I bet. Euler hackers returned over $100M out of the $136M stolen. Citi Bank predicts that trillions of assets could be tokenized by 2030. UK treasury and Home Office published a 3-year Economic Crime plan, looking to regulate crypto-assets to protect customers and make UK attractive for crypto innovation.
Bad news: Do Kwon was arrested and is being held in Montenegro, accused of attempting to use falsified documents to fly to Dubai, an offense that can carry a sentence of up to 5 years in prison. Both the US and South Korea are requesting his extradition. Not that we are surprised, but it seems that SBF and FTX paid a $40M bribe to Chinese officials to get frozen accounts worth $1B unlocked, in early 2021.
Joke of the week: Despite getting crazy amounts of money as profit from selling its graphic cards to miners, Nvidia chiefs said that crypto adds nothing useful to society, as now many of their GC are used for AI projects such as ChatGPT instead of mining. Talking about ungrateful ones! They will get a huge hit as more crypto will follow ETH and use PoS instead of PoW.
All the best,
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on my favorite 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.
