Another week passed, with dark clouds on the horizen. Still not sure if the dip reached the bottom, or it will still go slightly more in the next few weeks. What are the latest main news? Let's see:
Good news: Cobie (Crypto Cobain on Twitter) hosted a fundraising on his live stream, for a 6-year old battling leukemia, with over $800K raised in crypto quite spontaneously. Ethan Allen Interiors (ETH ticker on New York Stock Exchange) an 89 year old American furniture retailer, was surprised to see his shares price going 50% up, mostly bought by people believing they buy Ethereum (ETH). Coinbase launched a browser extension to make it easier to connect to DEFI, on desktop, getting rid of that pesky QR code. Still, Coinbase shares are down 30%, but some belive there is potential to increase more. Polkadot recent parachains auction will probably increase its own scalability and cross chain composability. Keep an eye on DOT and KSM.
Bad news: With BTC reaching $42K, Elon destroyed the balance with one word tweet, before trying to clarify that ''Tesla has not sold any Bitcoin'', but by then was too late, and an avalanche of liquidations started one after another. Vitalik find a way to get rid on those pesky Shiba Inu, burning almost 50% of the token supply, and donating them to charity. More FUD from Bloomberg, with one of their journalists arguing that BTC will become the AOL of crypto. By now, we know that Bloomberg columnists are paid extra for FUD, if they move the market down. Why? This is an interesting question. And to respond to some voices in the crowd, banks use twice as muhc 'unclean' energy as BTC, yet nobody complain about it (263 terawatt versus 114 terawatt per year, to be exact). Thoughts? On Twitter, from October until now, we had 7000 cases of scams possing as celebrities and crypto-influencers. Most of them being Elon, and you may think is stupid to belive it, but $80M were lost this way. Nvidia graphics card will have the hash rate reduced by the producer, to stop the abomination (read mining) and to increase their use as intended (gaming). Cascading liquidations, Elon tweets, China FUD, USDT being backed by USDT (not a Ponzi, they say, but I am starting to have doubts right now), these are just a few of the factors believed to create the latest dip. PancakeBunny just lost $200M (yes, millions) in a recent hack, and of course, flash loans were used to get acces to almost 700K BUNNY and 114K BNB. Now, everybody wonder if Binance will roll back the network to cancel the event or not. (They didn't do it yet.) Collateral liquidations in DEFI lending reached an ATH in the last few days ($39M worth of liquidations compared to $1-5M in a normal day). Not that funny, most of the centralized exchanged (CEX) experienced technical difficulties during the BTC crash (Coinbase had intermittent downtime, Binance paused ETH tokens withdrawal, Kraken got connectivity issues and Bitfinex, Bittrex, Kucoin and Huobi also got problems). As opposed to this, all the decentralized exchanges (DEX) worked just fine, as they are immune to outages as long as the blockchain is up.
Laws about crypto: the US Treasury department said ''bussinesses that receive cryptocurrencies with a fair value of more than 10.000$ should report this to IRS''. Hong Kong aslo proposed to restrict crypto exchanges only to professional investors.
ETH: In case you wonder in which countries ETH is the most popular search, US is on the first place, followed by Germany, Turkey, Brazil, France, UK, Canada, Australia and Poland, in this exact order. Ark Investment just bought $20M of Grayscale ETH Trust shares. Maybe they found out that the version ETH 2.0 will use 99.95 less energy, once POS will be launched.
BTC: My friend Yoda said that the fear of loss is the path to the darkside, and the Fear and Greed Index is now at 21, down from a hyped 73 greedy level. Not that funny for BlockFi, they mistakenly put BTC sign instead of $, paying March promotion in Bitcoin instead of Dollars. Imagine the lucky guy who received 700 BTC, instead of the estimated $700. Some transactions were reversed, some were quick to withdraw it, and the withdrawals were then restricted, and some were even threatened with legal action. Thursday was an interesting day, with BTC losing 10% of its value. Something good came out of this dip, Bitcoin dominance is increasing once more, as people sell their altcoins mobing funds into BTC.
NFTs: Rick and Morty co-creator, Dan Harmon is working on some animated series called Krapopolis fully on blockchain, with some NFTs related to is to be launched soon. Family Feud host Steve Harvey launched his own NFT on Rarible, with the money paid for it going to charity. Instagram is looking out to create a NFT platform, rumos has it (feedback was asked from 5000 content creators regarding NFTs). And the Hollywood sign (that one from LA) will be sold as NFT for charity. Christie's will auction some of Andy Warhol work as NFT.
Altcoins: Celo, Serum and Forth were the stars at the beginning of the week, followed by Polygon and SNX on Tuesday. Then Steem and Celer went up in the middle of the week for some strange reason, while most of the market started to bleed. Thursday everything wend down excepting MATIC, FTM and SUSHI. By Friday, most of the altcoins lost 30-50% of their value. Against any expectations, Monero went more than 80% up Friday, probably related to the revelation of the US Treasury's tax compliance agenda.
Cryptocurrency adoption: Williston, a North Dakota city, is accepting now crypto for utility bills, using Bitpay (1% fee for BTC, ETH, USDC and DAI, as opposed to the 3% asked by Paypal and Google Pay). Jack Dorsey's Square continues to purchase BTC as investment, and Uniswap liquidity briefly passed the one billion mark. Wells Fargo plan to add crypto to its platform very soon, according to its president. The most searched work on Google, US and worldwide, was ''cryptocurrency'' a new all time high. Coinbase is trying to buy asset management firm Osprey Funds (funds specialized in BTC and DOT).
And the fun news of the day, to close the weekly update, 56% of the Australians asked about it believe that Elon Musk invented Bitcoin.
All the best,
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands - Hearthstone-like card game) and (CryptoBrewmaster - Beer factory sim)
...get the higher rewards for your investments using Blockfi 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.
...the most lucrative faucets that I use: ZEN, ZEC, DOGE. Start mining Helium (NHT) for free on Emrit.io.
