What a month, what a week, with a lots of powerful airdrops, and thousands of dollars given for free. Kung fu means skill acquired by practice. So, in one way, each of us will be crypto kung fu masters at some moment in the future. I enjoy being an early adopter, and you should be doing that too. Let's see what happened in the past week!
Altcoins, AAVE got a new liquidity mining program for USDC, DAI, USDT, GUSD, ETH and WBTC, helping you to earn stAAVE, aiming to increase their market dominance and even overtake the number 1, COMPOUND. Badger and REN launched a BTC to ETH Bridge called Badger Bridge, using just one click. Too good to be true? I will try it. Nice yields also. 1inch launched its Ios version of a mobile wallet, read that as crypto exchange on the move. Nice! Opera added support for .crypto domains. Metamask reached 5M users (a surprising 500% growth in the last half an year). Big big one, Coinbase will let you to buy crypto using Paypal, just in US to begin with it. Next on the list are Canada, UK and EU. Funny enough, Paypal CEO said that the response to his company adopting crypto was beyond expectations. Polygon (MATIC) goes into DEFI, with a $100 M fund available with the tag #DEFIFORALL. Gemini is working with Mastercard to launch a card in the summer, with a cool 3% cashback in BTC and some other crypto. Another question: Is CURVE Protocol a dark horse, an undervalued project ready to moon soon? PAXOS raised $300M in a Dseries funding round, with the entire company evaluated at $2.4B.
Bad actors in crypto: Four employees arrested in the scandal involving the Turkish exchange Vebitcoin sudden closure, rumors talking about fraud allegations. On top of this, Turkey denied the total ban and said that crypto regulations will follow soon. Centre Consortium (Coinbase and Circle for you) banned 7 ETH wallets, in response to a request from law enforcement. Of course, privacy laws stop them to give us more informations, but this is what centralization can do. Remember, remember! In Mother Russia, police arrestedcounterfeiters after they sold more than 10 million dollars for BTC., at 10-15% of their nominal value. Moral of the day is: do not buy cheap dollars. And then, the lowest of the low, Coinseed wanted extra profits, and got them (or not) by changing their clients crypto for DOGE. Guess what, they did it just before DOGE got dumpd, losing some hundreds of dollars. False claims and defrauding investors, this is not a good calling card. Iran is trying to use crypto instead of dollars, for sanctioned imports. Will they, could they? We will see. We are talking about a domestic mining of $2M daily on average. In US, IRS arrested BitcoinFog creator, Roman Sterlingov, and charged him with money laundering. If you do not know, BitcoinFog is a cryptomixing service, which managed to launder more than 1.2M BTC in the past 10 years. Rumos has it that he got more than $70M form transaction fees. On the bad list we have now Pickle Finance, Cream Finance and Alpha Homora, with more than $284M lost in DEFI hacks. Choose wisely! The latest one is Uranium on Binance Smart Chain with a $50M exploit few days ago. SEC is not ready to approve VanEck and CBOE BTC ETF, delaying it another 90 days. Germany is saying that Binance introducind digital stocks is against the law, Probably others will follow. But Germany is not all against crypto, as one bill that just got approved will let fund managers to invest up to 20$ of their portfolio in crypto (Spezialfonds), with a possible investment storm up to $425B to go towards crypto. The top 'Pump and Dump' prize this week goes to DOGE and XRP. I like to stay away from both, unless they are free.
TOP gainers: on Monday Serum increased with 62%, and i remember my brother @PVMihalache telling me about Serum in 2019, when it was a fraction of dollar. No, I did not buy it. Tuesday, a nice assortment, Waves going up 47%, and Hive (one of my favourites) reaching $0.69 - 36% gain. Wednesday Alien.Worlds token started to recoved from the masive sale, reaching $0.37 - 38% up, and MATIC bumped 18% up also. Elon hinted that DOGE will pump on 8th of May, with Mark Cuban supporting his efforts. Thursday Syscoin and Alice gained more than 50% in value. IOTEX and VENUS gained more than 25% on Friday.
The Korean Japanese giant video game maker Nexon started to achieve some BTC, starting light with a $100M buy. University of Wyoming is getting BTC and other crypto via staking and masternodes. One of America well known food chains (Landry's - the ones with Morton's the Steakhouse and Bubba Gump Shrimp Company) is accepting BTC as payment now. Despite BTC advancing fast towards mass adoption, the market dominance is decreasing now to 48.2%, with ETH gaining momentum. Still, jumping on this, Goldman Sachs said that BTC is not digital gold. At least not until they buy all that you have, with the imminent launch of their actively managed BTC fund. Right? Tesla sold 10% of their BTC holding for $272M, getting more profit from crypto than from cars selling.
ETH reached a new ATH, $2731, and we have DEFI and liquidity providers to blame for that. (Smiling!) ETH total market cap is now woth more than Paypal, Toyota, Exxon or Comcast. Right now, the 4M ETH mark was achieved is ETH2.0 staking, total worth of $11B. European Investment Bank just issued a $100M digital bond on ETH, in a sale led by Goldman Sachs, Santander and Societe Generale.
NFTs - Disaster girl (the one with the Meme) managed to sold a NFT of her iconic photo with $430K (aka 180 ETH). Not bad, girl! Retired basketball palyer Yao Ming released a 200 limited NFT series, linked to an exclusive wine bottle, called The Chop (priced 0.2-9.99 ETH). Eminem is launching 3 different NFT sets on Nifty Gateway, and darn, some of them seems tasty. The cheaper ones were $5k. The price is now 25% higher already. And the biggest news, Binance will launch their own NFT market place in June.
Serious money come in with the FORTH airdrop, so, in case you just lived under a rock and you do not know, if you had AMPL in your Metamask or Trust, go and claim your 5-15 thousand dollars. Right, it is that much!
All the best,
George
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