This week was eventful enough, with plenty of moves on the market, which seems a bit undecisive at the moment, as BTC is testing 34k and 40k without going each way. Let's see what happened in the past 7 days:
BTC - There is a 2.18 BTC prize and some 250K dollars for the winner of FTX Crypto Cup, where the best chess players are competing. Do not hope for much, Magnus Carlsen is there too. BTC is playing a game of hyde and seek, going up and down and testing resistance at 34K at low and 40K at high. Depending on which one is broken you may see a bear or a little bull coming up. Meanwhile, in Netherlands, if you are a Domino Pizza employee, you can get your wages in BTC. I would! Elon Musk is doing what he knows well, fooling around, this time talking with the North American main BTC miners about renewable energy. Michael Saylor lead the discussions creating the Bitcoin Mining Council. Bitcoin did tested 40K resistance after that, but sadly did not went over it.
ETH - The latest star on the experts board is Arbitrum, a new scalling solution partnering with Alchemy, bringing higher output, and 270 times lower fees on ETH. Maker is also planning to use Arbitrum and Optimism scallability solutions for a DAI bridge.Wisdom Tree is getting ready to file its Ethereum ETF with SEC.
Altcoins - Elon wanted to propose some changes to DOGE, but Vitalik told him that this is impossible without extreme centralization (we are talking about DOGE block size and block times going x10 times faster). MATIC is getting serious, just launching a REN bridge this week, making BTC, BCH, DOGE, FIL, LUNA, ZEC and DGB available to Polygon network and you can use Quickswap to exchange them at minimal fees. Uniswap is testing a liquidity mining program soon, and there are some money to be made in there, once operational. Everybody's eyes are on yAxis, which seems to break into the Big Four (Uniswap, Curve, Sushi, Pancakeswap). They got some awesome stuff to show to the world.
NFTs - CryptoTrunks, a new NFT game letting you to produce and grow a tree based on your wallet carbon footprint (this sounds silly, but, well..) needed to pause the game due to the high ETH gas fees. Seriously guys, use WAX if you are bothered by the carbon print. 'Charlie bit my finger' video was deleted from Youtube and become a NFT, sold with $761K. Akon is selling DNA related NFTs on his own platform, courtesy of Oasis Lab. You can even receive your own 30x whole genome sequencing if you pay enough. NBA Top Shot crossed the 1 million users mark this week.
Good news - Federal reserve Governor Lael Brainard, speaking at the Consensus Conference, warned that US cannot fall behind in the CBDC (central bank digital currency) game, as some other countries are far ahead them. Apple is hiring people with crypto experience for some new project. Are they moving into the crypto market? Brian Brooks said that an American CBDC is more a discussion than a reality right now. Paypal wants to open the hunting season, mentioning the introduction of the feature allowing you to move to an external wallet. I think Coinbase success made them want a bigger slice of the pie.
Bad news - As you may know, DEFI100 was exploited, and some extimate a $32M plunder for the bad actors. Not only, they left a message about it on the website (''we scammed you guys and you cant do sXXt about it'') as this ring a bell to me with the cryptomining.io scam long long time ago. Is this a rug pull? Nobody knows. Huobi and OKex blocked Chinese customers from accesing their exchanges, after Chinese government threaten BTC mining and trading. Both exchanges moved base from China in 2017 after the ban. One of the big Chinese region, Inner Mongolia, announced very harsh penalties to anyone violating the crypto mining ban. And yes, it is confirmed by Cathie Wood that Elon may have stopped BTC payments on Tesla due to some shareholders pressuring him (cough' Blackrock cough'). Asked about, HSBC CEO said that they do not want to rush into stablecoins or to open a cryptocurrency trading desk. HSBC is still against crypto adoption, and more than often they ban or stop they clients to deal with crypto. BurgerSwap lost $7M in an exploit using flash loans and a Fake Coin to change the price of their native BURGER token.
Mass adoption - Chiliz added Alfa Romeo and Aston Martin F1 teams to their fan token list, and rumor has it that they are eyeing NASCAR next. Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater, said he own some BTC, and is ready to get more. He said he would rather have crypto than bonds at the moment. Mark Cuban invested in MATIC, and he is telling everyone how this is the next best thing. At least he moved forward from DOGE. Carl Icahn also mentioned that he wants some big bag of Bitcoin, most probably over 1 billion dollars. Tom Brady said he invested in Crypto, but did not disclose how much or what he bought. Galaxy Digital is on a shopping spree, acquiring Vision Hill Group last week (they are dealing with hedge fund in dices and buy-side databases for institutional clients). This happened after they achieved already BitGo, Drawbridge Lending and Blue Fire Capital. There are two motives for this to happen, either they try to cover big loses on their sheet, or they want to develop some new project related to banking/lending/shares for institutional clients. Coinbase is ready to provide prime brokerage services to institutional clients, offering the full package (custody, data, data analytics and more). Binance CEO CZ said that Bitcoin cannot be shutdown and that crypto are here to stay and increase freedon of money all around the world. What a bunch of BS, look what he did next!
A big one related to Binance this time, they announced plans to use the blockchain intelligence firm Cypher Trace to survey Binance Smart Chain, helping the compliance with the crypto-regulations. This means that basically whatever government needs data can negociate something with CZ, or maybe even worst, that CHina will have access to you wallet information and transactions. Is Binance the new crypto-Google?
And the fun news of the day, Austrian postal service plan to use near-field communication (NFC) chips to verify the authenticity of their Crypto Stamp 3.0, the NFT postage stamp project tested at the moment.
All the best,
George
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