To improve is to change, to be perfect is to change often! (crypto weekly updates)

My share of adventures was too generous with me, as I had my church wedding, my honeymoon, my first Covid positive during the said honeymoon, and I was a bit too far from my computer, admiring Petra in Jordan and randomly stopping in cities like Frankfurt and Wien. All good reasons to not be online, but now I had to cover two weeks instead of one, as usual, so I will just start and go through the latest events. Strange things are happening, with the ETH declining after the Merge, instead of going up as everyone expected, especially now that it is looking deflationary. Maybe the miners are selling it, once they got the hard-forked ETHW airdropped. What else? Read bellow:

• Bitcoin: MicroStrategy is going again to sell $500M Class A shares to buy 301 more BTC. Do they know something we don't? Fidelity is considering offering BTC to their investors, using the company brokerage platform, allowing up to 20% of the retirement funds to be saved as Bitcoin.

• Ethereum: Even Google got sucked into the FOMO, activating a countdown for the Merge. Ethereum Proof-of-Work fork took place 24 hours after the Merge, and you should see it as ETHW in your portfolio. Some companies who were concerned with the Merge got their money out, a bit over $61M outflows being registered before the upgrade. As the Merge was successful, not Ethereum is Proof-of-Stake, with no issues involved. The blockchain is faster, more scalable, and 99% less energy intensive. Still, the major mining pools (F2Pool, Poolin, and BTC.COM) confirmed that they will support ETHW, and even exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance stated that they may list it on their platforms. But this time did not go too well, as they started using a chain ID already used by the Bitcoin Cash testnet, and some people exploited the security breach, taking advantage of the confusion generated by the mentioned mistake. Another exploit used the vulnerability of Omni cross-chain bridge on ETHW, as they used an old chain ID, providing the attacker with 200 ETHW extra after his contract was used. After the Merge, Ethereum Network seems to be deflationary, as the total supply dropped by 34 ETH when it was last time checked on the 15th of September. But a new problem was raised, as it seems that more than 40% of the blocks were added by two entities only, Coinbase and Lido. It just seems too centralized at the moment. If a single entity manages to control more than 67% of the network staked Ether, it can overtake the whole network. On top of that, SEC claimed that ETH transactions fall under US jurisdictions ETH nodes are clustered more densely in the US than in any other country (45.85% of the ETH nodes are operated from the US). Is America the center of the civilized world? Keep dreaming!

• Altcoins: Funny enough, after the ETH Merge, Dogecoin is the second biggest PoW crypto, right behind Bitcoin. Who would expect this 3 years ago? SEC chairman Gary Gensler stated that proof of stake crypto may qualify as securities, according to Howey Test, as the investors pledge their money to fund an enterprise with the intention of making a profit. Wait a moment, that means that they equate your staked crypto with money? This will open a whole new can of worms. Helium is moving into Solana, with all their three tokens issued in there: NHT, MOBILE, and IoT. Cardano Network started its Vasil hard fork process, aiming to improve its network performance. Tether USDT launches on the NEAR blockchain, its 13th blockchain to host the stablecoin. Huobi will delist Monero and all the other privacy tokens, including DASH, DCR, XMR, XVG, ZEC, and ZEN. Binance decision to strengthen their own stablecoin, BUSD, and to convert all the USDC, USDP, and TUST, seems to be highly beneficial for USDT, as they were declining lately, and this will make it much harder for USDC to jump from the second position to the first place. BUSD is now available on 2 new blockchains, AVAX and Polygon.

• NFTs and blockchain games: Splinterlands was quite busy, with a huge amount of changes and improvements. A new short series was launched: the Riftwatchers packs, costing $5 in SPS and one Voucher. A new Splinterlands Tower Defence game was ready, with packs on presale, sold in few minutes, but still at a good price on Hive-Engine (tag: Nightmare). A Runi functional NFT on Ethereum was completely sold in half an hour, and this one can be used like Avatar, and also as a neutral legendary card in the game (but Ethereum, so meh, did not touch it). I did manage to get 130-something Riftwatchers and 10 Tower Defence packs. The potential for long-term profit is there and it is huge. On Solana, the numbers are going up, with more than 300K NFTs minted on September 7, compared with 39K a week before. The highest total trading volume was also registered on the 6th of September, $11.5M, overcoming the May previous record. Starbucks begins an NFT-based loyalty program on Polygon, letting you collect and purchase digital stamps to exchange for different perks and immersive experiences. Following an announcement of a $54M funding round, Doodles NFT Collection has risen x12 times in value, becoming the top NFT project. NFT-powered game Blankos Block Party was launched on Epic Games Store, being the first Web3 game published on the popular PC game marketplace, with a bit over 1 million users, as opposed to Valve's Steam marketplace, which will not allow any NFT-related games on their platform. Opensea integrated Arbitum starting from the 21st of September, adding this one to Solana, Polygon, and Klatyn. The creators of the Azuki NFT collection are expected to raise $30M in a Series A funding round.
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• Good news: The US Treasury department allowed Tornado Cash users to recover their funds, even if the platform is banned. Tornado Cash is also back on Github, being reinstalled. Federal Trade Commission has filed to enter the bankruptcy proceedings of Celsius App. Looks like some good things will happen to their creditors and to the users waiting to get their money back. They were repeatedly asking for permission to sell the $23M they have in stablecoins, in order to provide liquidity to finance their daily operations without additional financing. Tribes DAO voted to repay Rari Capital hack victims and the funds will be distributed in the next 24 hours. Nasdaq is planning to launch a crypto custody service, with BTC and ETH supported initially. Binance and FTX are entering in a bidding war for Voyager Digital assets, offering something close to $50M for their remaining assets. FTX is looking to raise $1B from its investors, looking to do even more acquisitions. Wall Street giants including Charles Schwab, Citadel, and Fidelity announced the launch of the crypto exchange EDX, in order to offer institutional clients a way to invest in crypto. Coinbase is showing to its users the politicians' crypto-friendliness, directly on its apps. White House finally published its first-ever framework on crypto regulations last week, following President Biden's executive order on ''Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets''. The European Central Bank announced the selection of five new partners to support the digital euro token. Amazon is one of them, Spanish Caixa Bank will do the p2p payments, French Wordline will create the off-line version, and the other two are the ECB-backed Payment Initiative and the Italian pay tech company Nexi. Messari also raised $35M in a Series B funding round.

• Bad news: SEC announced a plan to create a whole new Office of Crypto Assets, with the sole purpose to deal with crypto. Terra Founder Do Kwon has an arrest warrant on his name, on grounds of capital market rules violation, along with other 5 more individuals, all residing in Singapore. He tweeted that he is not on the run and he is cooperating with the authorities, but Do Kwon was nowhere to be found when local authorities checked for him. Then South Korean authorities asked Interpol to issue a red notice for the co-founder of Terra. Decentralized exchange GMX suffered a price manipulation exploit on its AVAX liquidity, losing $565K of the liquidity providers' money. Bank of Russia and its Ministry of Finance reached an agreement to allow crypto for cross-border settlements, so the citizens have access to their wallets, but the exchanges are not yet legal, so this is quite complicated still. One of the largest crypto-mining data centers, Compute North, filed for bankruptcy this week. On Kraken, co-founder and current CEO is stepping down from his role to become the chairman of the company's board of directors. A new anti-money laundering bill was introduced in the UK, making it easier to seize, freeze and recover digital assets, and it will be used especially to reinforce the Russia sanctions.

• Joke of the week: So Binance tracked two tokens as one, using the same denomination for Helium and Mobile, distributing 4.8M of HNT to users instead of Mobile, and with HNT being much more valuable than Mobile, a massive sell-off started, taking Helium token price down quite a bit. This is a bit surprising, not something that you would expect from a leading crypto exchange.

All the best,
George

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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).

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