What a week! Whales trying to flush out the little man, with a concentrate effort on all the main exchanges, focused on Bitcoin and Ethereum mainly. US government having interesting views on the stablecoin and bitcoin. Wrong, but interesting. Solana is all the hype lately. Tron network creating a gaming metaverse, yeah, right, and they start with a Mafia game. Somebody call the year 1999 please! And much more, bellow:
Bitcoin: Morgan Stanley added 2.1M Grayscale Bitcoin Trust shares on two of their portfolios. Singapore approved 2 Bitcoin Funds, one trading physical bitcoin (meaning that they buy the Bitcoin, not some derivative involved into the Bitcoin ecosystem), another one being an yield fund. And while there is a dip, El Salvador is always adding more BTC to their treasury, with another 100 just bought this week. MicroStrategy added another 7002 BTC to their treasury also, reaching a total of 121.044 BTC ( $6.9B). And something unheard until one year ago, many Wall Street banks, including Goldman Sachs, are working on a way to use synthetic crypto products to create BTC backed loans. The first one to adopt this, Fidelity Digital Assets, gave a press release on Wednesday, allowing bitcoin to be used as collateral against cash loans. While some dream at the $150K for a BTC, with no resistance above $69K, we just had a sudden drop to $43K on Saturday, already recovering at the moment ($49K right now). There are strong signs that both ETH and BTC market are manipulated by a group of whales, most probably in order to load their bags even more, before a masive jump to $100-150K. Also, they seems to aim to flush the small investors from the market.
Ethereum: Since London Hard fork (EIP 1559) was operational, more than 1 million ETH were burned. Also, while the net ETH emissions where even negative now and then, they declined quite a bit, leading to us thinking that one day the ETH may even be deflationary. Bitcoin investment products decreased 9.5% in November, while Ethereum based ones increased 5.4%. Altcoins also increased 10.4%. FTX.US allows you now to buy, sel and display ETH NFTs.
Altcoins: Crypto data company DappRadar is working on their own token launch, looking to decentralize in the future. Grayscale launched a new product - Solana Trust, which is obviously a good choice, as Solana increased more than 650%, outperforming ETH, ALGO, ADA and DOT. A Solana transaction uses less energy than a Google Search, and 24 times less energy than charging a phone. They stated that they are aiming to become carbon neutral. Alpha Finance joined Avalanche Rush program, with $6M allocation for liquidity mining incentives. Ripple (XRP) is assisting the Republic of Palau to develop their own USD backed CBDC. Celsius (CEL) did another funding round, up to 4750M, raising to a $3.25B evaluation. Still, there is some dodgy link between them and USDT, with a question mark on how CEL is sold all the time in order to keep the price the same level and prevent it to increase. Got some tokens in there, and I monitor them closely. Atomic wallet is adding Solana and Cardano to their list.
NFTs: Christie's auction house got a partnership with OpenSea, in order to start a series of curated auctions, featuring artists like Andre O'Shea, Ash Thorp, CyberKongs, DotPigeon, EtherRock and more to come. After NBA Top Shot, Dapper Labs will move into pro football, with a project called NFL All Day. Presearch search engine is integrating NFT search results with OpenSea, while their rewards are using now a dinamic rate for every search. Adidas entered into the NFT market, followed by Budweisser. Twitter is making some serious moves into the NFT world, with what I think will be a platform of their own coming soon. On Thanksgiving, even Martha Steward lauched a collection of 101 story telling NFTs. Mike Shnoda, that Linkin Park guy, is releasing a NFT series called Ziggurats, containing songs with same lyrics, but different cover art and audio. Snoop Dog revealed a NFT collab with Coldie, called Decentral Eyes Dogg, and the highest bid yesterday was 169 ETH ($760K).
Blockchain games: A Genesis plot of land on Axie Infinity was sold for 550 ETH (more than $2.3M). The first Ronin DEX, Katana, hit $1.3B in TVL in less than a week. At the moment they got AXS, SLP and WETH. Tron blockchain launched a blockchain game called Syn City, a play2earn mafia game, created by TRX Foundation ex head of bussiness, Roy Liu, after a %8M funding round. With just a video and some pages coming soon, they got some Syn City pass NFTs selling for more than 4 ETH on OpenSea. Did not make me very curious about it. Avocado Guild, a P2E companyraised $18M is a Series A funding round, with a valuation $200M. They are educating players on P2E games, Web 3 and DEFI. Grayscale did a research into the metaverse, estimating that by 2025 the revenue from blockchain games might reach $400B, up from $180B in 2020.
Good news: Coinbase is on shopping spree, acquiring the crypto-wallet company BRD, launched on 2014, focusing on decentralization and security. Today, they got more than 10 million users. No amount of money was disclosed. Also, they bought Unbound Security, a cybersecurity firm from Israel, as they own a secure multi-party computation (MPC) technology patent. Australia is discussing cryptocurrency and decentralized finance (DEFI) at the Australian Financial Review in Sydney. Jerome Powell is reappointed Chair of Federal Reserve, and he mentioned that he is not a fan, but also not against crypto, mentioning BTC and stablecoins when asked. Gary Gensler, Chairman of SEC, and Jay Clayton, former SEC chair agreed that there is a productive future for crypto as the regulation will become more easier, while the crypto space is consolidating. I am always amused with this kind of opinion that America holds the future of crypto. Also from US, Odell Beckam Jr signed with LA Rams, for a mere 4.25M, in BTC. Decentralization - this is the key for the future, and DAO is the way. Speaking of this, I am sure that you know that UMA Project mission is to enable anyone to build decentralized financial products. Even their SuperUMANS initiative is organising as a DAO, with a cool 24 hour launch party very very soon.
Bad news: Badger Dao lost more than $120M (2100 BTC and 151 ETH) in one hacking attack made in a complete new and unexpected way. Funds were drained from the users wallet using malicious contract permissions. Once they noticed, they proceed to froze all the vaults, and BADGER DAO token went down more than 20%, all the way to $16.20, from a $28 one week ago. The exploit occured in the front end of their website, not in the core protocol contracts. MonoX DEFI was also hacked, with $31M lost as its price was boosted, letting the attacker to buy crypto at cheaper rates. In UK, the crypto exchanges will face a 2% tax, probably paid by the users. And I was thinking Coinbase is bad at it. Is a little gimmick about a law passed in April 2020, related to Facebook and Google, which moved from here due to that, but look and wonder, if digital assets are financial instrument, then exchanges need to pay.
Mass adoption: If you did not heard, Notional Finance is an ETH protocol enabling you to lend and borrow crypto at a fixed rate, via on-chain liquidity pools. I am not sure the banks will be happy to hear that too. Fireblocks raised $400M in a Series E funding round, from the likes of Sequoia Capital, BNY Melon and Galaxy Digital, raising their evaluation from $2B to $8B. Crypto.com is looking to expand in North and South America, I believe, after they bought North American Derivatives Exchange Inc (NADEX) and a 40% stake in Small Exchange Inc, both of them from the IG Group Holdings PLC. Mercado Pago, a part of Mercado Libre, the South American equivalent of E-Bay, introduced BTC, ETH and PAX dollar (USDP) as methods of payment, with Paxos as crypto-custodian. Jack Dorsey's Square is rebranding as Block, embracing decentralization, he said. Should we believe it? Miami is working with Algorand (ALGO) building a decentralized IoT - internet of things network, in order to monitor the air quality. India announced that they aim to regulate crypto, not to ban it.
Joke of the week: Three parties from Germany (Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats) want to call together all the European countries to monitor all the crypto activities in order to identify all the owners. Yes, this is true. And while they are there, why not use this knowledge to convince them to buy and hold the most perfect cryptocurrency of all, the digital Euro. Sometimes I think that I can make serious money educating some people from various governments on what you can and what you cannot do in the crypto-sphere. Still, not as bad as Hillary Clinton, asking for stricter laws for crypto, to prevent China and Russia to destabilize US via technology. What? When? How?
All the best, George
Why not...
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