Tomorrow hope we have learned something from yesterday! (weekly crypto updates)

What happened in the past 2 weeks? I know, there are two weeks for this post now, as I was on holiday, far away from the internet. What else? Read below:

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• Bitcoin: The Fed kept the rates unchanged and Bitcoin moved over 35K, gaining more than 2% after the news. CMC Fear and Greed Index hits a 2-year high, pointing at overheated markets. Even the transaction volume for Bitcoin Ordinals spiked to its highest level since May, with $14.7M in assets being traded. BTC supply hit a new all-time low, indicating an accumulation trend. Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust discount went down to 12.6% amid rising BTC ETF optimism. Bitcoin's Wikipedia page sees a spike in interest as the Whitepaper turns 15. The United States leads the global digital assets under management with $24.5B, followed by Canada.

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• Ethereum: ProShare is letting traders bet against ETH with a new short ETF, and they seem to have chosen an awful moment to launch its product, with the live Ethereum price today being $2049.42 right now. Chainlight discovered a major vulnerability in the zkSync Era protocol, with big money at risk, but the issue was quickly resolved by Matter Labs after the report was published. Some even think that the time to get an ETH ETF approved by the SEC is getting closer. A Twitter user uncovered Blackrock's plans to launch an ETH ETF as they got registered as a new entity in Delaware this week. Over 200 million dollars were liquidated in a short squeeze. There are ARB incentives on the Vertex Protocol DEX.

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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Many friend.tech clones are popping up now, such as the New Bitcoin City on BTC, and Song.tech, where you can submit and trade keys of your favourite hits from Spotify. Did you know that 80% of the crypto trading volume in Brazil is done with USDT, up to $55B this year? The Tether reserves seem to increase nicely, with $72B in cold hard cash, a record-high percentage, even as its dominance went below 70%. The Unibot token price went 30% down after a hacker used a call injection attack to drain $600K from connected wallets. Hong Kong is entertaining the thought of issuing a CBDC, a digital HK dollar, following the China model. Visa helped test the e-HKD trial, with a real-time bank transfer on its blockchain network, demonstrating secure encryption for private transactions. The Avalanche explorer, SnowTrace, will close this month, most probably connected to the fact that Etherscan's service fees are too high. Circle is cancelling the USDC printing for individual customers, reserving the right to institutional VIPs only. Mydogechain.info wallet is asking people to move their crypto away due to some vulnerability affecting older accounts. Solana outperformed large caps, going up 20% this week. Why, nobody knows, but SOL is now the 7th largest crypto in terms of market value. PayPal got the green light from the UK regulators, after hitting a short pause on its crypto services to carefully regulate all the crypto-related promotions under the new rules, but to make things go crazy, the SEC, on the other side of the ocean, served them with a subpoena, regarding its new PYUSD stablecoin. Dubai approved XRP and TON to be used in its economic zone, adding 2 new crypto to its list. Yet, the UAE's regulators started to fine unlicensed firms. Render and Akash pumped by 70% and 30% over the past month. Seven exchanges, including Coinbase, Bitstamp and Kraken, achieved the highest attainable grade in the benchmark, AA, with Uniswap being the only AA-ranked decentralized exchange. Coinbase's net loss shrinks to $2M in Q3, revenue being up 14%. Scroll Network may be ready for an airdrop soon.

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• Blockchain games and NFT: With the ETH price going parabolic, the NFT sales are going up again, 32% in October, with the ETH ones increasing by 50% in volume. The NFT trading volume reached a 3-month high, with $19.1M. Despite all this, OpenSea surprised everyone by laying off close to half of its employees. Ava Labs also laid off around 12% of its staff, claiming to streamline operations. Magic Eden and Yuga Labs team up to launch an ETH NFT marketplace with Creator royalties. Elon was concerned about how NFTs can disappear if servers go down, but this is only a part of the truth, as it is always with him. Not all NFTs are exposed as he described. Is anyone out there still not playing Golem Overlord? Wombat Dungeon Masters' current season is close to its end. On Splinterlands, the Land 1.5 feature will be available on November 14, and this will probably bring many new ways to get some decent profit to this blockchain game. Talking about silly setups, the lightning at Yuga Labs' ApeFest in Hong Kong was bright enough to burn retinas, with some people landing in hospital with eye damage and intense pain. Ubisoft partnered with Immutable to build a web3 gaming experience. This sounds good to me, as I would like some Assassin's Creed shiny NFTs.

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• Good news: The UK government revealed a crypto regulation plan, looking to regulate the stablecoins allowed in the country, and making the crypto exchanges follow the local policies. Bitfinex was added to the warning list for unauthorized operations by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority. The only problem they have is to figure out how to control those pesky decentralized DEFI degens. Bank of England received over 50.000 responses on the digital pound consultation, mostly related to privacy, programmability and the future of cash. Zodia Custody, the institutional crypto custody firm co-owned by British giant Standard Chartered, SBI Holdings and Northern Trust, is launching a custody platform in Hong Kong. Thai second largest bank bought a majority stake in the local exchange Satang Corporation. Third-largest German bank just launched a crypto custody platform, with more German banks seeking crypto licenses from regulators. Swiss Bank SGKB, the fifth-largest bank in the country, launches BTC and ETH trading services. SK Telekom, the largest mobile carrier in South Korea, partnered with Aptos and Atomrigs Lab to enhance its T Wallet web3 wallet service. The HSBC bank partnered with Ripple-owned Metaco to offer tokenized securities custody. RobinHood is crossing the pond, looking to expand into Europe, where regulators are a bit friendlier. Celsius's bankruptcy plan was approved and creditors may get frozen funds back, along with some equity in the new Celsius company. Block posts $5.6B in revenue, with a $45M BTC gain in Q3, mostly driven by CahsApp and Square services.

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• Bad news: Be careful, a fake Ledger app wormed its way into the Microsoft store and already stole more than half a million. SBF never wanted to own FTX, his dream was to sell it to Binance for a lot of money. But this was so long ago, that he cannot even remember, a strange case of amnesia, with SBF answering with "I don't recall" when he is asked about its lost billions by the judges. He was convicted on all fraud charges, facing decades behind bars. The SEC greenlights the FTX relaunch. Gemini is suing Genesis demanding $1.6B worth of GBTC shares to repay its Earn users after Genesis froze withdrawals while going broke in the crypto winter. GBTC just pumped 200% this year, so you can see what they are missing. A LastPass breach facilitated a $4.4M theft from users who trusted the app with their private keys. The US CFTC paid over $16M to whistleblowers this year, with two of them scoring $15M alone, as their information led to some successful enforcement suits in September. SafeMoon executives are to be charged by authorities, after they promised profits, but delivered heavy losses. Wintermute, a crypto market maker, accused Near Foundation and Aurora of breaching an agreement to redeem $11M in USN stablecoins. An Australian exchange, as ZackXBT spotted, was exploited, losing a few million dollars, but we do not know exactly how much. Centralized and decentralized exchanges show persistent vulnerabilities, with 44% experiencing hacks in the past and 8 suffering exploits within the last year, with $117M being stolen from centralized exchanges just in 2023. Many crypto exchanges started to adopt custody services to enhance security.

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• Joke of the week: Kraken agreed to disclose data on those who made big crypto transactions from 2016-202 to the IRS, as they are rumoured to start to build their own layer-2 network soon. So, that is bad for Americans, but you can see how the centralized exchanges can mess with your plans and make you liable to pay big for the crypto taxes. The SEC chairman, Gary, is trying to be there on the news too, making a joke about Satoshi dressing up as himself on Halloween. And then reminded all the crypto companies to be as good as Kraken, complying with the security laws. In response, a US lawmaker proposed to slash Gary's massive $300K salary down to $1.The US is also working on a battle plan against ransomware attackers, working to share data on criminal crypto wallets with 40 other countries. A US senator even introduced a bill to protect the right to control your crypto, without requiring third parties like exchanges. The Majority Whip Tom Emmer aims to stop the SEC from suing crypto businesses, with a new provision for the next year.

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All the best,

George

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Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands - Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) (Wombat Dungeon Masters NFT staking on WAX) and (X-Portal - Elrond all in one app, free NFTs, and more).

...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog, using the Presearch search engine to maximize your income with PRE tokens. Use Torum instead of Twitter. I am also writing for crypto on Read.cash and Hive.

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