Let's see what happen lately:
Bitcoin - As this week started, BTC mining difficulty decreased by 28% as China is trying to stop the miners, but I believe it will recover slowly over the next month as they will move the equipment to other crypto friendly locations (Azerbaidjan seems to be one of them). The good thing is that the transactions fees also decreased by 40%, with 1 BTC being valued at $34.5K, and costing $6 to be transferred. Funy enough, even the US officials are making profit with BTC, as the 500 BTC seized in 2019, following fraud investigations were worth $2.9M at the time, but were sold recently for $16M. Even FBI like to HODL. And knows when to sell. Right now, Tesla lost up to $100M from their BTC investment, but CNBC is pointing this without realising that they did not sell, and I see just some cheap Tesla shares to be bought instead. Talking about loss, Chinese conglomerate Meitu lost more than $17M after buying BTC at the top. But, there is nothing lost until you sell, right? As the experts believe that the second half of 2021 will get BTC to the moon. I can olny wait full of hope, as I try to achieve another 0.1 BTC using all my savings. Meanwhile, in Salvador, 65% of the people are not really willing to be paid in BTC, a survey said. In the rest of the world, there are 80.000, yeah eighty thousand more Bitcoin whales more than one year ago (a whale has more than 1000 BTC).
Ethereum - Ernst & Young are working on their own version of ETH fee reduction initiative based on Nightfall (combining zero knowledge proofs with Optimistic rollups), aiming to use it on private ETH transactions. ETH also hit the highest point this month with $2384, and the incoming London hard fork is expected with interest, while BTC price was still going down 10%. London fork will bring us a base fee, which will be burned, hitting the ETH miners hard, but helping the token to become deflationary, increasing its value. 4th of August is the date, load yourself with some cheap ETH before it happens. Some people are hyping on this, even thinking that this is the first step stating the event where ETH will overtake BTC in the next few years.
Altcoins - Barnbridge is continuosly improving, surprising once again with the SMART exposure release, an app letting you to automate ETH based assets weighting. Boston Celtics basketball team is the latest to join Socios, and Chiliz (CHZ) to create fan tokens, and I am still delaying to achieve some CHZ for my portfolio. I need to make the move as fast as possible. Thursday was a bad day for altcoins, with a median 10% loss in value after a mini flash crash, but right now the market seems to recover. CoinMarketCap is now launching a swap feature, using Uniswap V1 and V2. Why version 1 also, I wonder? Balancer is featuring big improvements lately, in terms of fee reduction and trading performance. The Graph (GRT) is decentralizing its curation using subgraphs. Helium outage hit the miners hard, and I personally had a drop from $600 to $15 compared to the previous month. Shiden won Kusama third parachain auction.
NFTs - StormX, the blockchain company, is now sponsoring NBA team Portland Trail Blazers, with a 5 year contract and they will soon launch their first NFTs. The total sales of Non Fungible Tokes in the first 6 months of the year reached $2.5B, compared with $13+M in the previous 6 months in 2020. A good time to start a NFT bussiness. CryptoPunk #5293 is officially accepted into the Miami's Institute of Contemporary Art, as the first NFT to be into a Museum. Big, this is big! Sushiswap is working on a NFT platform.
Good news - Dogecoin developer Ross Nicoll is thinking that Elon is not to blame for the coin huge fluctuations, well i beg to difer, but who am I to say that? But he cannot be blamed for Doge activity raising after new games like the Augmented Reality mobile one called Million Doge Disco were made, where you can dance with virtual Shiba Inu dogs, while hunting a treasure of 1 million Dogecoins. There is also a Dogeagotchi in progress, you know, like Tamagotchi, but with dogs. Coinbase is now recruiting in their India hub, offering a $1000 bonus to its new employees. Wyoming is a progressive state, granting legal status to American CryptoFed DAO, on July 1st. Keep an eye on Emeris, a new crypto app store to be launched soon, unifying app across blockchains. Seems cool to me. Circle is going public soon (I you don't know who they are, Circle is a Goldman Sachs backed fintech focused on stablecoin developments).
Bad news - The ransomware known as Revil infected more than 1 million machines, asking 200+ companies for a crypto payment in exchange of decrypting their files. A Swedish supermarket chain had the tills not working in all their 500 stores after being infected. Patrick Shyu, ex Google employee, also known as TechLead on Youtube, is now accused of supported the pump and dump scheme using his Million (MM) token, after a big amount of liquidity was removed using the same address used to mint the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin.org is under siege, with a concentrated DDoS attack, being asked for a ransom demand in order to stop it. Claudio Oliveira, the Brasilian crypto-kind, was arrested, accused of a fraud scheme involving crypto, with more than 7000 BTC being lost via his Bitcoin Banco Group connection. John McAfee wife said that she does not believe that her husband killed himself, and she was hardly hit by all the conflicting news from mass media. According to the British researchers (yeah, we know them) 1 out of 5 crypto investors have no idea what they are doing. If only were that many, but most probably the number is much higher, with the mighty Doge and Shiba Inu going to $1 type leading them into the early grave. UK is stepping in trying to stop the crypto-adverts, you know, like the Luno wallet you see all over the London Tube. This is beyond pettiness, but you can still smile, thinkink that British government really thinks they can control BTC and ETH and the rest of them. Maybe even ask you to let a third party (British govt) to keep your crypto safe. Yeah, sure, why not! What's the worst can happen? UK becoming China? In UK also, Barclays and Santander banks stopped payments to Binance, but they are accepting money from Binance back to the bank. Really?
Mass addoption - Chainalysis Kim Grauer hinted nicely that governments should educate themselves on crypto, as bans don't work and crypto cannot be controlled by one country (at least in theory). Also, he pointed, only 1% of crypto is associated with illegal activity, as opposed to 5% of the cash used by the banks. Crypto.com seems to understand the value of marketing, and they are now sponsoring UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) in a 10 year deal, one week after sponsoring Formula 1. A TV show is made soon, were they will help unfortunate investors to recover their funds from frozen wallets. It is estimated that 4% of the total BTC is lost forever each passing year. But, on the good side, VISA related crypto accounts spent more than one billion dollars just from January to June. Did you heard this Mastercard?
Hot words: Eeris, CHZ, ETH, FLOW
The funniest news for last, in Korea some students are paid in crypto every time they take a dump, as the human waste is use by the hitech toilet to get methane to power up the building. If this is not a new version of ''My shXt is made of money'' I don't know what to say. Bring it on, in every university, please. Students are in need of it, especially as you can use the crypto received after your toilet visit to buy coffee, noodless and books.
That's all for today.
All the best,
George
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