US supremacy, Binance Earth Corporation + other crumbles on the Galaxy quest(weekly crypto updates)
Another week, another brick in the wall, Pink Floyd would have said, if he was into cryptocurrencies. More than that, if we are to ignore all the negative press, and do not talk about Covid19, world war three, climate change and alien invasion, what is left? US is looking to become the crypto-center of the world, with their new regulations, ETH fees are all time low and Assange is still in jail. What else? Read below:
· Bitcoin: OKcoin partnered with Stacks (STX) launching a grant program with $165M in funding, to bring Web3 elements to Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain. Chainalysis launched two new tools helping to make crypto sanctions compliance easier, in the light of the recent sanctions against Russia.
· Ethereum: Starkware, an ETH Layer 2 developer using ZK-Rollup, is raising funds at a $6B valuation. Goldman Sachs is offering access to an ETH fund issued by Galaxy Digital to the interested clients, with a $250K minimum investment, and more than $50M were sold to 28 clients. In terms of fees, the total amount spent of fees on ETH dropped 49.8% in February, with the average fee per transaction being $21.25. Seems that they went down even more in March, as one transaction yesterday cost me only 8$. From $1.3B in fees in January, to $673M in February, this is quite a steep drop, and the team behind ETH is working hard to use the ZK-Rollups and other similar technology to decrease the fees even further. In the same time, the average daily active addresses on ETH grew 1.56% in February.
· Altcoins: Avalanche (AVAX) announced a $290 M fund to support the subnets growth, making them to join the game on par with some of their rivals (ATOM and DOT). DeFi Kingdoms (JEWEL) is the first project to be granted incentives on AVAX. Keeping an eye on NEAR, after they added dynamic scaling, developer rewards, user onboarding and data storage to their Layer 1. A new privacy focused blockchain called Espresso was built by a team of researchers from Stanford University’s applied cryptography research group. The stablecoins total supply increased 29% from Q3 to Q4 2021. Gold backed crypto like PAX Gold and Tether Gold market cap surpassed $1 billion. There is still time for you to learn about X-Polycub and get in there early.
· NFTs and blockchain games: Pegaxy’s Vigorus token (VIS) is still going down, but lately most of the Altcoins are, so this game is still in cards for me, bringing a decent profit. Griffin Gaming Partners, one of the biggest gaming focused venture funds, raised $750M to focus on blockchain games. NFT Layer 2 platform Immutable X (IMX) raised $200M in a Series C funding round too, aiming to expand and scale even further. On Axie Infinity, more Origin cards were shown; this time we got the Mouth cards. On Splinterlands, the Waka card is now on sale on WAX blockchain, at some expensive price, given that the overhyped Poison summoner is not that awesome as I was expected, I would say pass to it. By the way, if you liked the Chifibots game mentioned in the latest OneUp Cartel posts, there is a week left if you want to get some of their NFT packs on this contest.
· Good news: FTX is expanding in Europe after they got approval from financial regulators in Cyprus, and they are getting their European Headquarters in Switzerland. The White House and President Joe Biden are ready to sign an executive order this week, with a strategy to deal with cryptocurrencies, was said Monday. Words like ‘responsible innovation’ were thrown around, and crypto will be studied across multiple US government departments. They will research the risks and benefits of using crypto. These two words alone almost landed them on the joke of the week. South Korea got elections and the winning candidate pledged to lower the tax for crypto investments gains. Dubai ruler approved the virtual assets law, making another move towards becoming a crypto-friendly region. Binance seems to be on an acquisition spree, as they acquired a $200M stake in Forbes (one year after they sued the same Forbes publication for a defamatory story showing that Binance has a strategy to evade regulations), and they seems to not be shy to buy other than crypto successful companies. They want to invest in one or two game-changing companies in every economic sector, and make them crypto-friendly. Stripe launched a crypto service enabling businesses to use the payment giant services as a payment method for crypto and NFT transactions, starting in US, UK and EU. FTX already signed a contract with Stripe, in order to use their payment services. Canadian crypto mining firm Hive Blockchain signed a deal with Intel to buy some of their new ASIC mining chips, increasing their hashrate by 95%. Santander partnered with Agrotoken start-up, providing loans against their Stablecoins (backed by agricultural commodities like soya, corn and wheat). VanEck launched a cryptocurrency mining fund, offering exposure to the companies involved in the crypto-mining industry. Crypto-donations for Ukraine are getting close to $100M.
· Bad news: John and Tina Barksdale have been charged by the SEC after they defrauded their investors out of $124M, with a scam token called Ormeus Coin. They falsely stated that the token is backed by a massive mining operation producing $5m to $8M per month. Coinbase blocked over 25000 wallet addresses linked to Russian individuals, one week after they said they needed to refuse SEC request to do it. Well done Coinbase, showing your true colors one more time, and making us to realise why we do not like to keep funds with you guys. Bitmex Co-founder pleads guilty to violating bank secrecy act, and he is facing a maximum sentence of 5 years in prison.
· The joke of the week: Assange DAO started like a noble case meant to help Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, legal case, and raised $56M in Ethereum, but right now most of the early stakeholders left the project, and the community is there to run it alone. Everybody is saying it like is something bad, but, well, isn’t this the DAO mission? To let the community do the governance choices?
Best regards,
George
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).
...get the higher rewards for your investments using Blockfi, Hodlnaut, and Celsius.network. _Get crypto while writing on Publish0x blog, using 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.