What happened in the past week? Bitcoin goes above $50K. Coinbase is doing very well. Celsius paid around 50% of the total amount to its creditors. ETH Deneb Cancun upgrade is coming soon. What else? Read below:

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• Bitcoin: With BTC hitting 50K, everyone is hopeful, especially now when the spot BTC ETFs are getting 12.5 times more BTC than the network can produce daily, so some can predict a shortage in the future. Many Chinese BTC miners are now moving to a new destination, where electricity is low, but selling crypto is still illegal, and this is in Ethiopia. Via his Founders Fund, Peter Thiel quietly accumulated $200M worth of Bitcoin and Ethereum late last year, while prices were under 30K for BTC. As Bitcoin goes up, the Japanese Yen struggles, as the Japanese savers view BTC as an alternative to protect wealth. Ordinals drove over $200M in fees for the BTC miners.

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• Ethereum: The Cancun upgrade was successfully implemented on the Holesky testnet, and now we are waiting for the deployment on March 13, if everything goes according to the schedule. Franklin Templeton applied for an ETH ETF. DN-404 is a better version of ERC-404, with NFT and token functionality, cutting transaction fees. Which for Ethereum is a must!

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• Altcoins and stablecoins: A Solana-based DEX, Jupiter, just got on the top, dethroning UniSwap, with $480M, versus $470M swaps per day. Did you get your airdrop in there: https://lfg.jup.ag/? Wormhole announced the airdrop of its W token, with 10B tokens to be distributed over 4 years, and an initial release of 1.8B to the community, core developers and strategic partners. Abu Dabhi and Solana Foundation formed a strategic alliance to advance distributed ledger technology (DLT) in the Middle East. In a move that reminds me of FTX, Ripple brought another custody provider this week - Standard Custody and Trust Company, giving them access to US customers. Even BONK was going up after rumours of the token being offered on Revolut Card came out. Stark airdrop will start Monday, and if you feel adventurous, you can buy some on the pre-market on the Kucoin exchange. The SK Klaytn project and the Abu Dabhi Finschia project will integrate technology and governance to form a unified network called Project Dragon.

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• NFTs and blockchain games: On Splinterlands, the first round of Conflicts airdrop activity is ending soon, and I just wanted to say good luck to everyone participating. One wagon can be bought with 50 Vouchers (around $2.30, less expensive) and deposit up to 5 cards and 100 Rebellion packs to get Airdrop points. You may also want to check Holozing - a soon-to-be-launched Pokemon-like game on the Hive blockchain. The SK web3 gaming giant Wemade, worth $1.2B, is not under investigation concerning its decentralized exchange, PNIX, and digital wallet, Play Wallet. Yuga Labs sparked outrage over its token giveaway this week, due to high gas fees. A play2earn game called PlayDapp was hacked, and signs point to a compromised key that granted access to mint vast fortunes in PLA governance tokens. One million no hard feelings bounty was offered, but the hacker minted more than $250M, and it is trying to sell them now.

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• Good news: In Argentina, locals are using illegal P2P exchanges called crypto-caves, to exchange their fast-depreciating pesos. Genesis will liquidate $1.3B GBTC to repay creditors. Ava Labs scored a big partnership with Citi, competing proof-of-concept for tokenizing private equity funds. Wow, so many big words in that phrase! Coinbase stock price surged 13%, with a revenue bump, probably related to the Celsius BTC and ETH payments for its creditors, made via the platform. Ledger partnered with Coinbase too, to move crypto to self custody easier. Spain's largest wireless provider is blocking the SIM swap scam, working with the blockchain data provider Chainlink. Super cool, I hope the rest will follow it soon. Celsius started to pay its creditors with BTC and ETH, 50% of what you had on the platform on average, half in BTC, half in ETH. The remaining 50% will be probably given in the mining company shares.

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• Bad news: Thai SEC charged Former Zipmex Thailand CEO with fraud. DCG needs to pay $3B over an alleged fraud lawsuit to the state of New York. A United Nations committee is concentrating on North Korea, as they have more than $3B in cryptocurrency from hacking, to use on prohibited weapons programs. Scammers impersonating top exchange MEXC are robbing the new adopters. Celebrity endorsements going wrong are now every day on the South Korean newspaper's front pages.

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• Joke of the week: New Zealand central banker told the world that the stablecoins are not always stable, as they do not have the central bank credibility. He told us that this is some big secret and not a piece of basic information that most of the people learning about crypto know. Even my 8-year-old nephew heard that all the crises in crypto in the last 2 years were because Luna stablecoin stopped being stable. Christopher Waller, a top US banker, pointed out that all the stable pegged to the dollar are helping the USD, not threatening the fiat in any way.

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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) (Upland - real-life virtual land) (Holozing - Pokemon-like game)and (Rising Star - Music creators game).

...Get ETH 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.

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