When everyone is bailing out, you don't want to be the last man standing. (weekly crypto updates)

What happened in the past week? Bittrex is closing, Binance leaves the US, and Kraken will most probably follow. Bitcoin mining is at an all-time high. Every country and city is creating their own stablecoin, What else? Read below:

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• Bitcoin: The BTC mining industry entered a new phase, starting with collaborations with hydro plants that generate surplus electricity, added to the hydro-cooling and immersion-cooling tech replacing the air-cooling rigs, with reduced noise, minimal maintenance and increased potential for overclocking. An all-time high BTC hash rate was reached this week. Yet, the BTC transaction fees are once again surpassing the ETH ones. BlackRock had a meeting with the SEC to press for a BTC ETF. Glassnode is thinking that more than $70B will move from traditional ETF to BTC ETF. After some typo, a Bitcoin sender lost over £3M with a single transaction fee. El Salvador counted his eggs, from all the baskets, and it seems that they are facing an 8% loss at the moment. Still, the price may continue to go up. Ark and 21Shares set the fee for the proposed BTC ETF at $0.80 for $100. BTC's price at the moment when this post was written is $29722.

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• Ethereum: Swiss city Lugano advanced a digital currency infrastructure with an ETH Layer-2, launching a stablecoin -LVGA, and it is working on an NFT collection featuring Iury Catania's artwork. ETH's price at the moment when this post was written is $1635.

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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Nocturne, a new privacy protocol enabling private accounts on Ethereum, just launched its mainnet a week ago, and there are rumours about a future airdrop too. Phantom Wallet added an in-app bridge between ETH, MATIC and SOL. The latest frenzy, a new L2 with native yield for ETH and stablecoins, called Blast, just launched too, and it already has $100M+ in TVL. Looks like Pyth airdrop was close to $79M, and the price kind of dropped 40%, with most of them people selling, yet, it may pay long term if you hold it. A new stablecoin pegged to the NZ USD is now live. Will this CBDC be adopted by the New Zealanders? We will see. South Korea is also looking for 100.000 citizens to test-run its own CBDC, over the next 3 months. Circle is working on a bridge, let's call it for now, that allows you to spawn pseudo-official versions of USDC across different chains. Avalanche surged in value by 131%, surpassing Solana over the past 30 days.

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• Blockchain games and NFT: Nike in collab with RTFKT started a presale for its new sneakers, integrated with an NFC chip, enabling owners to obtain a digital collectable - NFT. Is anyone out there still not playing Golem Overlord? Wombat Dungeon Masters' current season is just starting. On Splinterlands, the Land 1.5 feature will be available in November 28, after a considerably longer update. Blur announced its third season of airdrops, with 50-50 rewards for both NFT holders and BLUR holders.

• Good news: Celsius is moving from lending (which was disastrous for them) to BTC mining, but this is a slow way to recover, so, your crypto from Celsius, is not back too soon. Worldcoin founder is back to OpenAI, a few days after he quit, and the price is back again to his previous higher value. HTX and HECO Chain paused deposits and withdrawals after the $87M hack but promised to reimburse all users. Australia's biggest crypto exchange pointed to the awakening indicators, telling us that the bull market is coming. KPMG Canada partners with Chainalysis to fight crypto crime.

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• Bad news: The SEC filed charges against Kraken, alleging some big violations, but once the Kraken was released, they talked about misguided claims, despite the SEC mentioning billions in customer funds comingling and years operating without a license. Apple is forcing payment apps like Venmo to drop decentralized crypto functionality, this resulting in bigger commissions for Apple, while innovation suffers, and customers pay inflated prices. Looks like Bittrex will shut down on December 4, after legal run-ins in the US. Looks like soon you will have no exchange left for the American people. Out of crypto, out of chances for a decent future, while all the other countries will continue to grow and generate profit. The DOJ seized $9M worth of USDT tied to romance scammers. KyberSwap platform was hacked, and $46M in crypto funds were stolen after the attacker exploited a vulnerability in the site code to drain user wallets. Some are even thinking that this exploit was way too easy for the attacker to carry, almost as if he had admin access to the platform. Singapore is cracking down on retail crypto trading. The Binance story, it seems that it will completely exit the US market, after paying a $4.3B fine to settle, as it seems they prioritized growth over legal compliance, allowing illegal trades with sanctioned countries.

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• Joke of the week: In a story worth of a Netflix movie, one movie director had been given funds to make a Netflix movie, invested in stocks, lost most of the money, bought some Dogecoin, and made some huge profits, by sheer luck. A Romanian saying says that sometimes is better for you to be stupid, but lucky.

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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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