This week we got exciting stuff going on. NFTs are by far the talk of the news, with VISA investing in CryptoPunks, Facebook talking about adding them to Novi wallet and Justin Sun randomly buying EtherRock stuff. Paypal comes to UK, Avalanche and Cardano are mooning, and Ethereum almost forked up. Want to know more about it, keep reading:
Bitcoin: Right now 90% of all the BTC addresses are on green, making profit. Neuberger Berman $164M commodities fund got approval to invest 5% of its assets in Bitcoin. The online content platform Substack has finally introduced BTC as a payment option, using Lightning Network. US bank Citigroup applied to be the second firm trading BTC futures contracts, after Goldman Sachs. Microstrategy bought another 3907 BTC ($177M), owning now a total of 108.992 BTC ( worth more than five billion dollars). Bitcoin ATM operators are working to comply with anti-money laundering law in US.
Ethereum: Yesterday a major bug exploit affected more than 50% of ETH nodes, opening the ones running on GETH 1.10.7 or earlier versions to a 51% attack. The bug is fixed with the latest version of GETH 1.10.8, but you still need to be careful if you are doing a big ETH transaction, as you need to be sure you are using the latest GETH. The bug was exploited by a Tornado Cash client, at a moment where 73% of the GETH nodes were running older versions. Huobi has now one-click staking solutions for quite few cryptocurrencies, including ETH.
Altcoins: Bull run on sight, with some nice numbers going up ( SOL 98%, ADA 60%, DOT 43%), even if ETH increased only 19% . Avalanche entered into Apricot Phase 3 with some juicy improvements, so I can totally see this one mooning soon (6-18 months). Just to add to this, Avalanche Rush $180M liquidity mining initiative expanded this week to SushiSwap, allocating $7.5M every month for the next three months for Sushi, after the already implemented AAVE and CURVE programs. Just in case you were thinking that elastic stablecoin are the hype, I will introduce to you the hydrid stablecoin, Sperax USD, partially collateralized stablecoin airdropping the interest to its hodlers. It's new, it's hot, and I will stay away from it for this reason. Paxos becomes USDP, making it clear that they are a stablecoin. Looking at my portfolio, I can see XTZ pumping up nicely too. September 12 is the day when ADA (Cardano) is launching the Alonzo testnet, testing out smart contracts. Is this a good signal to buy or to sell? ADA is now $2.88, gaining an impressive 116% this week. Solana also jumped to $75-78, from a $40 on average one week ago. Cardano (ADA) is also getting regulated, complying with the Financial Action Task Force (EU), and they are using Coinfirm for analytics. Phillipines Finances Department announced that they will tax the Play2Earn incomes as any other job, after Axie Infinity was played by an impressive number in the whole country as a way to pay for bills and food. DJ Justin Blau, also known as 3lau, is launching a blockchain based music investment platform, called Royal, as a $16M founding round raised from the likes of Peter Thiel and Paradigm. On Hive blockchain, LEO (the ones behind the CUB.Finance project on BSC) is the coin worth to keep an eye on it, as this is one of the few teams that under-promise and over-deliver. If this is not the recipe for success, you tell me.
NFT: Splinterlands as blockchain game is a huge success, with their one year daily airdrop still up for another 11 months. More than $7K for one month is decent profit, and I think that I will keep them governance tokens for the moment, as there is some potential to go up a bit more than the average $0.40 in the past week. Axie Infinity is a far second place, with 30 times smaller profits, but still a good return for the time invested into it. Okex used the $10M grant from BlockDream Ventures to organize a Hackaton accelerating and helping early stage GameFi projects, collaborating with Animoca, Yield Guild Games and few other well known names. VISA bought a Cryptopunk for $165K, getting the NFT world on fire (all major NFT collections - EtherRock, CriptoPunks, Pudgy Penguins, Ape Yacht - are shooting up in the sky with some incredible ETH prices ranging 5-160 ETH this week). A $55M spending spree shortly followed. One million property NFT were minted on Upland, and $1M dollars were earned by its players selling them too. Head of Facebook Finance and Novi blockchain wallet, David Marcus said that ''we're definitely thinking about this'' refering to NFT and NFT support of their brand new wallet. Funny enough, maybe we will see a investment portfolio allocation for NFT, which I still think they are a kind of bubble, you may never know. Those EtherRock emerging and selling for a fortune are trying to prove me wrong. Even Justin Sun bought one EtherRock for half a million dollars, which is a good price now, as the floor price is $1M today. August 19, Marvel also launched classic Marvel Comics as NFT, starting with Spiderman and Captain America. Not to say I told you so, but if you invested in Mobox one year ago when I told you about it, you would have already noticed that the price of their token MBOX, jumped from $0.60 to almost $10, after their listing on Binance. And even more, if you liked NBA Top Shots NFT, WNBA just partnered with Dapper Labs to launch their own NFTs.
Good news: Blockfi is changing their rates, offerring more interest for Tier 1 (up to 0.10 BTC, 1.5 ETH, 40.000 USD in stablecoins, 20 LTC, 100 LINK, 1.5 PAXG, 4000 BAT, 100 UNI), but decreasing the tier 2 and 3. I am safe, as I am still working my way out to 0.1 BTC, but right now Celsius seems to be better than Blockfi to safely keep your crypto there for interest. Paypal is launching its crypto services in UK, letting you buy, sell and hold BTC, ETH, LTC and BCH on its platform. They do have 2 million active users in here, me included, so there is some potential in this move. Although, I would not store my crypto there, if there is the same wallet as the one used in US, for the simple reason that you cannot send the crypto to any external wallet from it. For now! Just in case you did not know, there are 6 exchanges that received the highest tier AA on Exchange Benchmark, and while I know about Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini, I do not know any of my friends using Cross Tower, itBit or Bitstamp. Circle and Coinbase announced that their stablecoin USDC will be 100% backed by cash and US Treasuries by September. We got Liquity, an algorithmic borrowing protocol on ETH with 0% interest loans, with a decent 110% collaterals needed. Just check them out. Indian Rupee as CBDC test trial will begin in December this year, an official from the Reserve Bank of India said.
Bad news: Uniswap v3 fee is swinging wildly these days, keep that in mind and check again if your transactions fees are too high. The Japanese exchange Liquid was hacked past week, with more than $90M lost, but they just received a life-saving loan of $120M from FTX Trading.A Turkish con man promising 100% on Dogecoin in 40 days just dissapeared with almost $120M worth of DOGE. He offered investment products at crypto conferences and live events, and paid for 3 months, only to run away after more investors joined the scam. Binance UK arm, Binance Markets Ltd, the one with crypto-shares and regulated products, was banned by the Financial Conduct Authority. Unregulated crypto exchange, the main one, is still working as usual, as only the one company dealing with derivatives is banned. Still the announcement make it sound like all Binance activity is banned. Twice this year, just blatant manipulation. And then, Paypal launches, as another option. Is this great timing or something else?
Mass adoption: According to Chainalysis, the first five countries adopting DEFI are, in order, UK, Vietnam, Thailand, China and UK. Deloitte's survey is estimating that crypto will become a strong alternative for fiat, or even will replace it in the next 5-10 years. Still time to pump your bags. Blockstream raised $210M in a Series B founding round, and now the company estimated total value is $3.2B (Baillie Gifford and iFinex - the ones with Tether and Bitfinex exchange - were some of the main investors). Morgan Stanley bought 6.5 million shares in Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, the second by numbers being Growth Portfolio with 'only' 2.4 million shares. Microsoft succesfully applied for a US patent for asoftware helping users to easily create tokens for different blockchains, without worring about the token specific code. This seems quite dodgy in my opinion, and I am sure they are tracking somehow, so not so much betting on decentralization while using it. But heck, I can be wrong. Well? Bybit stated to sponsor few more e-sport teams, Astralis and Alliance, with their branding to be exposed on Twitch feeds and gaming clothing line.
Joke of the week: The Poly Network hacker(s) just returned everything he/they stole, after he implied that he was just helping with the security of the project. He even refused a $500K bounty, but security experts think that he may have made some critical error while transferring the funds, exposing his main wallet, and once he realised that his identity can be revealed, he choose to return the stolen crypto. He even published an imaginary Q&A interviewing himself and describing the hack, all embedded into the blockchain. Not much of a catch me if you can.
That's all for today.
All the best,
George
Why not...
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