The weekend is coming, so it is time for my usual fun, checking the crypto market.

What happened in the past week? Bitcoin ETF slows down, Solana had an outage, and ETH's next upgrade will take place in March. What else? Read below:

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• Bitcoin: BTC price reached a one-month high as investors are expecting the halving event. The BTC Spot ETF adoption slowed down as many trading platforms are taking a cautious approach. Bitcoin, the digital gold, is stealing the physical Gold status as a safe haven asset. according to Cathie Wood. The halving will challenge the small miners, while big ones like CleanSpark are trying to double their computer power in the next few months. MicroStrategy bought another $37M worth of BTC, reaching 190K of BTK, making you think that maybe they want to get 200K. Valkyrie becomes the first spot BTC ETF to add a second custodian, BitGo, to its first one, Coinbase, to reduce counterparty risk.

• Ethereum: As layer 2 expands, Arbitrum is still in first place, with $10.35 TVL, followed by Optimism with $5.1B, and Manta Pacific is now in third, overtaking Base, with 'only' $1.56B. ETH developers successfully run the Deneb-Cancun upgrade on the final Holesky testnet, before next month's expected mainnet launch. We are all waiting for proto-sharding, which introduces 'blobs' for efficient off-chain data storage and promises significantly lower transaction costs, particularly for Layer 2 Rollups. The upgrade is scheduled for March 13.

• 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/. As February unfolds, we see major unlocks from AVAX, APTOS, OP and a few other blockchains, with some thinking that money will go towards the BTC ETFs. Solana got another outage, for 5 hours, the first this year, but somehow people got used, as you hear them saying that once ETH fees and SOL outages are solved, we will have two solid blockchains to use. DYM airdrop ended, with only 528K wallets out of 700K claiming their tokens, and the mainnet was launched Tuesday, boosting the token value by 30%. Sui performed quite well, with a 104% increase in TVL and a 65% increase in token price. Not bad! ENS is quietly launching its layer 2.

• NFTs and blockchain games: On Splinterlands, the first round of Conflicts airdrop activity is ending in a few weeks, 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. Epic Games will list the Web3 shooter Shrapnel, a blockchain game set in a dystopian world.

• Good news: Farcaster, a decentralized network for social media applications, witnessed a remarkable surge in daily active users, from 1600 at the start of the year, to 13.300 at the beginning of this week, mostly because of the Frames feature, which allows users to engage with external links and apps without leaving the Warpcast app, while they are also allowed to mint NFTs, claim tokens and read external blog posts. Meanwhile, Friend.tech is dying slowly, after its market domination in 2023. Banks are coming to crypto, USB Hong Kong is working to tokenise real-world financial products on ETH, wanting to eliminate fees and settle assets instantly. JPMorgan survey finds that most institutional traders are not interested in crypto. Good for us! BlockFi anticipates returning 20-40% of eligible clients allowed claims soon, expecting further recoveries from the FTX estate. Genesis asked the court for permission to sell $1.6B in assets.

• Bad news: In California, the DoJ accused two senior staff at a school district of using school resources and electricity to establish a crypto-mining farm. Do Kwon was sent to South Korea, to answer fraud calls tied to Terra's incredible $60B UST depeg in 2022. This was the starting point of the bear market that is still here now, two years later. Hong Kong regulators warned all the crypto platforms to apply for proper licensing of face closure within months. South Korea followed them swiftly, putting forward fresh legislation regarding this matter. Three executives of Haru Invest were arrested, suspected of stealing $828M worth of crypto from their 16000 users, as they paused withdrawals and laid off around 100 employees, following a rug pull, also in South Korea. Even OKX is currently under investigation in SK. Suspicious official ties were found in the $100M XRP hack, as the cashflow analysis reveals that hackers enjoyed oddly convenient access to channels resembling company accounts. Well, well, well! A new service called OnlyFace is using AI neural networks and generators to create counterfeit driver's licenses and passports that managed to breach KYC protocols on various crypto exchanges. For only a $15 fee, they produce realistic forgeries of identification documents from over 26 countries, including the US, Canada, the UK and several European countries. The SEC adopted new rules bringing large crypto, DEFI liquidity providers into federal oversight. The cryptocurrency platform and payment app Bakkt may go into bankruptcy in the next 12 months, as they do not have sufficient funds to operate for more than a year.

• Joke of the week: Nueva Ideas, President Bukele's party, is leading in El Salvador's presidential elections, and Nayib Bukele, a fervent Bitcoin supporter, put El Salvador on the first page through various crypto investments, the most well-known being the Bitcoin City to be built via Volcano energy BTC bonds. However, there are constitutional challenges regarding his second re-election. We will see how the story goes! A close call had the US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, asking for legislation for the high-risk areas in crypto, like stablecoin. Girl, that is one of the stable-ish areas, really. Wait until you discover the memecoins. Ha! Ha!

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.