Let your hopes, not your hurts, shape your future! (weekly crypto updates)

What happened in the past week? Is Blackrock trying to manipulate the market lately? It seems so. The UK seems to take its crypto regulations plans seriously right now. Crypto started to move upwards. What else? Read below:

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• Bitcoin: JP Morgan predicts multiple spot Bitcoin ETF approvals within months. Somehow, I am doubtful about it, as the SEC doesn't like to lose face. We had the news that Blackrock's spot Bitcoin ETF is listed on DTCC with the IBTC ticker, and it seems that is close to being approved by the SEC, though. However, it seems that this ETF has been on the DTCC website since August. Market manipulation much? Blackrock even agreed to pay $2.5M to the SEC as a fine related to mislabeled investments, looking quite a bit like a bribe. BTC short sellers lost $178M after the latest price surge. Spot Bitcoin price reached $35919 on OKX on October 25, at 10.30 PM. Over $57M flooded into BTC on Monday, as the ETF hype intensified. Bitcoin dominance hits 30-month dominance, climbing to 54%. Matrixport is expecting the BTC price to go all the way up to $45K by the end of the year. Grayscale Bitcoin Trust pumped 220%, outperforming NVIDIA, and even Bitcoin itself.

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• Ethereum: On Optimism both active addresses and transaction volumes recorded ATH, while the transaction fees dropped by 45% QoQ. The live price of Ethereum is $ 1,756.48 per (ETH / USD) with a current market cap of $ 211.23B USD.

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• Altcoins and stablecoins: The new updated Leo front looks cool enough. InLeo is making some decent efforts to make Hive Blockchain available to everyone. Check them out. Maker's annualized revenue hits a record of $200M as real-world assets grow. Filecoin's storage market continues to grow in Q3 2023, as active deals were up 45% QoQuarter and 10 times YoYear. The Sia network supports 4% more storage use but sees a 12% fall in active contracts. Venus had a 27% decline in borrowers, but the daily depositor activity increased by 117%, while the interest revenues decreased by 4% QoQ. Solana is a top performer with a 55% price appreciation over the last 30 days. Near saw an upsurge in network activity, with a 350% QoQ increase in active addresses and a 117% QoQ increase in transactions, both ATH. Worldcoin is switching from USDC to paying operators in their own WLD token. Is that good? Bitfinex plans to launch a Tether 3-year bond offering a 10% coupon, available from 100 USDT purchase price with a 125K minimum investment.

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• Blockchain games and NFT: Is anyone out there still not playing Golem Overlord? Wombat Dungeon Masters' current season is close to its end. On Splinterlands, the Land 1.5 feature will be online soon, as it is already on the test server, and then we will see some interesting moves on the game market, as the Rebellion pack presale started already (I got my 500+50 bonus packs, wink! wink!, but no I got almost no DEC left). They got an interesting burn mechanism, starting from day 1 of the launch, and some interesting airdrop strategy, using the pack staking.

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• Good news: North America leads in the crypto market with a $1.2 trillion volume. BlockFi emerges from bankruptcy, and you can now withdraw funds from your wallet, but not yet from the interest-earning accounts, this will be possible at the beginning of 2024. Elliptic debunked claims of Hamas raising millions in crypto, as data shows only 21K in fresh donations were received, and much was frozen already. JP Morgan disclosed that the company handles over $1B daily using its own digital asset, JPM Coin. The total digital assets under management see its first increase since July, with a 6.73% spice to $31.7B. Singapore is pioneering the use of NFTs attacked to compromised wallets to track their crypto funds. Cool one! Upbit is now controlling 80% of South Korea's crypto trading volumes.

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• Bad news: Binance will end Visa Debit Card services in Europe. The Binance card allowed users to pay with crypto from their Binance account, converting them into local currencies, using Contis, a Lithuanian-based electronic money institution and currency exchange operator. Coinbase challenged the SEC's crypto authority as it sought to dismiss the regulator's suit. The Financial Conduct Authority said that crypto firms already broke the new advertising rules, implemented in early October, more than 220 times. The UK King has approved a bill that will help law enforcement confiscate and freeze crypto that has been used for crime. London's police also assembled a 40-person crypto crimes unit. Hong Kong regulators restricted retail investors from trading high-risk crypto assets deemed too complex, and this led to an underground market for risky assets. China's E-Yuan powered a live cross-border oil trade transaction and this is a surprising move. Turkey will start to tax crypto in 2024.

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• Joke of the week: FTX is in talks with three potential buyers in order to revive the crypto exchange. The name of the buyers is not disclosed. FTX did look for funds from Blackrock and Google before its collapse. They even sent $8.6M in ETH to Binance to sell, making some think that they would pay some of its creditors. We all know this would not happen, I personally think that the legion of lawyers working on this case needs to be paid. Would you trust the FTX exchange enough to use it again? All this is happening while SBF is testifying at his fraud trial. His testimony was delayed by the judge, who asked about asking about its relevance.

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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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