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What happened in crypto the past week? Bitcoin is going up and down around the 100K level. ETH is looking good this week, but there is a lot of work to be done to grow in 2025. China introduced new laws to make cross-border trading harder. What else? Read below:

• Bitcoin: Bitcoin price forecast is wild, with values between 150K and 400K. Bitcoin faced price struggles last week as market sentiment shifted. The crypto market looked a bit sketchy at the end of the year, but we may witness a last-minute recovery right now, as I write this post. We are already at $102K for 1 BTC. Syria is exploring Bitcoin legalization to rebuild its economy post-Assad regime. MicroStrategy got another 2138 BTC (worth $209M) and Tether added 7629 BTC (worth $700M) to its total holdings too. The Bitcoin's supply is getting squeezed like never before, with Blackrock and friends now controlling 5.7$ of all Bitcoin. While in November we had 25K moved daily into the exchanges, right now we only have 2-5K BTC moved daily into the exchanges.

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• Ethereum: Ethereum's NFT trading volume surged to $186M last week, a 67% increase from the previous week, with Pudgy Penguins generating $108M alone. Still, Ethereum might disappoint in 2025, as it surged only 46% while Bitcoin went up 121%, and out of 19 upgrades, only two notably impacted the price. Metamask Gas Station enabled gasless swaps for supported tokens on ETH. Ethereum ETFs attracted $2.6B in net inflows in December.

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• Altcoins and stablecoins: It seems that altcoins need to rise by 16% to hit a critical market cap level, triggering the 'euphoria' phase and potential even higher price surges. Will this happen soon enough? A Lisk airdrop is ongoing, with 77 days remaining to climb the leatherboard (feel free to use my referral 0fRpWD if needed). You can use Velodrome or Okutrade for daily transactions. I did have some fun with Intract, where you do quests for NFT and even win some crypto in contests. The memecoin market lost billions in December, so think twice before making a move in there! SOL had a rough week before Christmas, but it seems to have recovered in the past week. Volatility Shares filed to Solana Futures ETF. Floki is one of the first memecoins to make a leap into traditional finance, with an exchange-traded product on Switzerland's largest stock exchange. Phantom is working on social features that let users create profiles and add friends. DOGE pumped 21%. Hyperliquid launched a native staking feature.

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• NFTs and blockchain games: On Splinterlands, we are getting ready for a new card collection, with some cool summoners that are now auction-only, yet it seems quite expensive. Check my Holozing article to learn about a new blockchain game that looks full of potential. I am also playing Golemancer on Hive, and it is quite profitable, I would say, with some great updates lately. Pengu token went up 13% this week, a 250% increase since its December launch.

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• Good news: Kucoin has a brilliant referral program if you are good at this stuff. We had $13.6B from venture capitalists in 2024, compared to 2023's $10B, and 2025 looks even better. After years of regulatory battles, Ripple is now focusing on the US market, with 75% of its new jobs in the US. Is this the Trump effect? Morgan Stanley is exploring the addition of crypto trading to its E-Tade online brokerage platform. Tether bought 103M shares of Rumble Class A Common stock at $7.50 per share, causing Rumble's stock to more than double over the next few days, and reach $17.40. Coinbase has acquired a key MiFID II license for its European expansion plans through the acquisition of the Cyprus unit of European brokerage firm Bux.

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• Bad news: China is making crypto trading harder, as the country's banks must now track and report everything, from trader identity to fund sources and trading frequencies. They are specifically targeting cross-border crypto activities, making it harder to use the yuan to buy digital assets. The total market cap dropped 4% in the last week. In his first US court appearance, Do Kwon pleaded not guilty to all nine charges related to Terraform Labs. Banks are moving into the stablecoin sector, especially in Europe, as Tether retreated from the market. Crypto losses from hacks and scams reached a 2024 low in December, only $27M, compared with $63M in November and $115M in October. Even the hackers took a break and celebrated the end of the year. But some are fighting back, like the T3 financial crimes unit, (Tron, Tether and TRM Labs collaboration) which has frozen $100M in USDT linked to illicit activities.

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• Joke of the week: It seems that the whole of 2024 was a comedian's work of art, as we started well on January 10 with the SEC's approval of the spot BTC ETFs. We had July's ETH ETFs and Gary Gensler's departure positioned the US well on the crypto map. India got into the global adoption rankings despite its 30% tax regime. Even Nigeria processed $59B in crypto transactions in 2024, as they are using crypto for everything, from bill payments to mobile top-ups. Indonesia has some impressive numbers, with 21M registered crypto users, 716K active traders and $30B in transactions, a 352% increase year-over-year. Vietnam is a surprising presence on the crypto map, with a big focus on the play2earn models. But the conclusion is that crypto is no longer asking for permission to exist, it is a way to thrive, from individual to whole countries (see El Salvador bitcoin experiment).

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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) (Golemancer - GamiFI NFT platform, great to accumulate more Hive) (Upland - real-life virtual land) (Holozing - Pokemon-like game)and (Rising Star - Music creators game).

...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 Grill and Hive.

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