A victorious life comes as a result of a correct way of thinking (weekly crypto updates)
Another week passed, and crypto is still going one step forward and two backward. Justin Sun is quite busy helping to sell Huobi and building a country fan token (the Dominican Republic, yeah), Bitcoin mining difficulty is increasing, Portugal will tax crypto short-term profits starting from next year, and much more. Check the latest news here:
Bitcoin: With the high inflation and the energy crisis, the bitcoin trading volume against fiat surged in September, with BTC/GBP pair seeing a 233% rise. Bitcoin's mining difficulty hit a new all-time high, increasing 13.55% in its latest adjustment. The current hashrate is 257 million terahashes per second, up from only 140 last year. The oldest bank in America, BNY Melon, announced that its digital asset custody platform is live, with select clients being able to hold and transfer BTC and ETH with it. Binance Pool launches a $500M fund to support bitcoin miners, with 18-24-month loans with interest ranging from 5-10%, and Bitmain is also setting up a $250M fund with a similar aim.
Ethereum: Ethereum supply turns deflationary first time since Merge, dropping by 4000 ETH so far this week, as every ETH transaction includes a gas fee in order to prevent an overload of malicious requests, and part of the fee is automatically burned. A new project called XEN Crypto accounts for 33% of all the gas used network-wide lately. Ethereum lost 19.6% after the Merge, but many believe this will last only short-term.
Altcoins: Avalanche's growth strategy seems flawless, and we saw integrations with ETH Core, THORChain, Boba, and a few others, expanding beyond DEFI, into NFT activities, real-world assets, GameFi, and even Film Finance Offerings (FFOs). There is a new Head Chef on Sushi, and his name is Jared Grey. Cardano (ADA) has a nice boost after its Vasil hard form, and Solana went down 26.6% declining for the third month in a row. Maker seems to innovate on both governance infrastructure and network growth after its founder returned and the community is more active than ever. Uniswap is now valued at $1.66B after they raised $165M in a funding campaign. Keep an eye on Filecoin and Pocket, as in the first case the utilization grew 6 times faster than the capacity for the decentralized storage business. Scale3, a Web3 infrastructure founded by 2 former Coinbase executives, raised $5.3M in seed funding, and they are mainly providing support for blockchain node operators. Check them out. BNB Chain deployed its latest upgrade, re-enabling cross-chain transfers between BNB Smart Chain and BNB Beacon Chain, so the users can once more complete their cross-chain transactions, as a response to the last week's $100M attack on the BSC Token Hub bridge attack. Eclipse, an EVM project meant to connect the Terra network to Ethereum, is now moving to Solana. Tron is launching a Dominica Coin, a country fan token? What is happening there? A critical vulnerability was discovered, affecting all IBC-enabled networks, and if you use Cosmos (ATOM), then you need to update and run the latest patch right now.
Blockchain games and NFTs: Splinterfest was a huge success, both live and online, even if it happened in Vegas, the news about it didn't stay in Vegas. I wait for a European version, for the next time. Splinterlands team is also doing some nice progress with the Genesis soccer game, and I like it. If you didn't get your share of Overline Network (I mean the free Land NFT), you still have time to claim it. OpenSea integrated Avalanche, and we already have theIR most popular NFT available on the platform now (their names are 'Smol Joes' and 'chikn'). SEC is looking at Yuga Labs and their airdrops, apparently asking themselves if they offered securities illegally, APE already falling 7%. Damien Hirst streamed himself setting fire to the remaining physical version of his NFT collection called 'The Currency', burning more than $10M worth of art, and ensuring that now only their digital counterparts will ever exist. You can buy them from OpenSea with a floor price of 5 ETH. Beeple is building a real-life studio to expose his art, especially his NFTs.
Good News: Morgan Stanley revealed that the crypto products market continues to grow even through the bear market, as there are now more than 180 active crypto exchange-traded funds (ETF) and exchange-traded products (ETP) and trusts, half of them launched since the beginning of the bear market. HK-based investment company About Capital is set to buy Huobi Global or at least a majority stake in it, rumor has it that the payment is at least 1 billion dollars. From what I know, Justin Sun, assisted by FTX Sam Bankman Fried, may have something to do with it, as the founder, Leon Li Lin sold his controlling stake to them. CBDC news - India is launching the central bank digital rupee (e-rupee)as an additional form of money, next to notes and coins. Google Cloud let users pay with BTC, ETH, and DOGE, via Coinbase, as they announced at this year's Cloud Next event. Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) allows citizens to pay property taxes in crypto and they are looking for a company to provide crypto payment services and conversion from crypto to fiat. Oh my God, Tether finally did it, eliminating all of the commercial paper holdings from its reserves. In Brazil, more than 12.000 companies are now holding crypto assets, Bitcoin being the most popular, followed by Tether. Crypto.com is investing some $145M to set up regional headquarters in Paris, and they are looking for local talents.
Bad News: European Parliament passes landmark crypto assets regulation bill that could go into effect in 2024, following legal and linguistic checks and the approval of the final text by the Parliament. Solana-based DEFI platform Mango suffered a $100M exploit, the attacker managed to manipulate their collateral, experiencing a 5-10 times price increase in a matter of minutes and maxed out the borrows available extracting 100 million dollars in net value. Then the hacker promised the send the funds back if they pay back the debt stemming from a bailout Mango and Solend put together for a Solana whale that had $207M debt across multiple platforms. **Celsius **did it again, and this time quite bad, as their latest court filing contains over 14.000 pages, including their transaction history, with details of their customers, the type of service used, and even their wallet addresses. A slap in the face of confidentiality, or what is happening when there is no decentralization. TrueFi (TRU), a lending protocol offering uncollateralized loans to vetted institutions, just issued a letter of default to one of its creditors, for a $3.4M loan. Blockwater Technologies, a South Korean company, missed one of its repayments and still owes $2.9M to TrueFi. Another victim on the bear altar? Portugal is no more a haven for crypto nomads, as they will implement a 28% capital gains tax on crypto starting from 2023, even if you generated returns in less than a year. TempleDAO was hacked, and $2.3M was stolen from the DAO. They are working with Binance to track down the hacker, as he/she had received funds from the exchange.
Joke of the day: Non-profit crypto think tank Coin Center filed a lawsuit against US Treasury (OFAC), claiming that the agency unlawfully overreached its authority when it criminalized interacting with the ETH-based coin mixing service Tornado Cash, in August, claiming that NK hackers laundered millions of dollars worth through it. They totally did that, but not in the US jurisdiction, this is kind of like punishing the pelicans from the US because the ones from the North Pole ate the grains on some Russian ship. Also, there is the right to privacy, something that some Americans may want to benefit from it. This joins a similar federal suit filed last month against the US Treasury by Coinbase, as Tornado Cash is a piece of open software unaffiliated with a company. As they say in my country, catch the blind man and take his eyes away.
All the best,
George
Why not...
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