What happened in crypto in the past week? Ethereum is the main rage, with Bitcoin cooling down. WLFI was on everybody's radar, with people losing 50% of their money in matter of days. Justin Sun got his WLFI wallet frozen over dodgy transfers, with Trump family telling him that they will kick his ass quicker than Hive blockchain. Now that is cool! What else? Read below:
- Bitcoin: BTC represents now 1.7% of all global money, a mere $2.4 trillion, but for a 16-year-old asset, this is awesome. Bitwise predicted Bitcoin dominance as the best-performing asset over the next decade. Scarramucci got an idea too, predicting 180K-200K by the end of 2025. Personally I do not believe this, but we will live and see. Retail went bear-ish again when BTC dipped bellow 113K, dumping quite a bit, as the market cap fell bellow $4 trillion for the first time in two weeks. And as everyone was shouting that Bitcoin's four year cycle is dead, the latest moves are showing us that is pretty much alive. Time to get some profits back now! MicroStrategy BTC strategy changed, as they now buy often and in small chunks. Others, like the UAE Government, choose to build a mining empire, and now they hold 6300 BTC worth $740M. Glassnode analysis is predicting the peak of the year happening in October. As Bitcoin crashed to a seven week low $110K, 900M were liquidated and volatility exploded in the crypto markets. Shall we go for BTC 100K and ETH 4K? Or we get liquidated too soon? El Salvador splits its BTC stash in 14 Wallets, as they are afraid someone will hack their main wallet, and in preparation for quantum computers. At least that's what he said. An interesting narative is present in crypto right now, about two big BTC whales that are dropping a lot of tokens every time the price is pumping, and as they finish selling, the price may go up, up and away. Bitcoin's BRC20 protocol adds ETH-style smart contracts in the BRC2.0 upgrade.
- Ethereum: Ethereum finally breaks its all-time high smashing through $4950. Despite all the fuss, one BTC whale dropped all its tokens in exchange of ETH, after 7 years of non-activity. BitMine became the world's largest corporate ETH holder, with 1.71M ETH worth roughly $8B. The SEC is warming up towards staking ETFs. Treasury companies bought 4.9% of all ETH supply, and Standard Chartered called it cheap at todays levels. Ethereum Etherscan added SEI to it, and now you have Seiscan available for you. Ethereum exit queue is now geting close to $5B, the largest validator exodus in history. One single investor dropped half a billion on The Ether Machine project, bringing their total ETH holding at $2.5B. Ethereum Foundation announced making interoperability top priority for user experience.
- Altcoins and stablecoins: Looks like Metamask is launching its own stablecoin later this year with backing from Stripe-owned Bridge, in some unique way, building native integration from day one, plus deep DEFI integrations and spending via their debit card. Metamask also created Social Login - you can now create wallets using your Google or Apple account instead of seed phrases. AAVE dropped 8% after rumours that they want to invest into WLF. As the reports denied this, it recovered quickly. In crypto world, just by being associated with Trump, you lose face. Canary Capital just filed with the SEC to create a $TRUMP ETF. What next? Trump Junior invested tens of millions in Polymarket prediction market company. Talking about unexpected moves, a major Chinese compane chose XRP Ledger over move obvious choises like ETH or SOL, resulting in a 22% jump in tokenized asset volume. Not related, or maybe exactly why this happen, a whale sell-offs made XRP drop 3.5% after 96M tokens moved to exchanges to be sold. Gemini targets XRP army with a new credit card for US customers. Rex Shares just applied for its first BNB staking ETF in the US. BNB is now nearly $900. Multiple companies are now building massive BNB treasuries with hundred of millions in funding. Crypto.com and Trump Media Group announced a collab with $6.4B CRO for the US CRO treasury. My problem, Crypto.com kind of revamped its VIP levels, messing with my lounge perk and changing the names and maybe stopping the initial benefits after one year, with a monthly pay (before were kind of lifetime). I did not had the time to read everything yet as I am in holiday, but I need to check them, they got a history of biting the hand that is feeding them. WLFI token launched, and crashed on day one. Trump made half a billion out from the people that already lost a decent chunk out of their first buy. Then Thursday dropped another 24% making it 50% from its peak, and American Bitcoin shares also dropped 21%. One day, as I warned so many people about it. Trmp family still having $5B worth of WLFI, who is getting rich out of it? Not you. Whatever Trump touches it is only to make money for himself. Not for you, unless you are really really lucky. Shapts Technology jumps 70% after raising $400M for Solana Treasury. Seven Solana ETF applications are to be approved by the SEC in October, and Bloomberg is optimistic about it. Solana went up to $203 (7% in a week). Pump.fun rolled out a new fee model, and the creators got $2M in a day instead on the previousday $198K. You can win big in there as a creator. Ondo Finance tokenized US stocks and ETFs on ETH, backed by real shares held at US broker-dealers. Check Linea Ignition, an incentive program for liquidity providers. Linea airdrop checker is also online from September 10th. Elon Musk lawyer become Dogecoin new boss, working towards some ETF idea.
- NFTs and blockchain games: I have enjoyed playing Golem Overlord lately on Hive, and it is quite profitable, I would say, with some significant updates lately. On Splinterlands, we have had the Land NFT new update and improved tokenomics on March 18. The sale of its latest Conclave Arcana collection is ongoing, and two promo cards are still on sale.
- Good news: The UK's Financial Conduct Authority will allow retail investors to access crypto-exchange traded notes (ETN) starting in October, ending a ban that has been in place since 2021. Digital Asset and major Wall Street firms completed the first real-time financing of US Treasuries against USDC on a Saturday, which is funny as traditional settlement systems only work on weekdays, but this action bypassed those limitations. VanEck CEO boldly said that banks must go crypto or go home. The biggest bank in Japan, Post Bank, just announced plans to tokenize $1.29 trillion in customer deposits, having its 120M account holders to convert savings into DCJPY tokens by 2026. Binance goes big in Mexico, with an independent entity registered as an Electronic Payment Funds Institution. Crypto is growing faster than the internet, and we may expect 4B crypto users by 2030. America jumped to second place in crypto adoption ranking, while India is still at the top for 3-year in a row. SEC and CTFC outline path for registered exchanges to list spot crypto products. Coinbase Derivatives is set to launch an equity index futures bundling leading US stocks like Apple Microsoft, Alphabet, Nvidia, Meta, Tesla, Coinbase and IBIT/ETHA. Stripe and Paradigm launched Tempo, a blockchain designed to handle stablecoin payments at scale.
- Bad news: Arthur Hayes, the BitMex guy, got a presidential pardon, and switched his interest from crypto to immortality research, getting a major stake in a stem cell company where he is getting treatments for over a year. You need to live forever to spend all the BTC that you hide from others in secret wallets when it will reach one million per token, right? A HK construction company is making a desperate move to buy hundreds of millions worth of BTC through share issuance, diluting existing shareholders down to a tiny fraction of ownership. Jerome Powel hinted at Fed Rade cuts in September. We had all the buy the dip vibes lately, and the dip goes deeper? Red September anyone? South Korea's Financial Services boss called crypto worthless as he is opposing pension fund getting ready to invest in crypto. AlphaTON Capital acquired $100M of TON tokens, and abandoned its biotech research.
- Joke of the week: China is quietly considering allowing yuan-backed stablecoins to expand globally, to compete with the likes of USDT and USDC. Considering that the yan share dropped to 2.88% while the dollar still got 47%, you can see their reasons. A close contender was the US Government publishing official data directly on blockchain, trnasparent and acocuntable, but are crypto oracles to be trusted with sensitive economic data? The benefit is that economic data onchain is very hard to manipulate. Pluses and minuses! WLFI freezing Justin Sun wallet over dodgy transactions is also quite a funny bussiness.
All the best,
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- a Hearthstone-like card game) (Golem Overlord - a Play2Earn game on Hive) (Upland - a real-life virtual land) (Holozing - a Pokemon-like game)and ( Chain of Legends - with a hint of Heroes of Might and Magic).
...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog, using the Presearch search engine to maximise your income with PRE tokens. Use Torum instead of Twitter. I am also writing for crypto on Hive.
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