What happened in crypto in the past week? This week we had Nigel Farage discovering Bitcoin, and while stocks are down, and gold is down, BTC is up 12%. Altcoins are also on the rise, but not as much. I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. . Feel free to check them. What else? Read below:
Bitcoin: Some said that the Bitcoin 50% drop form its all-time high already reflects the quantum risk. Apparently there is a window of three to five years to agree on a post-quantum upgrade. Saylor is close to overtake BlackRock, reaching 780K BTC, as the second are sitting at 790K BTC. Goldman Sacks filed for a Bitcoin ETF, but they will not hold Bitcoin directly, just buy into other Bitcoin ETFs and sell options on the top to generate income. Seems a bit dodgy, just saying give me you money to pretend to invest into BTC. Why would you want that? Bitcoin rose 5.38% this week.
Ethereum: Bitmine reported a $3.82B quaterly loss, and then bought more ETH anyway. They mentioned tokenization and AI as ETH's next catalysts. ETH outperformed BTC slightly, with a 7.26% increase this week. Ethereum L2 Scroll is planning to dissolve their Security Council in a favor of a Scroll Admin multisig, and some see this as increasing centralization.
Altcoins and stablecoins: The biggest Bitcoin miner, Foundry Digital, moved into privacy coins, as they launched a Zcash mining pool and are already controling 30% of the network's hashrate, with multiple institutional miners onboarded before the public launch. AI sector is down 0.8% week-over-week, with TAO being the worst behaving token. XRP just got bank-grade privacy. Tether launched a self-custodial wallet called People's Wallet, with no gas tokens, no long addresses, containing just USDT, Bitcoin and tokenized Gold. Solana rose 9% as easing macro fears listed crypto markets, and they could see new milestones in payments, staking, and tokenized shares. The BNB Chain sector is back in the green with a 2.2% improvement, mostly because of the RAVE token, which had a staggering 3958% week-on-week gain. China banned offshore yuan stablecoins two months ago, and dollar-backed stablecoins currently make up 99.8% of all the fiat stablecoins in circulation. Meme coins posted strong gains this week as the total market cpaitalization rose more than 10% to $33.2B.
- NFTs and blockchain games: I have also enjoyed playing Golem Overlord lately on Hive, and it is quite enjoyable, I would say, with no significant updates lately. On Splinterlands, we have had the Land NFT new update and improved tokenomics, and the new cards from the Conclave mini collection are up and running.
- Good news: Crypto investment products pulled in $1.1B last week, the strongest weekly inflow since January. Deutsche Borse invested $200M on a stake in Kraken. NYSE's parent company did the same with OKX. Fireblocks launced Earn, routing iddle stablecoin balances directly into AAVE and Morpho, to earn extra yield. Virginia signed a law requiring the state to hold unclaimed digital assets in their original form for at least one year before selling. Charles Schwab launched spot BTC and ETH trading to nearly 39M retail clients. All crypto deposits and withdrawals are fully disabled, and anything you want to trade has to be bought directly through Schwab. Not good enough! Tether bailed out Drift Protocol afet they lost $280M tied to a NK suspected hack, but they need to shift from USDC to USDT. .
- Bad news: Trump's World Liberty Financial proposed destroying 10% of insider WLFI allocations permanently, and holders who decline the new vesting structure would remain locked with no defined release date. Who would have tought that Trump will cheat on you and steal your money, raise your hand! We had Justin Sun complaining about a backdoor at WLF, which allowed the team to freeze over $500M worth in WLFI tokens belonging to him. The thief shouting thief, isn't it? He did try to sell some WLFI without being allowed to make some quick profit, though. Pakistan ended its 2018 crypto ban, and licensed exchanges can now open bank accounts, but the new law also introduced prison sentences, as they recommend financial institutions to conduct full due diligence on each VASP before opening the account. It seems complicated. Hyperbridge lost $2.5M after the bridged DOT token on ETH was exploited.
- Joke of the week: Nigel Farage publicly started to back Bitcoin, investing in Stack BTC, a listed Bitcoin treasury company that just added $2.7M in BTC to its holdings. Learning from his buddy Trump, I believe. Crypto will make you rich, if you already have money.
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. I am also writing for crypto on Hive.