What happened in crypto in the past week? Bitcoin is again getting one solo miner rich. Ethereum is kind of stagnating around 2000-2100 and stablecoins seems to be under attack lately. I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. What else? Read below:
- Bitcoin: Bitcoin is ranging between the same levels for weeks. The good news, one solo miner beats the system again, with a 0.00002% of BTC's total hashrate, and got crypto worth of $210.000. His odds of winning were 1 in 28.000. We do have Bloomberg telling us that BTC will drop 85% down to $10K. Saylor called the bottom, and we wait to see who is right. With the quantum clock ticking, Bitcoin has 3 to 5 years to prepare for quantum computers, before they become a real threat. Meanwhile, Bitcoin miners are bleeding before the 2028 halving.
- Ethereum: The Ethereum Foundation staked more than 45.000 ETH on Friday, leading to more than $143M worth of ETH locked as a direct response to community pressure. Staked ETH ETFs are now offering passive yield, and the gap between treasury companies and ETFs is narowing fast. Tom Lee is doing a buyback program of $4M, as the stock is down 63% and trading bellow the value of its own ETH holdings.
- Altcoins and stablecoins: Grayscale called the altcoin bottom, saying that Bitcoin will benefit less than altcoins from what is coming next. Polymarket is getting a full makeover with a new engine, reduced gas consumption and a new stablecoin called Polymarket USD. I do not understand why, but it seems that some institutions choose XRP over BTC, as XRP pulled $119M in inflows last week. Stablecoins could bury Visa and Mastercard, and they processed $28 trillion in real payments last year. Fincen and OFAC just dropped a joint rule under Genius Act, and stablecoin issuers are now treated like banks. Bitwise filed its second amendment for a spot HYPE ETF.
- NFTs and blockchain games: I have also enjoyed playing Golem Overlord lately on Hive, and it is quite enjoyable, I would say, with some 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: CME Group added AVAX and SUI futures next month, with Cardano, Chainlink and Stellar joining the lineup soon. South Korea regulators are now requiring all crypto exchanges to verify asset holdings every five minutes. Before that some were only doing it once every 24 hours. Same regulators just banned stablecoin yield.
- Bad news: JPMorgan ran the numbers, and the total crypto flows dropped about a third of what came during the Q1 of last year. These bunch of cheaters, they told shareholdersthat stablecoins, smart contracts, and tokenization are a direct threat to traditional bankings. A new rule from Binance, they can cancel your order mid-execution without your input, targeting volatile moments. The recent Drift Protocol hack left many protocols, especially on Solana, scrambling to ensure the safety of their user funds. ZachXBT dropped a cache of data exflirtrated from a NK payment server showing their chat logs, crypto transactions and fraudulent identities. Bitcoin Depot lost $3.7B in BTC after a hacker accessed its internal systems. Customer funds were not affected.
- Joke of the week: IMF warns of tokenized finance, as this is designed to eliminate settlement delays, exactly what give regulators time to step in during a crisis. There is also a beef with the stablecoins, as they have a history of collapsing under pressure. Wanna bet on it? Well, Binance, Paradigm and Pump.fun all made fresh moves into prediction markets, as this kind of trading activityhad surged over the past year. Binance added a prediction market feature directly inside Binance Wallet, with gas fees covered.
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.