What happened in crypto the past 2 weeks? Check the BBH Tribe, as 
- Bitcoin: Bitcoin started nicely, 2 weeks ago, approaching $70K, 6% under its ATH. A Hong Kong lawmaker proposed adding BTC to financial reserves. About 41.5% of Mt.Gox BTC has been distributed to the creditors. MicroStrategy bought 12.222 BTC for $805M during the second quarter. The Bitcoin 2024 conference seems to have mostly positive vibes. And then starting to dip. The first time was 4.5%, down to $67K, then a 14% loss to $53K, the steepest decline since the FTX collapse, after a confluence of economic and geopolitics challenges. We even had a brief liquidation cascade to $48.2K, as the Bank of Japan raised interest rates. Took 72 hours to go from $49K to $62K, in an epic comeback. Spot BTC ETFs experienced the largest outflows in three months, but BlackRock's spot BTC ETF sees zero outflows amid price drops. Morgan Stanley is set to become the first major Wall Street bank to actively offer spot BTC ETF funds to clients. Europe's 4th largest hedge fund, Capula Management, has invested $500M in spot BTC ETFs. Gibraltar-based Xapo Bank becomes the first UK bank to offer an interest-bearing BTC account, with a 1% interest rate with no stake, lend or lock-up. Marathon Digital boosted BTC production and hash rate in July 2024. Bitcoin's market dominance hit a 3-year ATH for 55% of the total crypto market, the second being ETH with 16.5%.
- Ethereum: Careful with the Neiro token, as it seems that this one is only an Ethereum honeypot trap, already accumulating $56M. BlackRock CIO said that only BTC and ETH met its strict criteria, and there is no demand for other cryptocurrencies such as Solana. But then, that's exactly what they were saying about ETH a few years ago. On August 5, ETH experienced a severe 20% drop, to $2340. Grayscale and Bitwise are seeking approval to list options on spot ETF ETFs. AAVE's v3 on ETH made $2.1M in daily revenue in liquidation fees.
- Altcoins and stablecoins: A new tribe on Hive was finally launched, the Bitcoin Backed Hive one, and they announced some good things coming soon. Check them out. Solana outpaced ETH in weekly fees for the first time ever. In July alone, SOL had an impressive 23.5% gain. Anchorage Digital expanded the custody support to Solana tokens. Brazil regulators greenlighted Spot SOL ETFs. Polkadot spent $87M worth of DOT in the past 6 months, double the amount of the last half of 2023, hosting events, meetups and conferences. They even made their own Twitter-like platform, Grill, where you are paid in crypto tips for publishing. Altcoins climbed only 58% since breaking out of a 525-day accumulation phase, but now they are down again. USDT (Tether) reported a record profit of $5.2B for the year's first half, reaching $114B ATH, with a market dominance of 69.6% and a 73.5% market share among the top 10 stablecoins. Circle's USDC experienced a surge too in trading volume, amid regulatory clarity in Europe. The total stablecoin market cap sees its tenth consecutive month increase. Ripple will allocate $10M into a tokenized version of US Treasury bills to be issued on the XRP Ledger. Telegram rolled out an in-app browser supporting TON sites, bringing web3 to one billion users. Memecoins on Solana are not looking good, as they lost last week 40% (WIF), 27% (MEW) and 34% (POPCAT). XRP's battle with the SEC can end as soon as they pay a $125M fine, and the coin went up 26%.
- NFTs and blockchain games: After introducing a Mini App Store, Telegram CEO praised Hamster Kombat as the fastest-growing game, with 100M monthly users in just 73 days and 4-5M new users daily. Rumour has it that a minimum of $1000 airdrop is incoming for this silly Hamster Kombat. We are talking about what they call the largest airdrop in history, with 300M active players, and no venture capital or early investment, check the article about it on the Coinmarket website. Do you wonder how quick the Hamster Kombat token value will drop, after the airdrop? Use the Storm Trade bot on Telegram to exchange tokens if needed. What a number! On Splinterlands, the sixth round of Conflicts airdrop finished, and another Legendary summoner is coming. Ronin (the Axie guys) are outpacing Tron and Solana, approaching 2M daily active users. All about the games! Two NFT artists sued the SEC for clarity on whether NFTs are securities or not.
- Good news: Kucoin has a brilliant referral program if you are good at this stuff. Advisers to VC Kamala Harris reached out to key players in the crypto industry, Coinbase, Circle, Ripple Labs and a few more, to establish a regulatory framework related to the industry's growth. The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the Bank of England have unveiled a stablecoin monitoring project trial. Coinbase beats Q2 forecasts with $1.4B revenue. Crypto trading volumes experienced a 19% rise last month. FTX and Alameda reached a $12.7B settlement with CFTC to repay creditors.
- Bad news: Elon is talking about crypto, nodding towards BTC, but admitting he has a soft spot for Dogecoin. Russia embraced and legalized crypto-mining and opened the door to crypto cross-border payments, mining companies need to register with a state database, while individual miners below a specific energy consumption threshold can operate freely. The UK Financial Regulator - FCA - has issued over 1000 warnings to crypto firms since introducing stricter marketing rules last October, which require firms to be registered with it to reach out to clients in the UK. Earlier this week they published guidance for registered firms, highlighting both compliant and problematic practices. Between August 2-5, we had the largest three-day sell-off, with crypto shedding $510B, while S&P dropped 'only' 4.4%.
- Joke of the week: At the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Donald said he wants to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve and keep 100% of all the Bitcoin the US government holds or acquires. He also wants America to lead the global Bitcoin mining race. Can't this be done? Maybe in response to that, the US government moved $2B of BTC into an unknown wallet, all the Silk Road seized amount, and made it look like it was getting ready to be sold. Michael Saylor went even better with his theory that the BTC market cap will reach $280T by 2025. Just to compare, today it is only one trillion. Even Senator Cynthia Lummis appeared at the same conference and proposed that the US government buy 5% of the total BTC and hold it for 20 years.
All the best,
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) (Upland - real-life virtual land) (Holozing - Pokemon-like game)and (Rising Star - Music creators game)
....g ETH 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.