What happened in crypto in the past week? Bitcoin is moving in some interesting ways, and even USDT is trying (again?!?) to connect with it. Quantum threat is becoming more real. Prediction markets are on the regulators sight. I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. What else? Read below:
- Bitcoin: Bitcoin miners are in the red, as it seems that the proce to mine 1 BTC now is $88K, so right now it is trading with a $19K loss per coin. Yet, Scaramucci still believes in the four-year cycle, saying that the time of recovery is close. On the other side, traders are paying record premiums to bet on BTC going lower, even as the price hovers around $78-80K. Sweden's H100 signed a deal to more than triple its BTC overnight. Bernstein is calling the bottom, and Strategy was buying through the entire crash and now holds 3.6% of all Bitcoin. On a different note, $14.16B in BTC options will expire soon. Will this push towards $75K? Miner company Mara sold 15.133 BTC in March for $1.1B, using the money to buy back $1B of its own debt at a 9% discount. Bhutan also quietly sold 1000 BTC that they mined using hydroelectric power. Morgan Stanley filed to launch a spot BTC ETF at 0.14%, the lowest fee in the US market. Eric Trump's Bitcoin miner is sinking, with 7000 BTC in treasury, yet, the stock is down 50% at $0.84. A Google paper said that around 6.9M BTC are exposed to long-term threats. It is something dodgy in there, as demand is flashing red, while institutions are buying at a record pace.
- Ethereum: Bitmine crossed $10B in ETH on its treasury and it is still buying. They now hold 4% of all the circulating ETH supply and their annual staking rewards is estimated to be at approx. $300M, based on a seven-day average yield of 2.83%. They are now launching their proprietary staking network, MAVAN, designed for institutional staking. ETH lost its number two spot to Tether, after the later increased 600% over 5 years, while ETH just 11%.
- Altcoins and stablecoins: Stablecoins are quietly becoming the payment layer for AI, and the infrastructure is moving faster than the number suggest. The AI sector cooled off this week, with the vast majority of prominet AI tokens slightly in red. Looks like Tether is finally getting a real audit with one of the Big Four, but will they? I may have heard this before, isn't it? They also launched its gold-backed token XAUT on BNB Chain. Mastercard and Western Union are building on Solana. SOL closed out the week down 4% as Middle East tensions jolted risk assets. Weekly revenue across Solana's app layer fell to an 18-month low. BNB is also down 0.5% this week. WLD hit an all-time low, a 97% drop from its peak. Stablecoins experienced a surge in velocity, with USDT focusing on EM savings, and USDC on TradFI replacement. Telegram rolled out perpetual futures for its 150M users through a DEX called Lighter.
- 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: NYSE has signed an agreement with Securitize, the BlackRock-backed tokenization firm, to serve as the digital transfer agent for its upcoming Digital Trading Platform. Marshal Islands launched a UBI program backed by an US dollar-pegged digital bond on Stellar. Ordo Finance and Franklin Templeton are letting crypto users hold tokenized stocks directly in a wallet, no brokerage account needed. Trust Wallet launchet a toolkit that lets AI trade for you across more than 25 blockchains, no human required, fully autonomous or just suggesting trades. France's BNB Paribas is rolling out six crypto ETNs to retail clients starting Monday. Young people in UK rate Bitcoin, then ISA and saving bonds as saving products, and half of them would trust a political party more if it understood crypto and blockchain concepts. Vitalik published how he runs AI, his AI can read his messages, but cannot send anything without his manual approval, capping autonomous crypto transactions at $100 per day. Coinbase got a bank regulator's nod.
- Bad news: A bi-partisan Senate bill wants to ban sports betting contracts on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. Nevada blocked Kalshi, Arizona filed criminal charges, and now the Congress is stepping up too. Three separate bills were introduced this month targeting prediction markets. Personally I do not see anything good coming out of these apps and companies, except a lot of manipulation and hate for crypto. Crypto-ETFs kept their inflow streak alive last week, but just barely. More expensive energy can sometimes increase miner selling, so all this oil trouble may also affect crypto sooner or later. Balancer plans to shut down Balancer Labs and halt BAL emissions. Solana's biggesttrading platform got drained, as Drift Protocol has seen over $280M leaving the platform within hours, with the stolen funds already moved off Solana entirely.
- Joke of the week: Fidelity would like that the SEC starts to move faster on crypto, and send them a letter to ask for it. CFTC published detailed guidance on using BTC, ETH, and stablecoins as colateral in derivatives markets. CFTC says it is ready to oversee the entire $3 trillion crypto market. Circle shares dropped 20% in a single day after reports that proposed US legislation could limit rewards wied to hodling USDC. White House also cleared a proposal that could open US retirement accounts to crypto exposure. One good thing amonth the hundred bad ones. We also found out about the introduction of the Mined In America Act, meant to bring digital asset mining infrastructure back to the US. Chainalysis is rolling out AI agents trained of over 10M investigations, offering law enforcement an upgrade.
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.