What happened in crypto in the past week? I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. What else? Read below:
- Bitcoin: The four-year cycle is back, the researchers told us, as BTC dropped 40% from its October peak, the sellof looking identical to 2018 and 2022, and we are looking at a $74K baseline, before we go up again. Strategy bought 855 BTC for $75.3M. Saylor is now in red with an average price of $76K per BTC. Binance SAFU Fund acquired another 1315 BTC ($100M). But in the past week Butcoin erased four years of gains, crashing below $65K, wiping out every dollar gained since the $69K peak in November 2021. Some are still believing that BTC can crash more (Standard Chartered is thinking $50K), while others are seeing the bottom being touched last week. Bernstein analysts still maintain their $150K price target for 2026. According to Deutsche Bank, institutions are giving up on BTC, with over $7B in outflows in November alone, as trading volumes thinned out. Lately Bitcoin also decoupled from both gold and tech stocks. Gold and silver crashed too. The Bitcoin miner Cango dumped 4451 BTC over the weekend for $305M as they needed to repay a Bitcoin-collaterized loan (they entered mining late 2024 with 7500 BTC and just sold a big chunk of it). Well, the crash last Friday brought us the lowest level of Bitcoin price since Trump won, $59.930.
- Ethereum: Vitalik sold 2961 ETH worth $6.6M using multiple small swaps through Cow Protocol to reduce market impact, and he will use the funds to support privacy-preserving technologies, open hardware and secure verifiable software. He also dropped an updated vision for ETH role in AI, as Vitalik is not interested in building superintelligence, focusing on practical tools instead. Bitmine went shopping during the price crash and added another 40613 ETH last week.
- Altcoins and stablecoins: Altcoins seems to rally, but is this a dead cat bounce? Blend is one interesting app where I try to save some USDC, while I may also qualify for an airdrop in the future. Standard Chartered estimated SOL price to $250 for 2026, but they are forecasting $2000 by 2030. Monero and Zcash are dropping lately. Ripple Prime added Hyperliquid to its institutional platform. ACS is bouncing with a x5 times jump on volume but still goes down in value. Once upon a time UMA Labs and Access Protocol had a good thing going on, but lately they seems to take quite debatable decisions. I sold all my ACS bags and moved my assets out of the bridge liquidity a few months ago already, kind of predicting this. We have a BNB ETF by Grayscale. Polymarket integrates with Solana for the first time, via Solana DEX aggregator Jupiter Exchange. Public companies holding Solana are siting on a $1.5B loss. MegaETH launched Monday claiming 50K trx/sec (compare this with ETH 30 trx/sec). The AI sector wiped out $2.8B this week (a 12% decline). BlackRock listed BUIDL on Uniswap. Stripe integrated payments using the x402 protocol, enabling AI agents to make payments using USDC on Base programmatically.
- NFTs and blockchain games: I heard of a next generation online betting platform called Bluff, I need to check it to see what is all this noise about it. 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: Fireblock integrated Canton Network, opening custody and settlement for institutions on a blockchain built specifically for regulated markets. Crypto crime tracker TRM Labs becomes an unicorn reaching a $1B valuation. Denmark largest lender, Danske Bank, just broke an eight-year ban offering now BTC and ETH ETPs to customers. Arkham Exchange switches to a decentralized model completely. Hong Kong approved crypto margin and perpetuals.
- Bad news: UK did it again, calling stablecoins on-ramps and off-rams to crypto - an intrinsically worthless asset. Who let the old people out of the care home again? Musk is looking for a crypto specialist to train its AI models on digital asset markets. Wow! Just WOW! Someone sent TMZ a Bitcoin ransom note tied to the dissapeareance of Savannah Guthrie's mother, as she is missing since January 31. There are talks about crypto-capitulation. Check Google if you do not know what this is. Prediction markets exploded from $15B to $63B, but nearly 60% of the reported volume is just wash trading, with traders farming rewards during the incentive periods. After World Liberty Markets, the lending platform, now, from the guys who want a bit of every pie, we have World Swap, a foreign exchange platform where illegal aliens can move funds between different currencies. AI is used by hackers to automatize the scams, for phishing, DMs, Deepfake founders, influencers and support staff, even chatbots and fake assistants, doing automated social engineering at scale. Heck, even the malware can be optimized by AI. Can we have a counter-AI that identify all this stuff and warns us?
- Joke of the week: Biliton Diamond and Ctrl Alt moved over $280M worth of certified polished diamonds on-chain in the UAE using Ripple's custody tech. Can you redeem it for physical stones? Still the funniest bit of news is related to Bithumb giveaway, where instead of a $1.37 reward, 695 users received 2000 BTC each (around $142M per person). The accounts were frozen within five minutes, but not before over $2B worth of BTC was sold. They achieved a 99.7% recovery rate. All while Gen Z already are paying for Valentine's date using crypto. Well done boys and girls!
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.