One eventful week, connecting all together banks (yes, I am talking about Silvergate), cryptocurrencies and a mini-crash (which we are already recovering from). Still upset that Binance stopped all the interest and rewards in UK, looking for alternatives. What else? Read bellow:
- Bitcoin: There is a discussion right now about Mt.Gox paying its creditors in Bitcoin in some time this year, and if this will lead to a mass sell-off or not. Yes, most of them people were early adopters, but will they sell some of it? Probably yes. The digital payment firm founded by Jack Dorsey (Block) wants to use their own BTC reserves to boos liquidity on Lightning Network.
- Ethereum: Ethereum's Sepolia testnet has successfully simulated the Shanghai hard fork upgrade (the upgrade allowing the withdrawal of the staked ETH), the one all of us expects, including Cappela upgrade too (this one is improving the consensus layer of the blockchain). Initially set for March, the set date seems to be moved to early April for now. 14% of the total ETH supply is staked (for a total value of $28B). Lido Finance reports record 150K ETH staked in a day. Coinbase is building a layer-2 solution for ETH called Base, joining other exchanges with its own blockchain solution, on top of the Optimism stack. Optimism focus on incentivizing user engagement, and Arbitrum has more organic growth, but both of them are doing great in the user retention sector.
- Altcoins: I am quite annoyed as Binance stopped all the Earn and Staking programs for the UK, quoting "as per our Termsa of Use and compliance with local regulations, these features are not available in your region". Somehow, their Binance Smart Chain surged 229%, and while their transactions used to be cost effective, now they are, at least for me, around 0.30-0.50$, up from an average of 0.03-0.04$ last year. I am not happy with Binance, and I am looking for alternatives. Safe alternatives, obviously. Any ideas? Still, after Paxos messed up with BUSD, USDT and TUSD rised, BUSD and Pax dollar (USDP) lost 15% and 24% of their market cap. Solana network failed once again, with a 20 hours outage, making you wonder how they are number 11 in terms of market capitalization. But time will tell us is in the end, they will improve as much as we need them to do it. One of the Layer 2 tokens of Hive, LEO, and their team, are showing quite a bit of potential, with some hit and miss strategies in the past (CUB on Polygon, of course), and their work on a one-app integrating all the most required features is looking promising. Check them out. Maker is continuing their quest to make DAI relevant, and they are soon to launch their own new lending platform, Spark protocol. Alchemy launched a tool allowing devs to start building apps within 4 minutes. Chinese CBDC is looking to be integrated into the local financial system, with 0.13% of the total yuan in circulation being now digital (e-CNY). Even Australia is now working on their own CBDC, called e-AUD. Arweave as a permanent storage solution os something quite innovative, and I like them. Elrond just got their new Dapp ready, all good and shinny. How functional it is, I will find out.
- Blockchain games and NFTs: Yuga Labs is releasing 300 Bitcoin NFTs, feeling like a 2017 artwork that they will bring back to life. Mark Zuckerberg was told off by some US senators, asked to keep teens out of his metaverse, after some reports suggested that kids as young as 13 can get access to his Horizon Worlds metaverse. Looking back at Facebook poor records of protecting children on social media, I think this will not happen (especially when money and profit are tied to his metaverse metrics and all the other numbers. Mistubishi, Fusitsu and other tech firms are partnering together to create a Japanese Metaverse economic zone, called Ryugukoku (any Japanese friend can translate the name for me?). Splinterlands is going forward with their plan to introduce a small fee for any NFT rental, and this can be good or bad, depending on your position. It will decrease the number of cheap cards rental, mostly done by bot teams, and let you find high level cards more easier, but it will also take out the possibility of making profit from the small players. Will the servers improve spectacularly after this change is implemented? I hope so. Chaos Legion packs are getting close to the end, with maybe another 2 weeks left until they are sold, and I hope this will make the team ready to move to the Land NFT and their improvements. Wombat Dungeon Master is starting to drop their Character NFTs soon. Get ready for that.
- Good news: Ukraine received over $70M in crypto since the start of the conflict with Russia, mostly in BTC, ETH and USDT, but they are also owning some NFT, and even implemented some NFT initiatives in order to get more funds. The big part of it (around 80%) were received in the first few months, after everything started, and they were directed toward military equipment, protective geat, vehicles and medicine. The Bank of England is more interested in the 5'0 clock tea, rather than build a CBDC, it seems. They said they are not doing a half-hearted effort to look cool, but when the governor was asked where they are on a scale of 1 to 10, he said maybe 5 or a bit above. Cannot get more English than that. Coinbase research suggests that 50M Americans now own crypto. Another UK bank, Nationwide, announced that they will limit the purchase of crypto using credit cards, and no more than £6000 can be used daily from the current account to buy crypto. Some protested against it, and they faced criticism for restricting how customers spend their own money. Santander also restricted customers from sending real-time payments to crypto-exchanges, to protect us from scams. Binance anti-cam campaign seems to be working after their Hong Kong pilot run, and they are rolling it out to their other locations. Goldman Sacks is considering expanding their digital assets team, and they are hiring now. RobinHood cryptowallets are now available for iPhone and iOS globally, in over 130 countries (and you have 50 ERC tokens there, including USDC, UNI, MATIC and SHIB). And Polygon is supported too.
- Bad news: Why so serious? Crypto market took a hit this week, and everything apparently started with Silvergate Bank, as they chose to stay away from crypto, after being exposed to the bear market, and to FTX shenanigans. They made $76M in profit in 2021, and lost $949M in 2022. As soon as they announced this, their shares value fell 44.2$, and then Coinbase and few others stopped using their service. Apparently, they may not survive over the next year. Then BTC fell by $1000 in 20 minutes, all the way to $22400. and we found out that FTX is kind of missing $9.47B, yeah, billions, from the customers funds. Would you wonder if you would find out that FTX bought a 'centuries old castle in the scenic Czeckh highlands'? Probably not. And yes, they did. Some rumours came out that Visa want to slow down their work with crypto, after BlockFi, Celsius, Voyager and FTX. But Visa head of crypto Guy Sheffield said the rumours are not true. Some VIP crypto-scammer, Monkey Drainer, a promoter of what you may call scam-as-a-service, announced that he/she is retiring, moving on to something better. His wallet has something like 1000+ ETH (a bit over $2M). Even Michael Saylor is out and about, after a judge pointed out that he claimed to be a citizen of Florida, while living in Washington DC (where tax is much higher), and more than $100M are mentioned in a tax evasion lawsuit. DCG reports a $1.1B loss in 2022, after the price drop and the lending platform Genesis restructuration. Crypto cryme in 2022 was estimated to $20.6B, with a big part of it pointing at North Korea and Russia ties.
- Joke of the week: Coinbase's CEO pointed out that, if you want to make America great again, something needs to be done with crypto-regulation, and that something is not the Wild West policy that SEC is using right now. Major financial hubs like London, Singapore and Hong Kong are being seen as pro-crypto, and if the US is not going on the right pathway, they will lose dominance, in the same way they did with the 5G technology and the semiconductors industry. Brian Armstrong wants regulators to work with crypto firms, not against them. I bet this will not happen.
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) (Wombat Dungeon Master - NFT staking game) and (CryptoBrewmaster - Beer factory sim).
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