What happened in crypto the past week? Bitcoin is relatively quiet, while the Ethereum foundation is shaken to its core (you see what I did here?). Solana went up with Trump. SEC is playing its cards. What else? Read below:
- Bitcoin: Larry Fink, BlackRock's CEO, predicted something like $700K for 1 BTC. Well, once before, he also called Bitcoin an index of money laundering, so, it is not that he knows much about it. Better researchers like Markus Thielen were talking about precise patterns of 18K jumps, so the next logical target would be $122K. This week BTC briefly reached $109.5K. MicroStrategy continues buying BTC, another 110K BTC for $1.1B. Meanwhile, China quietly sold 194K BTC, worth $19.7B, through exchanges like Huobi (the PlusToken ponzi scheme stash from the 2019 crackdown). Nasdaq proposed a rule change to allow in-kind redemptions of BlackRock's Spot BTC ETF, but not for retail investors. Until now you could get cash, but not BTC.
- Ethereum: ETH was down 0.88%, unlike BTC, which was up 3.40%. After the Ethereum Foundation shake-up, leadership changes aim to bolster technical expertise and ecosystem support. They faced criticism for lagging behind competitors like Solana. We could see some interesting moves, as the Foundation allocated 50.000 ETH to participate in DEFI, the first test being done with AAVE. This should have been done long ago, probably, as its treasury decreased by 39% in less than 3 years. They can earn a 3.31% yield on their ETH holdings. There is even a venture startup called Etherealize, aiming to position ETH as the preferred crypto for Wall Street. They are working hard!
- Altcoins and stablecoins: I did have some fun with Intract, where you do quests for NFT and even win some crypto in contests. Solana's total locked value went up from $1.4B to a staggering $9.77B, thanks to one memecoin, all of us know its name. Solana-based DEX Jupiter will use 50% of its fees on JUP buybacks. Uniswap V4 will begin to roll out this week. Thorchain halted BTC and ETH withdrawals amid restructurating efforts, to mitigate a potential insolvency risk. Check Timeswap, currently live on ETH and other popular L2 (BASE, ARB, OP), a lending protocol allowing anyone to create permissionless lending markets for virtually any token since the platform operates without any oracles. I say sketchy, but some call it innovative. I may be a bit old school, I know. There is a new SocialFi platform called Clout.me, where you can launch your social token if you have more than 10K followers on X. Creators will earn 1% of the transaction fees, and it is only available on iOS, with many many bugs. Accelerator-based crypto and AI projects are laying the groundwork for a more decentralized community-driven AI ecosystem. Personal note: I still need to learn more about AI agents. AI tokens price is down, over the launch of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI model that can compete with ChatGPT while running on less advanced chips. But well, is Chinese, so they probably are filtering your data too, so, apples and oranges.
- NFTs and blockchain games: I am big on playing Golem Overlord lately on Hive, and it is quite profitable, I would say, with some great updates lately. Check this article I wrote about: Link and this one too: Link. On Splinterlands, we are getting ready for a new card collection, with some cool summoners that are now auction-only, yet it seems quite expensive. Check my Holozing article to learn about a new blockchain game that looks full of potential. Following Pepe and Ape, Azuki launched its own token, ANIME token which surpassed $350 million in market capitalization one day after the launch.
- Good news: Wow, Tornado Cash won against the US government, and the US District Court just reversed the sanctions on Tornado Cash. Its native token, TORN, went up 140%. Apparently, they cannot sanction a computer code. Imagine that! Trump's first crypto move was to choose David Sacks to chair a new working group bringing together experts from the Treasury, SEC, CFTC, and other agencies, to tackle stablecoins and potentially create a national crypto stockpile. Republican SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda was appointed as interim Chair. He started to form a crypto task force to establish clear regulatory frameworks. The contentious crypto accounting rule requiring financial firms to list crypto holdings like liabilities on their balance sheets was rescinded (we are talking about SAB 121, a directive issued in March 2022). Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht was granted a full presidential pardon, as the 40 years +2 life sentences were branded ridiculous.
- Bad news: The US debt hits record high - a $36 trillion debt ceiling, how will this influence crypto? We will see. The EU regulator ESMA ordered crypto firms to delist non-compliant stablecoins by January 31, 2025. We got some drama with the SEC vs Ripple case, as a non-profit organisation called Better Markets joined the SEC efforts, saying that XRP transactions on the secondary trading platforms should still qualify as securities. The battle will go on. Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) denied incoming launch of XRP and SOL futures contracts.
- Joke of the week: Do you know that World Liberty Financial, Trump's DEFI venture, went on a shopping spree, spending more than $326M. They bought ETH and WBTC, $47M each, and smaller amounts of Ethene, Chainlink, AAVE, and UNI. On his first day of talking about crypto, Trump did not talk about protecting self-custody rights, nor did he oppose CBDC or starting the strategic BTC reserve. Coincidence? Maybe he was too busy with the Solana memecoin, as most transactions got stuck for more than 15 hours when TRUMP launched. Coinbase took 100 minutes to transfer USDC to the SOL blockchain. 21 hours later they cleaned the backlog. We are talking about 9M new addresses and a $14B market cap. Wen the presidential rug pull? Even Melania launched her own memecoin called, quite surprisingly, MELANIA.
All the best,
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- Hearthstone-like card game) (Golem Overlord - Play2Earn game on Hive) (Upland - real-life virtual land) (Holozing - Pokemon-like game)and (Rising Star - Music creators game).
...get crypto while writing on Publish0x blog, using 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.
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