What happened in crypto in the past week? Ethereum is the main rage, with Bitcoin cooling down. No clear Bitcoin reserve for the US. What else? Read below:
Bitcoin: Mat Hougan supported the theory that BTC Halving cycle no longer works, as each halving is half as important, and Bitcoin structure is evolving faster than anyone expected. Some early BTC holder cashed out 80.000 BTC worth $9B after the wallet was dormant for decades, through Galaxy Digital. The market barely reacted. Pakistan, after cooperating with El Salvador, planned to build a BTC reserve using its excess energy. Fun fact: as price goes down, we had a whole week with MicroStrategy not making any purchase, but they announced that they want 7% of the Bitcoin's total supply. Talking about timing! Bitcoin dominance dropped 6%. As price went down, the whales bought nearly 1% of the total supply. Bitcoin mining difficulty reached record high, highest level ever recorded.
Ethereum: ETH's 50% rally triggered a warning about extreme euphoria as its social dominance spiked up to 70% against BTC since early May. Some are betting on $6K before Christmas, but I don't think so! Corporate treasuries bought 1.26m ETH, 1% of the total supply, Standard Chartered aiming for 10% . eventually, Bitmine for 5%. SharpLink Gaming purchased 77210 ETH, more than all the new ETH issued last month. Linea commited 20% of all transactions fees to burn ETH, and remaining 80% to buy its own token, supporting ETH ecosystem. Ethereum broke its long-term downtrend after the Pectra upgrade, with 30% of its liquid supply now staked. Spot ETH ETFs pulled in $453M in daily inflows, extending record streak to 16 days. EToro wants to tokenize US stocks on Ethereum blockchain.
Altcoins and stablecoins: BNB breaks ATH at $858, pulling other tokens up, OP jumping 12.6%, AVX 8.9% and so on, one week ago. Everything seemed good back then. Nasdaq company converted half a billion dollars into SUI tokens, 98% of Mill City Ventures treasury being allocated to SUI. Base overtook Solana in daily token creation. Decentralized exchanges captured 30% of crypto spot trading volume last quarter, and this is good. Altcoin rally, anyone? Arthur Haynes sold $13M worth of ETH, ENA and PEPE, and he is holding now $26M in stablecoins, and he is waiting for Bitcoin 100K and ETH 3k to buy back. Filedlity National Information Services (FIS) is partnering with Circle to bring USDC payments to the US banks for payments and transfers.
NFTs and blockchain games: I have enjoyed playing Golem Overlord lately on Hive, and it is quite profitable, I would say, with some significant updates lately. On Splinterlands, we have had the Land NFT new update and improved tokenomics on March 18. The presale of its latest Conclave Arcana collection is ongoing, and two new promo cards are on sale. Check my Holozing article to learn about a new blockchain game that looks full of potential.
Good news: The UK's Financial Conduct Authority will allow retail investors to access crypto-exchange traded notes (ETN) starting in October, ending a ban that has been in place since 2021. Tether now backs over 259.000 XAUt tokens with 7.66 tons of actual gold woth over $800M you can trade instantly, and XAUt surged 40% this year perfectly tracking gold performance. As in terms of profits, Tether recorded a $4.9B net profit in three months. Chase customers can soon buy crypto directly and JPMorgan is partnering with Coinbase to let its customers to buy crypto using bank accounts, credit cards and Chase rewards points. The SEC chair just reversed every crypto ban, legalizing everything the previous administration fought against, creating formal categories for decentralized finance and promising to protect developers from prosecution. On top of that, SEC announced that they had approved in-kind creation and redemption for all the spot BTC and ETH ETFs. This is not the most daring initiative, as they named Project Crypto a push to update securities regulations for blockchain-based trading, aiming to legitimize tokenized versions of stocks, bonds and other assets on public blockchains. A Delloite survey fount that 99% of the CFOs at billion dollar companies expect to use crypto for bussiness. Citygroup, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have been quietly funding blockchain startups, 345 investments between 20202 and 2024, with 33 of them worth over $100M each. Paypal will soon let the US merchants accept over 100 crypocurrencies at checkout.
Bad news: Tron is planing to raise $1B to buy back more TRX tokens for their corporate treasury. So, you get money to buy your own tokens that you create, a whole one billion bucks. If this is not dodgy, I do not know what to say! Coinbase shares went down 11% after the company posted $1.5B in revenue instead of the $1.59 projected. Talking about biased perception!
Joke of the week: The SEC delays Trump's Truth Social Bitcoin ETF. Do they know something we peasants don't? No problem, World Liberty Financial invested $10M into Falcon Finance to get USD1 to serve as collateral on the platform. Coincidence, Trump's White House releases the most detailed crypto policy plan up to date, but the details about the Bitcoin reserve are still missing.
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.