What happened in crypto the past 3 weeks? ETH and BTC are at an yearly all-time high. Crypto has been going well since Trump's victory. Big brands are looking to acquire more Bitcoin lately. What else? Read below:
- Bitcoin: Some interesting few weeks. Middle of October, BTC was still around $67K and started to surge. Tesla moved $760M in BTC to fresh wallets for the first time in two years. Blackrock's BTC ETF had 13 straight days of positive inflows in November. Microstrategy announced that they go after $42B worth of BTC, to own 2.7% of all Bitcoin that will ever exist. Deutsche Telecom is mining Bitcoin now. The BTC ETFs hit $21B in the first year inflows, leaving gold behind. Even Mt.Gox is awake, with 500 BTC transferred to a mysterious new wallet. End of October we have BTC passing over $70K, amidst the US elections. First of November, an all-time high for BTC - $73562, and boom, on the 6th of November BTC reached $75181, with a final $76800 on Friday. And there we go, we have a paper from the European Central Bank claiming that Bitcoin enriches early adopters at the expense of everyone else. The Bitcoin open interest on centralized exchanges hits a new all-time high. Microsoft shareholders will vote on a potential Bitcoin investment. The Bitcoin mining difficulty surpassed 100 trillion for the first time.
- Ethereum: The next ETH major upgrade, Pectra, will be not only about faster transactions or lower fees, they are now working on something called social recovery, where you may never again worry about losing access to your digital assets again. But how safe is this feature? We will see. VanEck just lowered the price expectancies for ETH from $22K to a 'mere' $7300. Main culprit? Layer 2, as was supposed to provide 90% of the revenue, but in the real world, it is only providing 10%. Kraken launched wrapped kBTC on ETH and OP Mainnet.
- Altcoins and stablecoins: Most of the AI projects are growing steadily, from 27% to 34%, in just one year. Hong Kong's Hashkey Group hit the brakes on its HSK token launch, quoting the market movements. Canary Capital reminded us that LTC is still alive, filing for the world's first Litecoin ETF. We have some other L1 starting to challenge SOL dominance, just take a look at SUI, breaking the $1B mark. Circle's USDC can now be used as a gas token on Base L2. Sonic (formerly Fantom) released a lite paper mentioning a 6% supply mint for a potential airdrop. Trump-backed WLF token sale struggled, with only $12.5M in the first 24 hours. Vitalik is dumping more memecoins, this time selling POPCAT and ETH6900. A HYPE airdrop was announced by Hyperliquid. Puffer, Grass and DeBridge will have an airdrop too. Moodeng seems to be the talk of the town, as the most hyped memecoin, in the past few weeks. GOAT is a catchy memecoin that instead dropped 32%. It seems that all this memecoin mania is just a degens fight against the oppressive SEC. Coinbase launched a platform called 'Based Agent' that lets developers create AI-developed crypto agents in minutes. They also wrapped Bitcoin for Solana. A mention of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally made the DOGE token go 15% up. Peanut the Squirrell (PNUT) is a new memecoin on Solana that went totally 'nuts' after some comment from Elon Musk. A new stablecoin on Solana, sUSD, is backed up by the US treasury bills and pays you interest automatically in USDC. Yet the Treasury only mentioned crypto as a risk to watch out for. And yes, a lot of memecoins and the rest of crypto seemed to go up in a crazy way as soon as it was announced that Trump won. MakerDAO's Sky dollar becomes the second fastest stablecoin to reach a $1B market cap. Circle's Euro coin rose to an all-time high post-MiCA implementation.
- NFTs and blockchain games: On Splinterlands, the seventh round of Conflicts airdrop finished, and the last Legendary summoner is awesome. Check my Holozing article if you want to learn about a new blockchain game that looks full of potential. I am also playing Golemancer on Hive, and it is quite profitable, I would say.
- Good news: Visa enabled real-time deposits and withdrawals for Coinbase users in the US and EU. Kucoin has a brilliant referral program if you are good at this stuff. Ex-Worldcoin, now named just World, is branching out into NFC passport checks for age and citizenship verification, using the iris scan. Asia and Oceania are the heart of crypto now, with $750B inflows in just the last 12 months. Looks like Wall Street picked XRP over ETH. Polkadot flagship dev conference - sub0 reset, is starting in BabBangkokgkok through November 9 to 11th. A UK pension fund is making waves by adding Bitcoin to its retirement portfolio. And the UK is set to introduce stablecoin regulations in the coming months. Circle is working on a regulated global financial network that could make sending money abroad as easy as sending a text. Will Dan Gallagher be the new SEC boss? Detroit is the first major American city where you can pay for city services with crypto, using Paypal. Stripe completed its largest acquisition to date, buying the stablecoin platform Bridge for $1.1B. Nomura-backed Komainu acquired the Singapore-based crypto custodian Propine. Tesla's Q3 earnings revealed that the Bitcoin stash remained untouched. The Bank of England governor gave assurance that digital currencies will not replace cash in the UK. Peter Thiel-backed exchange Bitpanda is considering an IPO or sale. Emory University becomes the first US endowment to invest in a spot BTC ETF. 21 Shares filed to list a spot XRP ETF. Union Bank of Switzerland has launched a tokenized money market fund on the ETH blockchain. Michigan State retirement fund invested $10M in spot ETH ETFs. Healthcare technology firm Semler Scientific added $2.6M after Q3. Arkham Intelligence is set to launch a perpetual futures exchange.
- Bad news: Radiant Capital got hacked, due to some security bug that broke its multi-signature wallet, losing more than $50M in tokens from BNB and Arbitrum blockchain. Italy is planning to impose a 42% tax on crypto gains. Wasn't Europe becoming a crypto heaven? Coinbase dropped 15% on Halloween, as their revenues are down 27%. Japan Financial Services are working on new laws that could change how exchanges handle crypto and Japan's Amazon equivalent turned its users into crypto traders. Elizabeth Warren, one of the crypto's most vocal critics, secured her Senate seat for a fourth term. Metamask creator Consensys laid down 20% of its staff. Kraken is laying off 15% of its employees too. Franklin Templeton becomes the first asset manager to build a tokenized fund on the Base blockchain.
- Joke of the week: Tether wants to diversify into traditional finance lending and commodities trading. They did reveal a $100B Treasury holdings alongside Bitcoin and gold lately and announced $2.5B in profits last quarter alone. Other companies are not doing that well, look at RobinHood, with crypto revenues shooting up by 165%, yet overall their stock took a 12% dip. on top of that, there is a rumour that Mr.Beast has been running pump-and-dump schemes, with a report of 50 crypto wallets tied to him, with $13M transactions.
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) (Upland - real-life virtual land) (Holozing - Pokemon-like game)and (Rising Star - Music creators game)
....get ETH while writing on the Publish0x blog, using the 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.