What happened in crypto in the past week? Kucoin seems to recover nicely after the SEC threatened them. But it is not over. Roger Ver was arrested by the US in Spain 10 years after he renounced his US citizenship. Lost of airdrop, and even more complaints about it, just check Eigenleyer and FriendTeck to find more. What else? Read below:
- Bitcoin: MicroStrategy recorded a $191M impermanent loss on its BTC holdings. Yet, they just unveiled a new open-source protocol, MicroStrategy Orange, designed to create decentralized identity applications on the BTC blockchain. The US-listed Spot BTC ETFs experienced historic outflows above $500M. And this time Grayscale was not the culprit. Jack Dorsey's Block allocated 10% of Bitcoin profits to monthly BTC purchases. As BTC dropped to $60K, the general sentiment shifted from Greed to Neutrality. Are we going to $50K? Bitcoin Layer2 is up and running, with Stacks just witnessing an explosion in active user accounts.
- Ethereum: ETH and BTC ETFs were launched in Hong Kong, with modest volumes, HK$10.5M and HK$22M, while the first day of trading in the US reached $4.6B. EigenLayer stakedrop distribution has divided opinions, raising concerns about its long-term viability, as the airdrop is favoring the whales. The airdrop will start on May 10. Lido Finance surpassed 1M ETH validators. Renzo, the liquid restaking protocol, reached $3.3B in TVL.
- Altcoins and stablecoins: USDC officially overtook USD in monthly transaction volumes. I think this is good for crypto, as the whole house of cards would have even killed all crypto if something happened to USDT (who here does not believe that Tether is dodgy, one hand up?). Meanwhile, Tether invested $200M in BlackRock Neurotech - a pioneering neural implant company and reported a $4.5B profit for Q1 2024 alone. Stablecoins trading volume of CEX reached an all-time high - $2.18T as in trillion. But surprise, 90% of the stablecoin transactions are linked to bots, not to real users. Polkadot is doing well, with an ATH for active addresses - 514K, a 48% increase in QoQ and a 192% increase over the last 6 months. Moonbeam is the leading parachain and Manta Network saw the largest increase. Avalanche C-Chain partnered with Stripe, to streamline crypto purchases and transfers for verified Stripe users. SAFE token price dropped 42% after unlocking its transferability. Chainlink had a strategic partnership with Rapid Adition, to develop an adapter tailored for institutional trading of tokenized assets across the decentralized landscape. What a mouthful! Fantom announced a $6.5M prize pool to incentivize developers to create anti-scam and anti-rugpull standards. LayerZero announced an airdrop too. FriendTech airdrop is almost here, but there are some issues already, as there are hints of a non-transferable token called $POINT. After the launch, the value of $FRIEND went up to $169, only to drop and stabilize at $2.51 for now. There is talk about a lack of visibility into SUI treasury management activity.
- NFTs and blockchain games: What a number! On Splinterlands, the fourth round of Conflicts airdrop ongoing, with Legendary summoners next, and the new reward system seems to be alright, as you get Glint tokens for every match you win and double of it at the end of the season. You can use Glint tokens to buy specific cards, Merits, potions and even 3 different titles. You may also want to check Holozing - a soon-to-be-launched Pokemon-like game on the Hive blockchain.
- Good news: Kucoin has a brilliant referral program, if you are good at this kind of activity. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic trained AI model to spot money laundering. Coinbase revenue for Q1 is estimated to be $1.5B, a 65% increase for the quarter. PayPal teams up with MoonPay to expand crypto offerings allowing its users to buy, sell and hold over 100 cryptocurrencies (so far they only got BTC, ETH, BCH, LTC and PYUSDT). Venture capitalists have poured over $1B into the crypto space for the second month in a row. Uniswap integrated RobinHood Connect for seamless crypto purchases. A white hat hacker earned $250k after he found a critical vulnerability in Curve's liquidity pools.
- Bad news: Flash crashes experienced by crypto exchanges remain a concern, with 4 incidents experienced by each Cex.io and Probit exchanges in the past 6 months. Former BTC-e Exchange operator pleads guilty to laundering money, with at least $121M in stolen funds. ZachXBT, an on-chain investigator, has uncovered how Lazarus Group laundered over $200M in hacked crypto. We had a Bitfinex database hack, with over
- Joke of the week: Binance founder CZ was sentenced to 4 months in prison, and DoJ called for a 3 years-long sentence that was dismissed. CZ pleaded guilty in November to violating the Bank Secrecy Act (what that has to do with crypto?). But this one was put in the shadow of Roger Ver's arrest in Spain, by the US authorities, for an older than 10 years charge of mail fraud, tax evasion and filing false returns, which is worrying, as Ver renounced his US citizenship in 2014, moving to St. Kitts and Nevis. And to finish it in style, the US government just declared that they are not trying to kill crypto (when this happens, that is exactly what they are trying to do, as the past showed us).
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 Read.cash and Hive.
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