What happened in crypto this week? A lot, especially to me, and my portfolio will be potentially double by this time next year. This little miracle is called Splinterlands, and I will talk a bit about their airdrop on the altcoins line. Ethereum is moving a step further from PoW to PoS. There are no tokenized stocks to be found on most of the exchanges and RobinHood ICO just happened. Read bellow for more information:
Bitcoin: Bitcoin played the whole week around $40K, a 13% increase, prompting other tokens like ETH and BNB for example to also gain 10% on average. In case you did not know, 6% of the Americand own BTC right now, compared with 4% in 2018. Bitcoin hashrate reached 115.27 EH/s, all the way up from the 58.84 EH/s drop due to China ban. Many of the miners relocated to Kazahstan and US, and they are all set up by now.
Ethereum: According to Coinbase, the interest for ETH is increasing, as the volume for it went up to 1461% in the first half of the year, compared with 'only' 489% for BTC. Synthetix (SNX) is now using the layer 2 scaling platform Optimism with almost instant transaction speeds and X50 times less fees. London hard fork is coming soon, with the major update that will send the fees to burn instead to the miners, and we are one more step close to ETH 2.0. It must be good, as Ethereum is celebrating six years today. Hmm, my nephew's age, more or less. Proof of Work will fade away into nothingness, and Proof of Stake will rise.
Altcoins: Burger King is accepting Dogecoin as payment right now, but only in Brasil. To celebrate this they even made a Dogepper, a meat snack for dogs. And a nice round number, 221 million users using crypto around the world, double than half an year ago. Everything is going according to the plan. Okcoin is accepted by Netherland regulators, approved in Malta and Puerto Rico, as they aim to expand in America and Europe. Uniswap delisted a number of tokens, mainly the ones associated with tokenized stocks, as they try to comply with the current regulations, in a pre-emptive move. Both Binance and FTX removed high leverage and tokenized stocks from their exchanges. Ethereum Classic hard fork Magneto was also activated on 23rd of July. Quant (QNT) gained 60% after their Coinbase listing, and I must to admit that i never hear of this one. Basically this token will allow applications to operate on multiple blockchains.
NFTs: Splinterlands launched their Governance token, in some unheard until now way, with a daily airdrop going on for a year, yes, a whole year, with daily updates, depending on your Splinterlands assets (NFTs, native currency named DEC, liquidity provided for it, in-game cosmetics - skins and other stuff related to the game). All that you need to join the game is to buy a $10 digital key called Spell Book and start to earn. Hint, you may find some nice cheap Splinterlands NFT on wax also. I cannot be more happy as this is the highest airdrop I have ever received, with 5-6 digits rewards to be reached after the whole year. I would never thought that a blockchain game will provide my retirement fund, but there is a first for everything. After SPS AIRDROP success, HIVE increased a serious 50% in value (Splinterlands game is using HIVE blockchain). All the Hive layer 2 tokens also increased slightly. Binance will collaborate with State Hermitage Museum to launch some cool NFT collection, and people are talking about Da Vinci, Van Gogh and Monet, along many others. Shopify is testing a NFT market, and they will start with Chicago Bulls NFT drop. A Mobox Legendary NFT was just sold for $60K on BSC, via a Coinmarketcap campaign. You did not hear about Mobox yet? It is one of my favourites platforms, using NFT gaming and staking for rewards. Coca Cola is creating some NFT to raise funds for Special Olympics, and you can buy them on Opensea until 2nd of August. They are collaborating with the artist Tafi. Remember talking about Mila Kunis, Aston Kutcher and Vitalik, , seems that they were working on a NFT project - Stoner Cats - that sold completely in 35 minutes. What was noted is that more than $800K in ETH was spend on failed transaction. Vitalik, you are there, for God's sake. Can you see that? Helium halving event is on 1st of August, with rewards going from 5M to 2.5M per month.
Good news: Some insider told the worlds that Amazon is working to implement BTC/other crypto payments. But Amazon denied, while looking to hire experts in crypto, blockchain, distributed ledgers and CBDC. So there is something going on for sure! Next day they denied this saying that no, we have no plans to do this, but we explore the possibility. Really? Can you be more clear? All about Amazon? No? Tesla jumped out of nowhere to tell us they did not sell any of their BTC from April to June. Paypal popped out too , to tell us that their super wallet code is ready and it will be implemented soon. Except feeding your baby, this wallet is rumoured to do everything, well almost everything, high yield rewards, early access to stuff and many additional crypto capabilities, they said. Paypal is also looking forward to provide crypto services to UK soon (this summer they said). Blockfi is starting to send their Visa card now, with 3.5% BTC rewards in first 90 days, and an additional 2% cashback in BTC if you spend more than $50K annually. They want to add more crypto as a cashback choice soon.
Bad news: In Brasil, Police confiscated more than $33M from some local crypto-exchanges used to launder money. Buuhuu! Tether (USDT) is still under investigation, as US officialls believe that somehow they are committing bank fraud. I know they are, we know they are, it is just that they cannot prove it. Yet. Tether on the other side said they are open to dialogue with the enforcement agencies. Kaseya denies paying $70M ransom to REvil, saying that they acquired a universal decryptor key, without saying it from where. Monero has a privacy problem, as longer times for a transaction and spending the XMR within 20 minutes of receiving it increase the chances of your wallet to be identified. This bug will be fixed, said the developers. In US, all the bussinesses must report cryptocurrency transfers bigger than $10.000, as the Congress wants to get at least 28 billion dollars in tax from the people owning crypto. Thorchain was attacked twice, via ETH router, with a $16M total loss. They will reimburse and cover the losses using Thorchain treasury, no other information yet.
Mass adoption: Robin Hood CEO said that they are looking to do more than buy and sell crypto, working on a wallet that will provide lending and staking services. But he is saying this from March, and not much happened. Until recently, when hidden code lines where spotted in a test app for Iphones, pointing to a something called round-up invetment, letting you to exchange your spare change for crypto. A reward program for the new users was also found. UK changellor Rishi Sunak is talking about a CBDC work in progress. That being said, they completed their IPO, raising $2.1B after selling 55 million shares. The value of RobinHood is now estimated at more than $31B. Still, experts were dissapointed as the stock price went down from $38 to $34 in just the first 15 minutes after their Nasdaq listing. Jokes were made about this virtual GBP being named Britcoin. Sbercloud, a Sberbank service offered by Russia top bank, will let preserve your wallets private keys, and give it to your children, as inheritance. Well, this is good, except, well, Russia, where the government may take your private key to enjoy your crypto. Not to complain about it. My country government will do the same, along with one too many other countries. Horizon Blockchain Games, the ones with Skyweaver game, is now part of Ubisoft Accelerator program, so we are getting there. They managed to raise a nice $4.5M investment in their latest funding round. Microstrategy is still agressively acquiring more and more BTC, despite the price drop. Or because of that? Decentralized Exchanges interacted with more than 3 million uniques addresses, a 160% rise from in just half an year. Uniswap got 63.8% of them, followed by Sushi with 9.6%. Fireblock, a platform allowing banks to store, move and issue tokens, raised $310M in a founding rounding, and it is evaluated at $2B total value. Binance is changing from startup to proper financial institution, planning to build some headquarters around the world, to comply a bit more with the regulators. Lately they seems very compliant, after few governments tried to tackle them down, but I am sure this whole game of cat and mouse is just the beginning. Anchorage Digital was chosed as custodian for all the crypto seized by the US marshalls. Since 2014, US marshals sold more than 185.000 BTC ($7.2B). Meanwhile, in Germany, institutional funds are allowed to have up to 20% in crypto. Not bad Germany, not bad!
Joke of the day: There is a game out there called ''Who slote my beard?'' with 12 scraps of paper that can be found in the game, which can be combined to form a wallet seed, with an undisclosed amount of Bitcoin. First to get it is the winner. What do you think about another company holding your private keys? Feel good about that?
All the best,
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands - Hearthstone-like card game) and (CryptoBrewmaster - Beer factory sim)
...get the higher rewards for your investments using Blockfi and Celsius.network. Get ETH while writing on Publish0x blog, using Presearch search engine to maximize your income with PRE tokens. Check my Lbry.tv channel in here and use Torum instead of Twitter . I am also writing on Read.cash.
...the most lucrative faucets that I use: ZEN, ZEC, DOGE. Start mining Helium (NHT) for free on Emrit.io.
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Participate in the next Power Up Day and try to power-up more HIVE to get a bigger Power-Bee.
May the Hive Power be with you!
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