Some interesting events this week, with Coinbase IPO live and Doge defying odds, to name just two of them. But what really happened this past week? Let's see.
NFTs - WWE will launch a four tier collection of NFTs right before the WrestleMania main event. They are focused on Undertaker, and the highest tier, Platinum, will offer an unique NFT and two front row tickets to WrestleMania, hotel and VIP access included. NYSE (yeah the bloody New York Stock Exchange) want to issue a series of NFTs about the main events related to their company. Aliend.worlds, the NFT game that took the crypto-world by storm, got promoted by Binance, and created a WAX-BSC bridge to let you to move their native token Trillium (TLM) accross blockchains. Which leaded to a mass sell, and yet the value of 1 TLM right now is much higher than ever on WAX. Even the NFTs used to mine TLM in the game increased in price 50-100 times. Good time to sell them. Edward Snowden released a NFT, currently having a 200ETH bid for it. Forbes sold a Winklevoss twins NFT with $333.333, New York Times sold a NFT linked to them with $560K, and TIME magazine sold 3 of them for $131K. Is everyone trying to make dumb money on NFT? Seems so. And I heard experts talking about Flow blockchain being better than ETH, asking myself, what is this Flow? I checked, and seems that Zynga, Coinbase and Dreamworks will work with then, NBA Top Shots being the latest user of Flow. Definitely one blockchain to keep an eye on.
Revolut is adding new crypto for EU and UK (SNX, GRT, FIL, UNI, ADA), after their latest move to Australia and US. GME (Gamestop) try to cash in from the REDDIT movement looking to hire a security analyst specialized in crypto and NFT. Are we waiting for GME NFT soon? Or maybe a whole NFT blockchain. dHEDGE (DHT) is an tokenized index fund of the best 10 index funds, with funds rebalance every month, decentralized, but quite expensive, with a 10% performance fee. At least they do not put you to pay the gas fees.
Bad and grey news, in UK, HSBC decided to stop the clients from buying BTC supporting companies such as MicroStrategy and Tesla. Basically they want to ban any company related to crypto. I laugh in front of danger, said no one ever, but few years from now most of the companies will invest or use blockchain and crypto-related products. What you gonna do then, HSBC? Binance is doing the opposite, making Tesla shares available to buy on the blockchain. Yin and Yang. Coal mines accidents in China triggered a power cut, affecting big pools like F2Pool and AntPool, and resulting in a 35% hash rate decrease. Celsius Network suffered an email server breach, with the attacker getting access to some clients email database. I bet phishing attempts will follow shortly, so, whatever email you receive asking you for Celsius data, better not to provide it too fast. SEC is doing their job, this time checking on Wisdom Tree Bitcoin ETF. They blocked various BTC ETF until now, but Wisdom Tree seems to have a solid case. Biden is concerned about the digital Yuan, covering the roles previously taken by the old mighty dollar. Not funny, the government said they are trying to understand these new digital money. Trying? They should chose their words more carefully, but hey, they repeatedly showed that they are not able to understand what is a cryptocurrency and what role can play. And the latest hit, Turkey decided to ban every use of crypto inside their borders, you can have crypto as investment, but you cannot use it. They blame crypto for the national currency devalorization and hyperinflation. Is Russia their role model? Still, you need to protect your citizen interests, right? Or not?
Good news, the people from TIME are accepting payments in BTC. Miami famous club E11 said that soon will accept BTC payment for their services. Still, I believe BCH or LTC will be more suitable than BTC if I want to buy a 3$ Coca Cola. Sportwise, Southampton FC made a sponsorship deal with Sportsbet.io, and they are thinking to pay performance bonuses to their players in BTC. Apparently you can buy luxury penthouses in London now, using BTC, with a $241M one being sold near Hyde Park, wine room and champagne room included. One of the European largest insurers, AXA, will accept BTC for all its products, except life insurance. Blame COVID19 for this, they said. Wednesday, a new ATH for BTC, $64863, went down to 461K on Friday, dropping back to $55K today. The big whales want more BTC before let is rise into the sky. Everyone is raising money now, the Exodus wallet raised $59M first days into their public offering, Consensys raised $65M from the likes of JPMorgan and Mastercard. Grayscale hit $50B in BTC (3.5% of all BTC supply).
Coinbase launched Tuesday on Nasdaq, starting price $250, and increased up to $380 last time I checked. This is close to 50% increase, beating the other succesful IPO if this year, Slack and Spotify (48% and 25% increase until now). They were grateful for their employees support, and gave 100 shares to each on them (we are talking about 1700 employees all around the globe). More than $350K, nice bonus, I may say. Binance plays catch-up, announcing than they plan to list Coinbase shares on blockchain also. In my opinion there is a risk betting your life savings on Coinbase as more than 65% of their income is due to the transaction fees, and this may end in the near future is a strong competitor arise, even if they mention some long-term strategies related to Coinbase Earn, staking and a Debit Card. I will definitely get their card, if they launch it. All us fun and play on a bull market, but the bear market will come back eventually. Ark Invest bought an insane $250M worth of Coinbase shares.
Talking about Binance and their Binance Smart Chain, the opinions are divided regarding their future with people like Ryan Watkins saying on twitter that whatever they do, BSC and Cake are still copycats, and Wilson Withian complaining about their heavy centralization (21 active validators on BSC, 9 validators on Binance). Agree, but there are also optimists like me and Mira Christanto, seeing the huge boost that BNB will have due to BSC (x3 more trx than ETH at the moment).
Dogecoin started Tuesday, with a $0.12, and reached $0.26 on Friday. The highest value was $0.32 yesterday, with heavy names like Cuban trying to pump it even more, a slight drop and another rise up to $0.31 today. I can see a big dump eventually, do you?
ETH introduced Berlin upgrade, in a bid to decrease the fees level, fighting against DEFI, NFTs and bull market influence. An ATH of almost $2500 shortly followed.
XRP is trying to hit the $2 mark (ATH was $3.84 in January 2018). Polkadot hidden gem PINT (Polkadot Index Network Token) is a tokenized items, supported until now by Acala, Moonbeam and Litentry. PancakeSwap is officially the largest DEX in town, after they outperformed Uniswap 7 times more. Terra (Luna) is also increasing dramatically, after their stablecoin UST start to be demanded on two successful projects (Mirror.finance and Anchor Portocol). Uniswap retaliate launching Uniswap Version3 and promising improved capital efficiency and faster speed with up-to-date fees. Thorchain is launching a trustless, cross-chain trading, having BTC,ETH, BCH and BNB to start with. Liquity is the latest DEFI protocol, and they just reached one billion dollars in TVL. So, to finish babbling around, best choices this week where DOGE, XRP, Vetchain and Thorchain, and the least performing were BTC and DOT. but all of them could be used for profit. As for me, I would rather have more BTC and DOT than the others.
All the best,
George
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