What happened in crypto in the past week? Kucoin seems to be slightly better than Binance, at least in my country. What else? Read below:
- Bitcoin: El Salvador has $360M in Bitcoin. BTC halving did not help the crypto prices as much as we expected. But Lightning Labs are working to enable stablecoins to be natively issued and transacted on the BTC blockchain, while the interest for Runes protocol is slowly fading. Bitcoin ETFs returned last week, with $116M in net inflows. More than $3.5B were allocated to the US Spot BTC ETFs over the past quarter alone. The Bitcoin options are picking interest too, with an accumulation of bets at $75K. But Mike Novogratz believe that BTC will be stuck for a while under $75K. BTC went up to $63K on May 14, $66K on May 16, and a surprising $71785 on May 21. Bitcoin derivatives signalled a $73K breakout. Bitcoin whales were staking up in the last 30 days, according to CryptoQuant. Wisconsin became the first state to disclose BTC investment after they purchased shares of BlackRock IBIT. Morgan Stanley disclosed that it is holding $269M worth of BTC. CME Group planned to launch a Bitcoin spot trading feature on its regulated platform. Bitcoin mining costs dropped below $50K per BTC. Babylon is a protocol designed to enable BTC staking, offering Bitcoin holders a chance to earn yields. The UK High Court ruled that Craig Wright lied extensively about creating Bitcoin.
- Ethereum: In the last two weeks we started with the ETH spot ETF approval odds slim to none, and ETH struggled to clear the $3K resistance level at first. Deciding to go up after that, reaching $3780 on May 21, after some rumours about ETH ETFs finally getting SEC approval. Looks like the SEC is set to approve spot ETH ETFs this week. I wonder if SOL and XRP ETFs are next? Prometheum launched its Ethereum custody service, but it treats Ethereum as a security.
- Altcoins and stablecoins: Blast airdrop is official starting on June 26. Floki Inu surged 17%, and one lucky trader bought $3K of PEPE, which became $46M overnight, hitting ATH amid the spot ETF approval hype. Not the only one, another trader made $2.26M with $2.2K in 8 hours only. NOT token had the biggest gaming token launch of the year, surpassing Pixels and Saga. Solana's Phantom Wallet is the number 3 app in the App Store. And on a funny note, hackers are pumping crypto using compromised X accounts, suck as ORDI and Luna 2.0, selling what they previously bought. APTOS just overtook Solana on May 25. Check Morph and Initia airdrop, if you have time.
- NFTs and blockchain games: I did find some funny game called Chain of Legends and if you go here to do their quest, you get 1 free land, 1 free barracks and 2-3 troups too for a better start. What a number! On Splinterlands, the fourth round of Conflicts airdrop finished, with the second Legendary summoner, 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. Wells Fargo, the traditional banking titan, is also picking up some Bitcoin ETF products, including Grayscale GBTC and ProShares BITO. Trump opened the 2024 campaign by accepting BTC, ETH and DOGE donations. Deutsche Bank joined Singapore's asset tokenization project. MicroStrategy joined the MSCI World Index. The US Senate voted to overturn the SEC rule on banks doing business with crypto firms. Bankrupt crypto lender Genesis approved the return of $3B to its creditors.
- Bad news: A new malware called Durian is specifically attacking SK crypto companies, using security tools that only these companies are using, and the North Korean hackers seem to be behind those attacks. Chinese authorities in Jilin province cracked down on a massive underground banking operation that used crypto to transfer wealth across international borders. We know that BTC pumped, as Coinbase had yet another 'unexpected' outage preventing people from selling. Again! LayerZero labs paused its bounty hunter program after 3000 bounty reports and 30.000 appeals crashed its servers on the first day. Gala survived a $206M exploit on May 20, 15% of the total supply. The US ordered Chinese crypto miners to leave the property they bought near a military base, in Wyoming. FalconX settled with CTFC for $1.8 million over failure to register. BlockTower Capital suffered a security breach with hackers draining the hedge fund assets. Former FTX CEO SBF moved to Oklahoma detention center. BlockFi web platform will shut down by May 31.
- Joke of the week: Tether is showing its ugly face again, with $5.2M worth of USDT frozen for 12 ETH wallets, identified as USDT Banned Address. They say they are connected to sanctioned individuals or entities listed by the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control. Not too much decentralization and freedom in there, I presume, if the US authorities can get your crypto even if you are not living there.
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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