What happened in crypto in the past week? Polkadot Decoded 2024 is here, with a nice Utility NFT for all the participants, including the online ones. Bitcoin shows signs of recovery. Kucoin seems slightly better than Binance, at least in my country. What else? Read below:
- Bitcoin: We had an 11.70% drop in July 2024, due to concerns over Mt. Gox reimbursement and the German Government liquidations (only $282M worth of BTC left on July 12). A five-month low of $53.905 was hit, but now there are signs of potential recovery, as interest rates may be cut by the Federal Reserve and US-based Spot BTC ETFs are receiving decent capital inflows ($143M record on July 5 as BTC price went below $54K). Also, a notable fact is that the US inflation decreased by 0.1% in June, the first monthly decrease in the last 4 years. DigitalX is set to launch the second BTC ETF on Australia's Main Stock Exchange.
- Ethereum: Many major asset managers are now submitting amended filings to the SEC for the spot ETH ETFs, yet none of them disclosed the planned fees. Starknet announced the STRK staking, for Q4 2024, decentralizing the chain. The CFTC chair reaffirms that BTC and ETH are commodities and need to be regulated as such.
- Altcoins and stablecoins: Leo Power Up day is here, on July 15, on Hive Blockchain. Polkadot was spending $87M worth of DOT in the past 6 months, double the amount of the last half of 2023, hosting events, meetups and conferences. We are talking about $36M into marketing and outreach, $23M in software development and $15M into liquidity pools and incentives. They even made their own Twitter-like platform, Grill, where you are paid in crypto tips for publishing. Justin Sun announced a gas-free stablecoin solution, aiming to eliminate the need for gas tokens, as the fees are covered by the stablecoins themselves. But will they work? Jump Crypto and Immunefi teamed up to launch a bug bounty program offering up to $1M for developers who identify vulnerabilities on the new Solana high-performance validator client, Firedancer. Solana spot ETFs are expected mid-March next year as 21Shares and VanEck already filed for it. Cardano launched Node 9.0, as we get closer to the highly anticipated Chang high fork. TON partnered with Polygon to launch a Layer 2. Check your latest airdrops: Sanctum, Debank, Etherfi, Lava and Layer3. The SEC called off the Paxos investigation, with no enforcement action against Paxos over the BUSD token. Stablecoin issuer Circle launched a Euro-backed stablecoin, EURC, natively added to Base too. The stablecoin sector reached its highest market cap since April 2022. TRX, AAVE and ZEN are the main crypto market movers this week.
- NFTs and blockchain games: Telegram CEO praised Hamster Kombat as the fastest-growing game, with 100M monthly users in just 73 days and 4-5M new users daily. What a number! On Splinterlands, the fifth round of Conflicts airdrop finished, with the third Legendary summoner, and the reward system seems to be all right, as you get Glint tokens for every match you win and some 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. Memecoin markets, what can you say, Messi promotes a Solana-based Watercoin, and the price dropped 48%. Not the right choice?
- Good news: Kucoin has a brilliant referral program if you are good at this stuff. Republicans are working on a draft that ends crypto restrictions, positioning themselves in opposition to what the Democrats are doing with their crypto crackdown. Coinbase is working on a new platform for All Things Crypto, and you can manage tokens, NFTs and DEFI positions all in one place. Check the new web app for their Coinbase wallet to find out more. BlackRock's tokenized treasury fund hit a new milestone, $500M. Singapore's DBS, the largest bank, saw trading volume triple compared with 2023 on its digital exchange. Spot trading volumes on CEX rose by 145% in the first two quarters of 2024. MicroStrategy announced a 10-for-1 stock split.
- Bad news: Taiwan's Central Bank emphasised a focus on steady progress over speed in developing a CBDC. Another one, just what we need it! In the first half of 2024, $1.38B worth of crypto was stolen, more than double the $657M stolen in 2023 same period. The top five hacks accounted for 70% of the total amount, with the largest being the $300M BTC stolen from the Japanese exchange DMM. Bitmex is accused of Wilful evasion of the US anti-money laundering, as they only needed an email for account creation, but they countered by saying that they have long since fully remediated its operations, as the charges were brought in 202 against its founders, and they were fined $10M in September 2022 already.
- Joke of the week: Andrew Tate. facing serious charges of human trafficking and rape in Romania, was granted permission to leave the country, as long as he stays within the European Union. He announced a global tour to promote his memecoin, DADDY, with places like Dubai and Tokyo on the list. How does this work in terms of geography limitations? We will find out.
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)
....g 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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