What happened in crypto in the past week? Kucoin seems slightly better than Binance, at least in my country. What else? Read below:
- Bitcoin: It seems that the combination of Mt.Gox paying the Bitcoin back and the German government selling its stash sent Bitcoin down for now. Mt.Gox moved $8.6B of BTC and $54M of BCH, causing concerns about another major sell-off, leading to an 8% drop in the BTC price. Even the US government moved $240M worth of BTC on a Coinbase Prime wallet. Are they selling some of the $13B worth of BTC? So BTC went above $61K at first, then to $63K around July 1, only to reach $58K on July 4. So BTC price started to trade below its 200-day trendline for the first time in over 10 months. The lower point was $55K, and all the newbies got sold, mainly from accounts aged 3 to 6 months old. Only for for $56M in short positions to get liquidated at $63K, with another $307M liquidated at $58K. Well, $10B in options were set to expire on Friday, as in 40% of the open interest, standing at $23B. CleanSpark announced a merger with Grid Infrastructure, with a $155M deal, getting the second one 20 megawatts of mining power, to start with it. As for BTC's new token standard, Runes, its daily average transactions went down by 88% just in the past 3 weeks. Bitcoin was trading at a discount on Coinbase, signalling a price bottom, the price gap between Coinbase and Binance hitting -0.19 Friday. German lawmakers urged the government to stop hastily disposing of its BTC, and treat it like a strategic reserve currency instead. And Justin Sun offered to buy them all from the German Government, to save the day, but why do I think that this is just the Chinese government hiding behind him? Brazil's Nubank integrated the Bitcoin Lightning Network for its 100M users.
- Ethereum: VanEck hinted that ETH ETFs could hit the market soon. Bitwise is considering waiving fees for its first $500M sales on the ETH ETF. Will this still pump the price up? ZKsync also rolled out a major upgrade called elastic chain architecture, moving from a single-lane road to a multi-lane highway, to say it simply. Separate chains working together is a good idea. Ethereum Foundation's email seems to have been hacked on June 23, with some dodgy emails sent out to 36.000 people, quoting a fake partnership between the Ethereum Foundation and LidoDAO, with the Stake button initiating a drainer, despite the breach, no victims appear to have lost funds. RobinHood started to offer Bitcoin and ETH futures in the US and Europe.
- Altcoins and stablecoins: Dogfiwhat had a brief dump, going down 38%. Blast's big airdrop was not that big, so many people spent more than the few cents they got back from the airdrop, mainly because everyone and their cats sold right away, and the price went down to $0.025. They are back for the airdrop round 2, but not many seem to be interested in it. Solana Foundation revealed new features called Solana Actions and blinks, special links that let you perform Solana transactions right from any webpage. Some are thinking that Spot Solana ETF has a good chance of approval, even if there are no Futures SOL ETFs yet, unlike the case of BTC and ETH. Solana-based DEX called Zeta announced an airdrop, and the token price went from $0.13 to $0.30. Solana's memecoin called Billy becomes the second-largest token on Pump.fun. Notcoin burned $3M worth of tokens, and the price went up 16%. Coinbase said that they will not execute the migration of tokens in the merger of AGIX, FET and OCEAN, as they will combine to create the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI) new token. Lyra is hosting the Round 2 of its airdrop program. The zkEVM Layer-2 solution, Scroll, is hosting its own loyalty points program known as Scroll Sessions, too. Dogfiwhat memecoin went up 16% in one day, on July 1. Polkadot was spending $87M worth of DOT in the past 6 months, double than 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. However, some are pointing out that the Polkadot treasury may only last for another 2 years if they spend at this rate. Curve's 3Pool imbalance caused a minor USDT depeg.
- NFTs and blockchain games: Pudgy Penguins acquired NFT-focused chain Frame, positioning for a better market, despite being down 45% from its peak in February this year. 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 fifth round of Conflicts airdrop finished, with the third Legendary summoner, and the new 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. Paradigm closed a 4850M fund for early-stage web3 bets.
- Good news: 54% of the Japanese investment managers plan to invest in crypto within 3 years. Kucoin has a brilliant referral program if you are good at this stuff. The SEC is saying that Consensys offered unregistered securities via Metamask Staking, but Consensys actually sued the SEC back in April, claiming that they secretly eyed ETH as a security for over a year. Circle got an Electronic Money Institution licence from France's banking centre, becoming the first global stablecoin to be compliant with the new European MiCA rules. Paxos got Singapore Stablecoin approval, joining a select group of 19 other companies. Coinbase partnered with Stripe to boost USDC onboarding on Base. They also sued the SEC and FDIC over withheld crypto documents regarding letters asking banks to pause crypto-related business as part of a deliberate and concerted effort to pressure financial institutions into cutting off digital-asset firms from the banking system. Tether and BTguru aim to educate Turkish citizens and institutions on the potential of crypto. Metamask acquired WalletGuard, a security tool designed to safeguard digital assets and user data from theft, scam and fraud.
- Bad news: Nvidia shares price is down, but AI crypto tokens were still going up. TON's success has made its ecosystem a prime target for phishing attackers. Crypto lost $509M to hacks and fraud in Q2 2024 alone, if we are talking about numbers. Some Friend.tech drama, they decided to leave Base blockchain, only to announce that they will stay, and the token price dropped 60% in just a week, a 90% drop since May highs. Abra reached a $82M settlement with 25 states for operating without licenses. Rusia's Central Bank eased crypto stance amid sanctions pressure.
- Joke of the week: There are talks about Trump's potential appearance at the Bitcoin 2024 Conference. For real! And it seems that even the approval of the spot SOL ETFs shortly is tied to a certain president's choice. Buy some KAMALA memecoins (250% surge), if you want to get rich quick, and see what happens next.
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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