During the night we must wait for the light! (weekly crypto updates)
And here we are again, for one more episode of our weekly crypto updates blog post. What is happening? Are we getting into the bull market, or is there still a bit until then? Is this just a derail, before we drop even further? In today's post, I will try to bring some more facts, and let you draw your own conclusion, whichever that may be. Bitcoin went over $23K, and ETH is over 1600 too. Can we see the light at the end of the tunnel? Read below and find out more:
Bitcoin: Bitcoin price is $22963 today. Bitcoin's mining difficulty went up another 10% in the past two weeks, and the hashrate of the BTC network has also risen lately, as an effect of the increasing Bitcoin price. Bitcoin went above 23K, the higher in the last 52 weeks (with the lowest being 15599), but for the bull market officially to be declared, apparently, it needs to stay above 18.7K for at least one month. Fear and Greed Index is now a healthy 52, as BTC is up 20% this week, and 27% since the start of the year. As BTC mining cost is around $18K, the miners can once again operate within profitability, so the rigs are up for now. This is the second surge since October 13.5%, when the temperature going down helped with cooling and saving money on electricity. JP Morgan CEO compared Bitcoin with a pet rock and he obviously did not seem to understand what is the deal with the 21M Bitcoin cap. Hilarious! Did you end up not buying as much BTC as you wanted and trying to pull an Elon Musk move, Sir?
Ethereum: ETH price is $1638 today. The number of smart contracts deployed on ETH raised by 300% in 2022, with a 453% increase in the fourth quarter. Aztec concluded a $100M Series B funding in December, focusing on cheaper transactions and privacy for the ETH network. Optimism, the ETH scaling solution, is getting ready for its Bedrock upgrade, aiming to improve transaction fees, and speed, and getting ready for decentralized sequencing. Optimism daily profits are now up to $33K per week, 130% up from the previous month.
Altcoins: Solana seems to get disconnected from their relations with Alameda and SBF, going up 60% in the last week, and 300% in the last three months, past Matic, into the top 10 cryptos. Is Polygon heavily centralized? Some may say so, as it took only 13 votes from only 15 participating validators to push the hard fork through. In theory, there are over 100 validators, but many of them were not even aware of the vote or participating in the forum activities. Twitter's crypto index feature added new tokens, like XRP, ADA, MATIC, SOL, LTC, DAI, UNI, and DOGE. The market share of algo stablecoins continues to decrease since the Luna disaster, with only 1.6% of the total market share, down from 12% at its peak. BNB keeps going up, as Binance offered institutional investors the opportunity to keep their crypto collateral off in a cold wallet, using Binance Custody. But there are also issues, as for example the Swift partner, Signature Bank, who won.t accept user transactions below $100K, yet Binance said that only 0.01% of their clients use this specific bank. Iran and Russia are looking to cooperate on a gold-backed cryptocurrency, but the Russian market needs to be fully regulated before this happens. Did you sell all of your FT tokens? Well, it seems that J.J. Ray III is exploring restating the FTX exchange, as they found already %$B in liquid assets and $4.6B in investments.
NFTs and blockchain games: An NFT influencer (called NFT God) lost over 19 ETH, and multiple NFTs, including a Mutant Ape, after downloading malicious software via a Google Ad. Be careful out there. Splinterlands Winterfest promo was a huge success, leading to 770K packs sold, and it seems that Chaos Legion packs are going out of print in April at the latest. We had the fourth legendary summoner, Immortalis, airdropped (the 12th Chaos Legion card for airdrop).
Good news: A bit of fun on those grey days, it seems that former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson received a £1.2M political donation from crypto investor Chris Harborne, a shareholder in the parent company of Bitfinex and Tether. This is the largest-ever donation to a UK politician, and Mr. Johnson is right now on all news, connected to some illegal loans. Conservatives are somehow against crypto, yet they use money from crypto to achieve their political agenda. The irony? Justin Sun wants to use $1B to buy DCG assets. You sneaky one, Sun! There is some noise related to central banks and the Unbanked, with countries like Turkey and Nigeria, where banks are not dominant, going up by 40% and 45% on crypto adoption, while Italy is looking for a collaborative approach.
Bad news: Liquidators of Alameda Research liquidated 4.05 WBTC by mistake, removing the excess collateral from AAVE, and it would have been funny, but this is not their first mistake. Is it that hard to find someone that really knows how crypto works? Their incurred losses are now up to $11.5M, can someone teach them how you do this stuff, please? Another interesting number is this: 196 Congress members out of a total of 535 accepted money from SBF or FTX. What? I wonder if donating the money back will make a fund big enough to pay the disgruntled customers? Meanwhile, SPB is sitting in his cushy mansion, writing blog posts and making his lawyers really work for their money. Four people from the UK were convicted of $26M crypto fraud, as they used a loophole in an Australian crypto exchange to steal it. Crypto lender Vauld has now until the end of February to explore alternatives, but they are keeping customer funds for now, and still owe over $400M to their creditors. The $100M hacked amount from the Horizon Bridge, probably done by Lazarus Group, is now moved using Railgun, a project that makes transactions fully private. Binance seized $2.5M, but the rest it still used to sidestep economic sanctions and fund the North Korean nuclear weapons program. And in the US, you don't even need the hackers to do their work, as SEC itself unintentionally leaked 650 miners' personal information while investigating blockchain firm Green, leaving their nodes vulnerable to hacks. Digital Currency Group (or DCG as you know it) announced that they are halting their dividends until further notice. In the end, DCG filed for bankruptcy, which many of us see it coming. Ransomware seems to drop by 40% in 2022, compared with the previous year, $457M in 2022, from $765M in 2021, and only 41% paid in the past year, compared with 75% in 2021. We are slowly learning. The US prosecutors charged the Hong Kong-based exchange Bizlato with money laundering and arrested its founder in Miami, talking about more than $700M in illicit funds, tied to the Russian Government. Coinbase is halting operations in Japan on February 16. Nexo agreed to pay $45M in penalties to SEC.
Joke of the week: How can I even treat this as news? I do not know, but Coinflex and Three Arrow Capital decided to join together to raise money for a new crypto exchange. Hey, you two are partially guilty for all the BS that eventually led to Celsius, FTX, and a few other companies going down the hill! Who would want to give you their hard-earned money? This is what I think, but wanna bet that some people will never learn and give them money to start again? I do not know when somebody is stealing your money, are you ready to give them a second chance? They are like, we only need $25M to do this. 3AC still owes its creditors $3.5B. Billions. And now they think they can save the day with $25M. What kind of sick game is this? Also, as G comes after F, the exchange will be named GTX. Their focus will be on helping people who are owed money by bankrupt companies. Somebody compared them with arsonists coming back to the crime scene to sell very expensive water buckets. I have no more words. (And a worthy mention of Apple's attempt to get glasses that replace iPhones, with all included, Metaverse, and bla bla bla, guess what is the problem, of course, the battery, which seems that will not last long enough, wonder what they think of this long enough, and the question of the $3000 starting price. Are you crazy, Apple?)
All the best,
George
Why not...
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