In the Bitcoin world, live by the sword, but do not stay in the North (weekly crypto updates)

One more week is gone, never to come back again. And the crypto-sphere is more active than ever. After 4 years, Bitcoin is getting an update for smart contracts. Kind of. El Salvador is getting a new shiny Bitcoin City. Where you pay nothing except Bitcoin. Your Bitcoin. The gaming into the blockchain is getting serious. But not as serious as the amount of money poured into crypto related projects, and we are talking about billions. Yeah, like in more than one. What else? Read bellow:

• Bitcoin: Bitcoin most awaited upgrade - Taproot - went live on block 709.623. This one will improve efficiency and transaction privacy, introducing Schnorr signatures, these will make possible complex transactions to look like simple transactions, and more important, smart contracts will be introduced on Bitcoin network. VanEck Bitcoin ETF, ticker symbol XBTF, was also launched past week. And they were denied so many times, finally their persistence paid off. Still, this one is a cash settled fund, so the settlement is in cash, not in BTC. There is a trend now related to the BTC miners, as they are loaning their Bitcoin in order to cover operational costs, instead of selling it. This is a game changer. In a move that let the world wonder, the Salvadorian president announced the project Bitcoin City, a place with zero tax, zero fees, using volcanic energy to not impact the climate. Even Square (I mean Twitter, right?) is working on a decentralized exchange called tbDEX, for BTC.
• Ethereum: Insitutional holdings on Ethereum Grayscale's trust are up 19%. You can buy them to gain exposure to ETH, but without having any public or private key. They say this is good for you, as you don't need to stress about securing your keys. I do not believe that. Binance completed their integration of Arbitum One, allowing users to deposit ETH directly, without using the Arbitum bridge, instantly. Sounds like I have already heard this somewhere last week (Across protocol ETH bridge, to be exact).
• Altcoins: Past week we had almost $60M liquidated on AAVE Lending, with USDC being the dominant debt in top 10 liquidations. Do not get too greedy. Chiliz (CHZ) fan tokens are more than $40B in volume right now. With Man United just joining them last week. The newest STARK based zk-rollup Miden was released on MATIC. On Polkadot Parachain auctions I was kind of right, singling out Acala and Moonshot as the main contenders, with Acala winning the first one, and probably Moonshot getting the second. If this happen, I will be 2 out of 2 correct, how is that? ParaSwap is launching their governance token, PSP, with more than 20.000 ETH addresses whitelisted for the airdrop. UMA is getting seriously involved into the future of DAO, while even their SuperUMANS initiative is thinking to migrate into a DAO of some sorts. Check their discord.
• NFTs: In May this year, the floor price for Bored Ape was $400, but in the last week jumped from $130K to an average of $206K. In the same time, the total value of the BAYC collection went from $3M to $466M. Crazy! Did you ever heard on Genie, the NFT aggregator, enabling you to buy and sell multiple NFT via multipla marketplaces. Me neither, I need to check them! WAX price is still going up, if you had some staked around, this is too cool to miss. Snoop Dog, deadmau5 and Shaun Neff joined crypto VC firm Outliers Ventures, supporting startups involved into the Open Metaverse.
• Blockchain games: Staking AXS (Axie Infinity governance token) is paying 114% rewards at the moment when this post was writen. Axie Infinity is very popular right now in Philippines, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Turkmenistan, Myanmar and many African countries. There is a whole bussines side developing right now, with the Axie scholarships, where you play with rented Axies, keeping around 50% of what you earn. Remember this one, the gaming startup Forte, a gaming platform, raised $725M in a Series B funding round, from the likes of A16Z, Animoca, Warner Music Group, and even Cosmos, Polygon Studios and Solana Ventures. It feels big already. Mobox changed their website completely and is getting ready to create their Metaverse. The MBOX token jumped from $4 to $8+, an increase of more than 100%. Splinterlands is finishing their Chaos Legion pre-sale, there are only days left for you to buy them packs, in order to receive the special presale card, Dr.Blight. You need 1 voucher and $4 to buy one pack. If you don't have enough vouchers, you can buy them on the secondary markets like Hive-engine.
• Good news: Paradigm announced that they will launch the biggest ever crypto VC fund, with $2.5B initial investment. And, one interesting piece of news, Gemini raised $400M in a funding round, being evaluated at $7.1B. Consensys also raised $200M in a funding round, with HSBC and Coinbase Ventures being some of the main investors, and it is evaluated at $3.2B. Yes, that HSBC that it is not letting you to pay for crypto, using your own money, that one. Galaxy Digital earnings increased x10 times, from $41.5M in 2020 Q3 to $517M in 2021 Q3. What a big change in just one year! MoonPay just raised $555M and is evaluated at $3.4B. Some serious money ere entering into crypto-market lately. Mt.Gox rehabilitation plan was finalized, and now the creditors are required to registed in order to receive their compensation. We do not know if they will be paid in BTC or fiat.
• Bad news: People are worring that Biden Infrastructure bill will get a much broader definition of what a broker is, including even miners or parties that do not facilitate transactions. Helium Blockchain was halted, with a validator patch release to come soon. India will ban all the cryptocurrency payments, but not the crypto-asset trading, which instead will be regulated. I am very confused reading this, as it will be quite difficult to define what is this crypto-assets class. US Justice Dept is selling $56M worth of crypto, all seized from BitConnect ponzi scheme. CREAM was a victim of a flash loan exploit, we know, and they are planning to distribute 1.4M CREAM tokens from their treasury, to the impacted users, removing the remaining CREAM allocation for their team. Russian Prosecutor want to define crypto as property, and allow it to be taxed. Elliptic, a risk management company, estimates that DEFI users lost x7 times more in 2021 ($10.5B) as compared with 2020 ($1.5B).
• Mass adoption: AMC Theaters started to accept crypto-payments online, with BTC, ETH, BCH and LTC to start, and DOGE to join them soon. Constitution DAO was the name of a new decentralized autonomous organization, wanting to pool resources to buy a first edition printed copy of the US Constitution. The document is one of the only 11 surviving 1787 first edition copies. And no, they did not managed to buy it, being oudbided. Staples Arena become Crypto.com arena, sending the CRO token in frenzy, with more than 75% increase in the last few days. Facebook, pardon me, Meta, is showing everyone a fancy glove, full of lights, as the key to their Metaverse. Probably the backpack will be next.
• Joke of the week: According to Cointelegraph, almost half of the liquidity providers are on the minus, due to the impermanent lossses. From May to September, the pools on Uniswap generated $199M in fees, while they suffered $260M in impermanent losses. This is a $60 million difference that the liquidity providers covered from their own funds, a 30% loss, while just Hodling from May to September, you would have on average a 89% increase. Conclusion: Hodling and lending is the best way to increase your portfolio, while liquidity providing is good only in the first 7-30days after the project is launched.

All the best,

George

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...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) and (CryptoBrewmaster - Beer factory sim).

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