Luna going to the moon, Tether down in a spoon, with a splash of Bitcoin hash (weekly crypto updates)

This week news are contradictory, but we can use them to make some profit, if we are careful enough. San Salvador seems to be ok at the moment, with the prospect for Bitcoin to increase even more than the actual 55K in the next few months. The Tether - Celsius connection is a bit hot lately and few more random letters making way into crypto-world. Check them news, while they are still fresh:

• Bitcoin: San Salvador government negotiated some deals with the top gas station providers, so whoever is using BTC will receive a discounted price per gallon when buying fuel. But the locals seems more interested in day trading, buying the dip and selling the rise. Even Virgin Galactic CEO said that Bitcoin replaced gold. The main problem is mass adoption for BTC was that more that 60% of the pools were located in China, so they were prone to price manipulation by the state and the latest ban solved the issue, with many of the miners relocating in other friendly locations, leading in time to true decentralization. Now many believe that BTC will reack 100K by the end of the year. These net 6 months will be interesting for sure. Tuesday resistance being broken, everybody has great expectations right now. And Volt Bitcoin Revolution ETH was approved yesterday, with a significant portion of the fund owning shares from MicroStrategy, Tesla, Square, Coinbase and Paypal.
• Ethereum: Visa is working on a layer 2 solution on Ethereum, similar with Bitcoin Lightning, on the project named 'universal payments channel' using a hashed timelock contract, but we do not know much about this yet.
• Altcoins: BlockFi is increasing the interest rates for stablecoins. Good to know. Of course, no USDT for US clients, I will come back to this one later. Compound was losing thousands of COMP every day lately, as some anonymous user discovered and exploited a bug, getting 65K COMP rewards in just 4 transactions (valued more than $21M). Basically they lost $156M because one '=' was missing from their code. The issue was solved last Thursday. RAMP just raised $30M in a founding round, and it is one of those future unicorns, I would say, as they are working to make it easier for their customers to convert crypto in fiat and viceversa. Ripple started to work with one of the biggest bank from Middle East, looking to expand in the Asia Pacific region. Shiba Inu pumped once more, 348% this time, reaching top 20 crypto. This used to be fun, if not for the many losing their life savings on it. First time I have heard of Velas, Swiss based blockchain, having a $100M fund to help startups to develop on their blockchain. Torum is now on PancakeSwap, just in case you didn't know. Algorand is getting decentralized and anyone can vote, given that they stake their Algo tokens for 3 months. And crypto activity in Asia is now x7 bigger than one year ago. I keep hearing about Anchor Protocol (ANC) the one on Terra, as this is ticking a lot of boxes.
• NFTs: Solana NFTs, especially MonekyBussiness colection, are pumping up, to the same unreasonable prices like the ETH ones. SolMonkey#1335 was sold with $2.1M (13027 SOL). Talking about Solana, TSM FTX, the eSports firm, just launched their first ever NFT on Solana also. If you ever had an Axie.Infinity account, check you Ronin wallet, as you may be surprised to find some AXS in there, after the airdrop. You can even stake it now on their website . Opensea reached record sales recently, with the biggest one last Sunday, and this is tied to the release of the Cryptoadz collection, currently trading at the floor price of 14 ETH ($48k). Socios is partnering with NBA team Brooklin Nets, and we may have some NFT coming from them soon. VisionRare, probably trying to capitalize on Sorare succes, launched a pay to play beta test promoting fantasy football, but they shut it down after one day, as they did not have authorization from the companies/teams featured in the game. Really, where you even trying? Almost forget, did everyone got their free DC Comics NFT? (Check here). Got a Legendary Green Lantern.
• Good news: Soramitsu, a Tokyo based crypto technology company is helping Laos to develop their own Cambodgian CBDC. Their wallet already has almost 6 million users. Dapper Labs is creating a Dapper Collective unit, in order to assist communities to create DAO (decentralized autonomous organizations) using FLOW blockchain. Did you get enough of this one? Facebook tried to jump inot the crypto and NFT train, allocating $50M to responsibly build the Metaverse, and then what happened? We got Facebook, Insta, Whatsup down for a short period (too long others may say) and many crypto users pointed out at the benefits of the blockchain based solutions. Crypto-twitter had its day. And, believe it or not, Robin Hood improved their customer service, they even added a 24/7 support to their platform. And, if you didn't found out, Binance is working now with the German company CM-Equity AG, if you want to move your tokenized stocks from the Binance account, before is shutting down.
• Bad news: Coinbase account recovery process was hacked between March and May 2020, via SMS tow-factor auth process, with more than 6000 customers having their funds moved from their account. Coinbase promised to refund the stolen assets, but it was not done yet. Four ETFs have been delayed the final decision by SEC, for another 60 days, until December. And some National Crypto Enforcement Team is being set up. At least 20 of the biggest crypto companies moved out of China, after the ban. Not sure if this are completely bad news. Circle, the ones with USDC, received an investigative subpoena from SEC, most probably linked with their high yield Circle Yield product, as banking system is not liking that much to have their funds taken away from them and used to actually make a living. After the Bloomberg report regarding Tether, the crypto company responded swiftly, trashing them and even threaten them straigh away, as they said they feel the story was trying to mislead, discredit and put them into a bad light. One interesting fact is that they are shown to have more than $1 billion USDT lend to Celsius, and I remember Tether being one of the main investors in Celsius, with more than $30M paid in the June 2020 founding round. My only thought is, in a true Marvel style: What if...
• Mass adoption: Swiss Post is launching 175.000 crypto-stamps, both physical and digital, using 13 designs and having even 50 super-rare ones. Best Universities for blockchain study are National University of Singapore, followed by Melbourne and Berkeley, California. Out of 25 top universities, only 5 are American. Binance closed many of their firms around the world, and just opened 3 new ones in Ireland (Binance APAC Holdings, Binance Services Holdings and Binance Tehcnologies). Moneygram, obviously hurt by Salvadorian initiative, and fearing that many other will follow their example, addopted Stellar (XLM) in order to facilitate crypto payouts in local currencies. A bit too late, and there is still the question: are the fees cheap enough? Smart contract automatization network Gelato just raised $11M in a closed door sale, and they are working on a solution to protect traders from significant losses by automatically rebalancing their portfolio. Central bank of Georgia is working on their CBDC also. One Wyoming Senator, Cynthia Lummis, got 100K invested in BTC. If this is not skin into the game, i do not know what it is. Also, Bank of America, saying that crypto is too big to ignore, just 4 month after they were trashing them all over in May 2021, is a good candidate for joke of the week. Better than their competitors, US Bank announced that crypto custody service is available to fund managers, trying to capitalize on it. Metamask partnered with three crypto custodial services - BitGo, Qredo and CactusCustody, working on a new product called Metamask Institutional, securing private keys and having built-in compliance functionalities. Also US, thinking to see if you can be eligible for deposit insurance if you own stablecoins !?!
• Joke of the week: Would you believe that SEC Chair Gary Gesler won this category once more? I bet you do. This time he said he does not plan to ban crypto, but they need to make a real crypto, a CBDC, following China example, as stablecoins are nothing more than casino chips, and a danger to economy. Obviously he never learn about shitcoins. Are there any crypto-experts working for SEC? And one final question, if EU is saying that Digital Euro is the ultimate crypto-token, and SEC is telling us that Digital Dollar is the only one, which of them is right? I would like to see a meeting between them two, fighting to decide the ultimate CBDC. Me personally, I would rather touch USDT than any of them two. At least we already know that Tether is dodgy as hell. At least they got the Deltec Bank and Trust chairman Jean Chalopin helping them (this is one of the creators of Inspector Gadget cartoon and that will make you to understand more about USDT backing right now). Right?

That's all for today.

All the best,

George

Why not...

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