Last week crypto-review - Angels and Demons

Wow, the last 7 days can describe the whole cryptocurrency circle, and the whole stress to last for one year. Let's see what happen!

• Monday, BTC crossed the 1 trillion dollars milestone, after the price pushed above 53K all the way to almost 57K. Oh, the good times. We got Tesla, MicroStrategy, Square, Ruffer, Riot, Argo, Hive Blockchain and many others sustaining this growth with spectacular bitcoin wallet increases. In U.S. 1 out of 4 investors now own crypto. The Purpose Bitcoin ETF reached more than $500M in assets on Toronto Stock Exchange. Thursday MicroStrategy bought another $1B of BTC, having now a bit more than 90.000 BTC. Goldman Sacks analysts think that Bitcoin and gold will not fight for the same money, continuing to co-exist with no added issues. JPMorgan finally take a look at BTC, thinking that 1% of their investors portfolio can be used for BTC. Ex-London Stock Exchange CEO Xavier Rolet has recommended the UK government to make plans including crypto, as this is the future and can do all the heavy lifting to help recovery after Brexit.

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  BTC bad news. India's famous billionaire Rakesh Jhunjhunwala said that he will never buy BTC, as 10% volatility in one day is too much and the authorities should ban BTC. India also told companies planning an IPO to sell all their BTC before raising money (as this will be quite problematic if the ban is in place). At the moment BTC is hovering around $43K, with many thinking that it was a whale selling $156M starting the descending trend. Funny enough, if you are a coincidence believer, it was this same address that sold a lot of BTC right before the 2020 March crash. Over $5B BTC futures were liquidated this week. Even Elon Musk was saying that BTC and ETH prices are a bit too high. One programming error of Philippines Digital Asset Exchange made BTC drop to $6100. Some bought and withdrew it quickly, before the withdrawal ban, and they are not facing a potential legal action.

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  Canada first ETH ETF goes above $400M. Talking about ETH, on Tuesday, something strange happened on Kraken exchange, with a flash dump making the price go down to $700 for less than a minute. Can you imagine, buying ETH with $700. My question is, who benefited from this? And how many stop-sell orders were liquidated in less than a minute. I can tell you that $25M in DEFI loans were liquidated just when ETH went from 1800 to 1500 (mostly on Compound and AAVE). As the price went towards $1400, another $115M were liquidated (with 75% of them on Compound). Sushiswap integrated Raydium AMM (RAY) which will be deployed on Solana Blockchain, in order to mitigate ETH high gas fees.

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  On Monday, XRP, OKB and Luna were the star gainers. On Wednesday the biggest gainers were BNB, UNI and SOL. Daily movers gaining value on Thursday were FTM, MATIC and SRM (@pvmihalache do you still got Serum?). RUNE reached an ATH after Multicoin Capital revealed that they bought a big amount of it. Chainlink upgrades are promising ten times more speed, and i think this will help the price go up soon.

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  Moneygram decided to stop using Ripple due to SEC lawsuit.

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  Coinshares is the first crypto-assets manager to list publicly in Sweden (Share ticker:COIN). They are conservatively evaluated at $3-5B. In Germany, Solarisbank got a license for cryptocurrency brokerage. In US, Arca hedge fund wants to launch a Bitcoin trust product, filling the papers with SEC. They are taking investments of at least $25K (as opposed of Grayscale which has a 450k limit). Cryptocustodian Anchorage had a Series C funding round, achieving $80M which will be used to expand their digital banking services.

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  European Union central bank wants the power to veto stablecoins in the Eurozone. They are working on what they call ''a comprehensive framework on rules around cryptocurrency'' to be ready by September. They are mainly eyeing at Facebook's DIEM. In Asia, South Korea Financial Intelligence Unit asked all the domestic exchanges to delist the privacy coins, as they are linked to money laundering, starting from March.

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  Bitfinex and USDT paid a $18.5M fine to end their legal dispute started in the summer of 2019 with the State of New York. This is not the first shady business linked to USDT and Bitfinex.

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  Brave browser is working to add its own DEX aggregator and a Brave wallet, improving the BAT token reach and utility. Keep this in mind, this is huge for them, and maybe for the BAT holders also. Talking about DEX, $120B in crypto were moved in the first 2 months in decentralized exchanges, with a notable newcomer (Pancakeswap on BSC with $1.1B). What can Coinbase say about this, with $322M in profit for 2020 (but still better than $30M loss in 2019).

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  On NFT market, Beeple ''5000 days'' collection was sold by the British auction house Christies for $1.8M. This was the first NFT product ever sold by an auction house. Beeple NFT Crossroad was sold on Nifty Gateway last Thursday for $6.6M also. NBA Top Shot NFT sales exceeded $33M in just one day. One NFT Cryptopunk #6965 soled for 800ETH ($1.5M). Even Lindsay Lohan made $15K (8.8 ETH) selling one Daft Punk NFT. Sorare (i play that) raised $50M is a Series A funding - they are fantasy football NFT game. I heard even Kraken is looking to do a funding raise soon.

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  1inch moved to BSC looking for better gas fees. RobinHood had more than 6 million people registering for their services in 2021, as people tend to forget the role played by RH in stopping the huge loss of the corporate friends on GameStop stunt done by Reddit users.

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  Grayscale got a huge list of candidates for the next ETF funds: AAVE, BAT, ADA, LINK, COMP, ATOM, MANA,EOS,FIL,FLOW,LPT, MKR, XMR, NMR, DOT, RSR, STX, SUSHI, SNX, XTZ, GRT, UNI, YFI.

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  And to finish with good news, Mt. Gox is getting closer to pay its debts as soon as October, if the compensation plan is voted.
  

And with this, I end the weekly review here, see you in one week?

G.

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Article re-published on read.cash