Another week is gone, and the things looks bright and the spring is here. Bitcoin and Ethereum are going towards new all time high. What can go wrong? Let's see what is happening lately:
- Bitcoin miners are doing well lately, with $1.4B earned from block subsidies, and $148M earned from transaction fees. Brokerage company Mogo extended their BTC cashback program, paying up to $3100 in Bitcoin to anyone getting a new mortgage or doing a refinance. Even Goldman Sacks is not offering access to Bitcoin via private wealth management, ironically after they said one year ago that BTC is not here to stay. Word in town is that even Blackrock bought some $6.5M CME bitcoin futures 3 months ago. Let's not forget that Kiwisaver program in New Zealand is letting you to invest 5% of your retirement funds in BTC, starting from this week. Algo and DMG created the first BTC mining pool powered by clean energy (hydroelectric). Even Tesla is trying to help the Bitcoin project team, after the company security team found a bug in the BTCPay Server wallet and payment processor, and helped them to review the GitHub open source data. Chipotle joined the game, with a game of code-cracking rewarding $100.000 in Bitcoins and free burritos.
- Duke University, an early Coinbase investor, has more that $500M in shares, possibly, after the company will go public. Good for them, as this will happen on April 14, after their move was approved by the US securities and exchange commission.
- Blockchain forensics company Chainanalysis was valuated at $2B after another Series D funding round. FBI, IRS, DHS and other enforcement agencies are using their technology to track illegal money laundering across different blockchains. VISA started to implement USDC stablecoin payments on the ETH blockchain. Paypal did another power move, letting US customers to pay with crypto when using online merchants (for BTC,BCH,ETH,LTC). The startup who created NBA Top Shot NFT collection just raised $305M in a funding round, backed by celebrities like Michael Jordan, Will Smith, Kevin Durant and Aston Kutcher. Talking about NFTs, Justin Sun launched a NFT fund called Just NFT, targeting high-profile, expensive art, via Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses. Ethereum is reaching all time high value, while BTC slightly decreased in the last 48 hours. Elon Musk is pumping DOGE again, but there is nothing new here.
- This week gainers, at the start of it, were MANA, ONE and CRV. Then DENT, OMG and ALGO took their turn to increase, the last with up to 40%. Filecoin got a surprising 2 digits increase in the last few days, and lately even TRX and EOS are in green, up 20% on average. Wink (WIN), my favourite TRX token, also jumped 40%, and having more than one million tokens, I can only enjoy the ride.
- Cosmos (ATOM) just launched a feature enabling Cross-chain DEFI, for both fungible and non-fungible tokens, also able to scale via sharding. We are talking about IBC (inter chain communication). Another very important piece of news, accountancy firm Moore Caymen published a report related to USDT, assuring that the controversial stablecoin is fully backed by assets exceeding their liabilities. Enjin is trying to build a Polkadot based blockchain for its NFT, called Efinity. AAVE is now working with Polygon (MATIC) in order to solve the congestion problem on ETH network. Decentraland (MANA) is also joining Polygon, asking for quicker transactions and lower fees.
- If you are a trader, you may need to know that right now the Coinbase effect is a thing, with an average of 91% increase in the next 5 days after listing. District0x and Civic were the biggest gainers, with 645% and 493% after they were listed on the exchange.
- New York city is working on a collaboration with IBM to create a blockchain based digital health app to be used as a COVID passport, letting you to check, print and store informations about your vaccination and testing via smartphone. South Korea is also working on a similar initiative, ready to launch this month. Meanwhile, in Japan, the first security token was launched by Sumitomo Mitsui bank, complying with all the cryptocurrency rules, laws and policies. Russia decided that crypto are bad, but stablecoins are a problem too, so you need to keep saving the rubla, and cope with the ever increasing inflation. How this will go with Sberbank and they own crypto ready to launch (Sbercoin), we do not know!
- Be careful and always check what you download, as a Trezor user lost 17 BTC downloading a face Trezor app from Apple store. The total loss is estimated to be almost $1M. IRS is looking for the US taxpayers that used Circle, to make them pay their dues.
- Some of the Bitcoin Cash developers were accused of bid-rigging, a horizontal price-fixing violating the antitrust laws, but the case was dismissed, as no evidence was found to prove this.
- Mark Cuban revealed his portfolio, and it is simpler than you can imagine 60% in BTC, 30% in ETH, and 10% in other altcoins. He is still dismissing NFT as a temporary craze.
- And to close this week edition with good news, while BTC is still trying to go over 60k, ETH and BNB reached ATH today, as you can see with your own eyes.
All the best,
George
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