The last week news - 1-7.02.2021

Nice to come back here and do a bit of writing. Let's see what changed lately in the crypto-sphere. As most people say, i do not give advice, and i am writing about my points of view, which may or may not be right. But they are right. Mostly.

• A new NFT based game will be launched soon, Smighties Universe, and the game seems solid, and got the right ideas, website is clean and not too confusing at all, but i am under the impression that it is under ETH network, so i will not deep into it right now. It is looking cool thought.

• Bitcoin active addresses went from 21 to 22.3 M, with the record of 682.000 being created on January 7. A good time even to be a Bitcoin miner, with more than $1B paid in fees. It is still less than the $1.25B record from December 2017, but this is just because back then we had 12.5 BTC per block, and now there are only 6.25 BTC, after last year halving. We had Andrew Chow (BTC CORE developer) disclosed that un unexploitable vulnerability was found in the version 0.18 and earlier, but was fixed on version 0.19. The current version is 0.21. A possible attack could affect user devices, not the BTC protocol. Elon Musk made everyone in crypto happy just adding the word $Bitcoin to his twitter bio. He said that this is ''a good think''. and it is ''on the verge of becoming widely accepted''. He then removed $Bitcoin word from his bio, only to troll a bit more with a Dogecoin Simba meme, even if he said than he is not really into Doge. But Blockchain Research Lab analyzed the six times when Elon mentioned crypto, and every time significat increases appeared right after the tweet.

• Adoption stories. Microstrategy bought another 295 BTC, paying $10M for it and now holds 71079 BTC ( $2.5B). Next place was taken by Galaxy Digital with 16402 BTC. Miami city is thinking to let their employees receive their salary in BTC and let people soon to pay their local fees and taxes using cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is sitting now well over $40K. Jack Dorsey admited running his own Bitcoin node using an Apple computer.

• Coinbase is choosing Nasdaq for direct listing, after they were already trading on the Nasdaq private market for $200 per share. But the public listing is offering now the shares at $277 each. Right now Coinbase is ranked #874 globally on the most popular websites, with Binance sitting on the #839 too.

• Uniswap native token - UNI - increased more than 90% in just one week and its market maturity went from A rating to S (the best there is). Still, it is quite painful to use it, when amounts smaller than $80 could have ETH fees bigger than that.

• Wednesday, ETH reached a new ATH of $1500, going all the way t0 $1700 at the moment i am writing this post. Some even hope for the $2000 soon. But the fees are also keeping up with the pump, reaching an average of $23.37. Japan Based exchange Liquid halted ETH withdrawals, reassuring their customers that they will resume when the fees are back to normal. Many projects choosed Polkadot lately, specifically for the high fee reason. The ETH PoS is still like 6 months away, at least, according to my own estimation.

• At the start of this week we got Luna, UMA and SUSHI increasing with double digits. Middle of the week, we had Doge, AAVE and DOT increasing quite nicely, but Doge was just a pump&dump, courtesy of our friendly reddit users )and maybe a bit of Elon Musk fault, huh!). At the end of the week we got BNB HITTING A NEW ALL HIGH

• Giant tech VISA is working with Anchorage to let customers to buy and sell digital assets like BTC. They are also considering stablecoins if they start to be used by global commerce. First Boulevard was the first bank to join the VISA pilot, this being a digital bank buidling tools to help African Americans to passively build wealth and achieve financial independence.

• This tweet: https://twitter.com/CharlieBot/status/1356882803170947074

• Latest news (or not so fresh right now) YFI lost $11 M in a security exploit affecting the DAI vault, and the hacker managed to redirect $2.8M into his wallets using an AAVE flash loan to trigger vault draining. Yearn.Finance has $500M in assets at the moment. All the funds were deposited into a '3pool' containing DAI, USDT and USDC, and Curve AMM (automated market maker) was used to get the DAI price. The attacked used an AAVE flashloan to deposit enough crypto into Curve 3 Pool to change the DAI price, then the money went back to pay the loan, and this was repeated quite few times. Curve CEO Michael Egorov blames Yfi code for the exploit. Meanwhile AAVE Protocol token increased over 75% and become the second largest DEFI with over $5B assets locked in. AAVE v2 migration tool was providing real help to migrate all the data into the new updated protocol. But AAVE founder, Stani Kulechov, looked into it and tweeted that the attack was quite sophisticated, involving over 160 transactions accross multiple DEFI platforms.

• For the looks of it, SEC could lose the Ripple lawsuit, as it seems that their way to prove that a particular crypto-asset is a security may be faulty (They are using Howey test for this). We could also see a nice XRP pump and dump last week. Talking about law and order, RobinHood CEO Vlad Tenev may testify soon in front of the Congress, facing some tough questions related to Gamestop arbitrary restrictions. RobinHood IPO was postponed at the moment, with all the drama surrounding the company. There is also a class action lawsuit against RobinHood, TD Ameritrade and WeBull, as they denied to their customers the opportunity to profit from the Gamestop trading. At the time of writing this post, the limit was raised from 20 to 100 GAMESTOP shares to buy for RobinHood users.

• Kiss member Gene Simmons admited to have a nice portfolio of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, XRP and even some Dogecoin. He just said to his followers ''Make of it what you will.''.

• And how NFTs helped one lucky guy to become rich, after he bought the Hashmasks NFT named ''The Day Internet Fxxxxd Wall Street'' with $130 just to sell it 3 days later for $130.000. NFT time is coming, i tell you.

• Maybe one of the few companios to not live up to the blockchain hype, IBM had only 10% of the expected revenue targets and now most of the people working in their blockchain team were fired or left. Another bad news related to crypto, if you live in South Africa and you do not disclose your income from crypto, you may face fines and up to two years in prison.

• CEFI (centralized finance) is doing well, with Blockfi paying more than $28M in interest in January (i have $2.2 of this, i must to admit).

• Justin Sun is being rewarded the number 1 prize on the 'being the worst copy/paste user' ever, after investing $12M in WallStreetbets promoted shares at the height, losing more than 70% until now. I will watch his share trading closely, to know what i need not to do.

• And a bit of innocent fun, after the crypto-writer PVMihalache (the guy with the 1BCH Club initiative) published an article about the word 'people' being mentioned in Bitcoin Black whitepaper for more than 43 times, Elon Musk tweeted in here:Dogecoin is the people’s crypto. They are both funny, as Paul said he is the Meme master, with Elon reply: ''I am become meme, Destroyer of shorts!'' You two should get a room.

Yours truly

George

Why not...

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

...get the higher rewards for your investments using Blockfi and Celsius.network. Get ETH while writing on Publish0x blog, using Presearch search engine to maximize your income with PRE tokens. Check my Lbry.tv channel in here and use Torum instead of Twitter . I am also writing on Read.cash.

...the most lucrative faucets that I use: ZEN, ZEC, DOGE. Start mining Helium (NHT) for free on Emrit.io.