It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves! (weekly crypto updates)

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What happened in crypto in the past week? Ethereum is the main rage, with Bitcoin cooling down. Trump is making a lot of good and bad moves. The market is in cooldown. What else? Read below:

• Bitcoin: Bitcoin is now entering in the bullish cooldown phase. Its index droped from 80% to 60%. Bitcoin volatility dropped to 2023 levels but the price still holds above the $110K mark. A solominer just scored $371K by mining block 910440 with 1 in 650000 odds. Michigan State Pension tripled its holdings in the ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF from 100K to 300K shares. Bitcoin asset manager Parataxis will go public in a $400M deal with SilverBox Corp IV. New friends, the Winklewoss twins have invested $220M in American Bitcoin Corp, Eric and Donald crypto mining firm. El Salvador has passed a law that allow investment banks to hold BTC on their balance sheets. Bitcoin traders hedge against the CPI shock as the $115K puts see surge in demand. It bounced back a little but analysts are warning of trouble ahead, some thinking that it will reach $80-100K. And just like that, Bitcoin enters its worst hystoric month, dropping 5% over weekend, up to 11.4% average loss in August. BTC ETFs are bleeding money, four straight days of outflows draining $1.4B, with Tuesday alone seeing $196M out. Harvard quetly stacks BTC, disclosing a $116M stake in BlackRock BTC ETF. US Treasury Secretary told the government won't buy additional Bitcoin for its reserve program.

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• Ethereum: ETH broke a multi-year resistance level after has more than tripled in just four months. The SEC just said that liquid staking services do not trigger securities disclosure agreement, as long as the providers act only as agents and don't manage the users' funds. Two major companies deployed another $50M into ETH in coordonated buying. Ether Machine bought 10605 ETH and GameSquare added another 2717 ETH to its stack. The SharpLink bought another 83562 ETH too, leading to the average price of $3634 for its stash. Standard Chartered said that Ethereum treasury companies are now better investment than ETFs. Even the experts can be wrong, as Hayes loses $1.6M buying back the ETH that he just sold last week, at $4150, after he sold at $3507. Corporate giants control now 8% of the ETH. Bitmine and Shaprlink want to raise more bucks to buy ETH. Most of the ETH shorts got crushed in just 24 hours (over $104M in short positions). Standard Chartered is predicting a $7500 Ether by the end of the year. Ethereum validators rush for exit, as the exit queue reached massive proportions worth billions.

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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Altcoins outgain Bitcoin despite new highs. Google search for the word 'altcoins' reached their highest point since the last bull cycle. Chainlink has joined forces with Intercontinental Exchange, to bring foreign exchange and precious metal pricing to blockchain networks. Paxos seeks federal oversight with a new national bank trust charted bid. Metamask is preparing to launch its own US dollar-pegged stablecoin, mUSD, backed with short-term US Treasuries and other liquid securities. Wyoming announced the mainnet launch of the first state-issued US dollar stablecoin, called Frontier Stable Coin, deployed on seven major blockchains (ARB, AVX, BASE OP, ETH, Polygon and SOL). XRP leads the crypto recovery while ETH follows on the second place. Verb Technology Company raised $558M to become the largest TON holder on the planet. There is an AI bot callec Clanker generating over $34M in fees by automatically creating tokens based on user prompts. Talking about silly stuff, MEI Pharma closed a $100M private placement and abandoned drug development to become a Litecoin treasury firm. Binance launched a bet on entire crypto market, with the ALLUSDT perpetual offers up to x75 leverage and daily rebalances. World Liberty Financial launches loyalty points for USD1 users that works like airline miles. Rippler CTO says the ledged needs more developers, after they acquired Rail, a stablecoin payments platform for $200M. ALT5 Sigma Corporation is raising $1.5B to launch a WLFI token treasure strategy. Canary Capital registered a Trump Coin ETH in Delaware. ZORA exploded 43% in 24 hours and it is up 1566% over the past month. Coinbase picked up a position in Toncoin.

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• NFTs and blockchain games: The NFT market is crashing heavily, 12% and CryptoPunks lost $300M, as Bored Apes fell 20% too. Pudgy Penguins also losat $100M in total value. I have enjoyed playing Golem Overlord lately on Hive, and it is quite profitable, I would say, with some significant updates lately. On Splinterlands, we have had the Land NFT new update and improved tokenomics on March 18. The presale of its latest Conclave Arcana collection is ongoing, and two new promo cards are still on sale.

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• Good news: The UK's Financial Conduct Authority will allow retail investors to access crypto-exchange traded notes (ETN) starting in October, ending a ban that has been in place since 2021.Bullish, the crypto exchange owning CoinDesk, is aiming to raise $629M in a US IPO. On debut, their shares surged 84%, closing at $68, quite optimistically away from the initial $37 offer price. CFTC will allow spot crypto trading on federally registered futures exchanges. Non-custodial wallets are not in scope of Google Play Store ban, the company said. SkyBridge Capital wants to tokenize $300M worth of its hedge funds on the Avalanche Network. Tokenized stocks exploded 220% in July, with blockchain addresses holding them jumping from 1600 to 90.000. A solar company bought Ripple Labs shares, for cheaper XRP exposure at $0.47, an 86% discount to current market prices. Blue Origin is accepting BTC, ETH, SOL, USDT and USDC for trips aboard their New Shapard rocket, integrated through Shift4 Payments. Crypto flows surge acros Latin America.

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• Bad news: Compass Point downgraded Coinbase to a 'Sell' rating, with its share pricegoing from $330 to $248. Coinbase is back in India, after they fled in 2023. Roman Storm, the cofounder of Tornado Cash, has been convicted of conspiring to operate an unlicensed transmission bussiness, but not on the other counts. The SEC formally ends the lawsuit against Ripple after nearly five years. Turkey's biggest exchange, BtcTurk, goes dark after massive hack. Tether hired Trump's former crypto advisor.

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• Joke of the week: As Trump prepares an order to penalize banks for dropping Conservative crypto clients, I may declare myself a Conservative, for the fun of it, maybe, well, the order would instruct regulators to probe whether account closures violated civil rights or consumer protection laws. Donald also signed another executive order that could open 401 (K) retirement plans to private equity, real estate, cryptocurrency and other alternative assets. He does some good stuff here and there, I must admit it! And then it shows, as World Liberty Financial is aiming to rise $1.5B to create a public company holding its WLFI tokens.

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All the best,

George

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Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- a Hearthstone-like card game) (Golem Overlord - a Play2Earn game on Hive) (Upland - a real-life virtual land) (Holozing - a Pokemon-like game)and ( Chain of Legends - with a hint of Heroes of Might and Magic).

...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog, using the Presearch search engine to maximise your income with PRE tokens. Use Torum instead of Twitter. I am also writing for crypto on Hive.

Check this one here .

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