Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain!(weekly crypto updates)

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What happened in crypto in the past week? World War 3 is apparently a reason for Bitcoin to go down. The 4th Bitcoin Halving happened this week. ETH ETF approved in Hong Kong. Kucoin will airdrop $20M for 3 million users as gratitude for their support for the exchange during the SEC notice. What else? Read below:

  • Bitcoin: With all the Iran-Israel conflict, BTC plummeted within hours after the first Iranian rockets fell upon the Israeli military base. More and more people talk about a Bitcoin-related token standard called Runes, as a way to enhance privacy and increase scaling. But will this work? Norway passed a new law mandating stricter oversight and registration requirements for all data centres within its borders. Bitcoin miners looked bullish expecting the halving, despite the obvious underperformance. Looks like $5.2B worth of Bitcoin was liquidated last week on the futures market. And, on April 20th, 2024, the 4th Bitcoin Halving was completed, as the much-expected block was mined. Bitcoin's dominance was up to 55%, a three-year high. Three consecutive days of net outflows for the BTC ETFs could spell trouble, despite the halving event just happening. More important, looks like the Bitcoin reserves on the centralized exchanges face potential depletion in nine months from now.

  • Ethereum: Spot BTC and ETH ETFs have been approved by regulators in Hong Kong, while they still struggle in the US. Hong Kong is the real deal these days, and crypto-assets are flowing into it. Mainland Chinese investors were barred from accessing these funds. DEFI's TVL increased by 65% QoQ to reach $101B, with the leading ETH's TVL growing by 71%.

  • Altcoins and stablecoins: Solana is still swinging wildly, with a 30% drop the past week, and more than $85M in leveraged long positions were liquidated. Solana's new version 1.18.11 proposed a few tweaks intended to ease the strain in its chokepoints. Layer-1 blockchain Berachain built atop the Cosmos ecosystem, did a series B funding round led by Brevan Howard Digital and Framework Venues - I only know something about a dual token system that incentivizes liquidity provision. OKX is working on its own X-Layer, a new layer-2 solution leveraging Polygon's blockchain interoperability tech. Singularity.net, Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol Merged to forge a $7.5B decentralized project. In the US, algo stablecoins may be in trouble soon with the new bill called Payment Stablecoin Act gaining traction. Worldcoin launched World Chain (you know them, the ones with the eyes scan, and they already onboarded over 10M World Citizens across 160 countries). Layer N announced a new liquidity program backed by PayPal's co-founder Peter Thiel. We also have a $600M token airdrop by Avail - check yourself at https://claim.availproject.org. SUI looks interesting, with a 1459% increase in TVL in the past two quarters, to $787M, ranking 12 among similar ecosystems. Another interesting one is Blast, recently surpassing Base with $1.7B TVL.

  • NFTs and blockchain games: Andreessen Horowitz is preparing a $7.2B funding haul to back the web3 gaming project. What a number! On Splinterlands, the third round of Conflicts airdrop activity is almost finished and a new reward system was implemented, as you get Glint tokens for every match you win and double of it at the end of the season. You can use Glint tokens to buy cards, Merits, potions and even 3 different titles. You may also want to check Holozing - a soon-to-be-launched Pokemon-like game on the Hive blockchain. Yuga Labs offloaded 2 of its gaming projects - HV-MTL and Legends of the Mara, to focus more on BAYC.

  • Good news: Kucoin is airdropping $20M in BTC to 3 million users as gratitude. I got around $113 in BTC, so I am pleased with it, but its token, KCS, is still in need of recovering to reach the March price level. The banking and finance trade association UK Finance is starting to use blockchain technology to streamline secure online deliveries, bringing some transparency to the UK home-buying process, and even preparing for digital bonds setup. Kraken introduced a new product, an open-source wallet, from day one. German banking giant LBBW announced a partnership with Bitpanda to offer cryptocurrency custody services.

  • Bad news: Trust Wallet asked users to disable Apple iMessage due to some unpatched zero-day exploit that could allow a hacker to seize control of devices without any user interaction required. This is big! Another Lazarus Group drama is unfolding, with the FBI saying that North Korea was using Railgun privacy to launder over $60M from the Harmony Bridge hack, with Railgun's social channels saying 'No, we did not do that'. Avraham Eisenberg, the 27-year-old who exploited Mango, was convicted on all counts of fraud and manipulation by a Manhattan jury.

  • Joke of the week: BlackRock's $288M BUIDL investment vehicle chose to stake directly on Ethereum mainnet, to avoid a private chain to get rich in the process, as they plan to put some serious money into it. This is legacy finance for you, always looking only for itself and its profits, and not there for the clients. BlackRock almost lost the first place to the JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon who said that BTC is a public decentralized Ponzi scheme, a fraud, while his company applied to be an authorized participant with its new spot ETF aiming to do some serious business. So, which one is the right version?

#aprilinleo

All the best,

George

Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) (Upland - real-life virtual land) (Holozing - Pokemon-like game)and (Rising Star - Music creators game).

...Get ETH while writing on the Publish0x blog, using the Presearch search engine to maximize your income with PRE tokens. Use Torum instead of Twitter. I am also writing for crypto on Read.cash and Hive.

Posted Using InLeo Alpha

Posted Using InLeo Alpha

Posted Using InLeo Alpha



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