202
Another week, another brick in the wall. Let’s see the main events of the last seven days! The bulls seem to gain control, once again, and hopefully, we will go over $50K this time, UK clarifies the crypto taxes, Solana is on the news with good and bad altogether, NFT is a word now, and Winter Olympics are playing with NFT lovers, but on a Chinese blockchain, if I am not mistaken. What else?
Bitcoin: Apparently, the Lunar New Year may be at least partially responsible for the BTC fall, as many investors were withdrawing funds in order to fund the traditional red envelopes (Hongbao) as cash gifts are exchanged between family and friends. At the moment the fight is around the $37.6K, and depending on how this one goes, we will see a decrease or increase in price. The latest announcement of Google and Facebook 2021 revenues may also factor into the price. MicroStrategy bought another 660 BTC to add to their treasury. UNIFY partnered with NYDIG becoming the first credit union to allow its members to hold Bitcoin.
Ethereum: Check for Centrifuge, a DEFI structured money market, and see their potential. Vitalik tweeted about a fork addressing the high-cost fees issue making the chain unusable for small amounts, and he plans to do this before the 2023 promised sharding.
Altcoins: Solana, still recovering from the Wormhole hack, launched Solana Pay, a protocol allowing retailers to accept crypto-payments directly from customers, frictionless and instant, with lower costs, using USDC (thank God for that, USDT will raise my spider senses again). Talking about Solana, their most popular wallet, Phantom, just launched its IOS app. Miami received the first payment from the project mining MiamiCoin (MIA), with a total value of $5.25M. VanEck launched a Multi-Crypto fund, providing exposure to BTC, ETH, DOT, SOL, TRX, AVAX, and MATIC. Ox protocol v4 will soon allow swaps between NFTs on ETH, AVAX, FTM, Optimism, Polygon, and BSC. Uniswap v3 will deploy on Harmony blockchain.
NFTs: NFT is the Collin’s Dictionary word of the year in 2021. Not surprising. ApeDAO is voting to sell their digital assets, including more than 81 Bored Apes, their multisig wallet has 4 signers, with two needed to move assets, and one of them voted in favor of liquidating. They bet on their own token $APED, to increase in value-generating more profit. The International Olympic Committee partnered with Nway to create a Winter Olympics game, where you can collect Olympic NFT digital pins. Also, Coachella partnered with the crypto-exchange FTX US, and they will even launch an NFT collection. Yuga Labs, the ones with Bored Ape, right, are talking with Andreessen Horowitz looking to sell a multimillion-dollar stake in a new funding round. Are we expecting new collections?
Blockchain games: SPLINTERLANDS team is working to increase the rewards for the ranked season ladder (DEC, daily quest, and season rewards) and they are working on a solution to make people play beyond the daily quest limit. Chaos Legion packs were added to the daily quest and season reward also, starting with the Silver league and the name of your opponent will be hidden now until the game starts. Axie Infinity is continuing its approach, trying to burn more of its SLP and AXS tokens using cosmetics, skins, upgraded AXIE body parts, in-game emojis, breeding events, and Axie naming. Meta joined Crypto Open Patent Alliance, the consortium led by Jack Dorsey’s Block after the Diem project was closed and their assets sold back to the Silvergate Bank, in order to return the funds to their investors. Another funny game, this time about Pandas, on WAX, old-style, reminded me of Heroes of Might and Magic 1, check it in
Good news: UK HM Revenue and Customs Office updated the tax rules for decentralized finance and staking. Those are more like a set of guiding principles, as the area is constantly evolving, and the returns on DEFI and staking are classified as income or capital gains. Basically staking is capital gains and DEFI is revenue/income is I am understanding correctly, but there are some other variables like if the return is known when the agreement is made if the return is realized through the disposal of capital, is there a one-off payment or recurring ones and is the lending fixed or indefinite, short term or long term, but more important, crypto assets are treated as property for tax purposes. In the last quarter of 2021, VISA processed $2.5B worth of payments on their crypto-related debit and credit cards. This is more than 70% of the cryptocurrencies volume. India provided clear guidance on crypto, with a 30% tax on digital assets, the same as gambling. This comes at a time when they are also launching a blockchain-based digital rupee, much faster and cheaper, so, you see where they are going with this one. A bipartisan group of the US House of Representatives proposed a law excluding individuals to pay taxes for payments lower than 200$, this will work miracles towards payment adoption, if it will pass. Tezos is now sponsoring Manchester United, with a $27M partnership. Financial Times partnered with Wilshire to launch an easy-to-use cryptocurrency pricing dashboard. I can’t wait to test it. Dune Analytics, a crypto analytics platform, raised $69.42M and it is now valued at $1B. Good for them, how long until some of the crypto-giants will buy them? Talking about that, FTX bought the Japanese fintech company Liquid Group and all its subsidiaries. Will they expand in Japan next? Myanmar seems to be the next country to create its own CBDC after they initially accepted USDT as the official currency.
Bad news: Some US senators for Wyoming noticed that America Competes Act is virtually picking winners and losers while handling the crypto control to the banks, nothing new under the sky. Wonderland co-founder, Daniele Sestagally, said that the project is too divided, and therefore, the project failed. There is also the issue of Michael Patryn, the one-thieving co-founder of QuadrigaCX, managing the treasury in here. The wolf among the sheep. The community voted yes, but they still shut it down, making many to think that this was nothing else than a Ponzi scheme. Solana Bridge Wormhole has been hacked, losing more than $326M, and it is down at the present. The attackers were offered a $10M reward if they return the funds. Jump Trading, the parent company of WormHole, covered the missing funds in order to stop the chaos created by the hack and build back some trust. Some of the Bitfinex stolen BTC (almost $3.6B) were moved to an anonymous wallet. Cryptominer Riot Blockchain will shut down 99% of their operations as Winter Storm Landon is expected to hit Texas this week, and the demand on the power grid will surge. Gofundme shuts down the Truckers Freedom Convoy fundraiser, freezing their assets. If only we would have something similar, but using a decentralized project and crypto. That will be badass.
Joke of the week: Axie Infinity is playing a dangerous card, with all the rewards from Adventure mode and Daily quest mode reduced to zero in the upcoming season. Now the only way to win SLP is to play in Arena, and unless you have a competitive (read expensive) team, you may not win as much as you hope (the rewards are between 1-12 SLP per game won). I think that the people farming the daily rewards to survive will probably change their focus joining other move profitable games such as Pegaxy, where you need no initial investment and you can rent up to 3 NFTs for a 10-15% share of the wins, and play daily gaining at least 15-25$ if you use your energy optimally. Although the AXS rewards seem to increase, now being paid to more users.
All the best,
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