In the news this week, PayPal-owned Venmo launched their cryptocurrency trading platform, in conjunction with the Paxos Trust Company, a well reputable company in the space. Furthermore, Venmo also now holds a conditional "Bitlicense" from the New York Department of Financial Services. These conditional licenses require companies to work with other companies which have been granted full licenses, such as Paxos. Moving forwards, it definitely feels like PayPal will be adventuring further into cryptocurrency services and expanding their infrastructure using blockchain technology.
Weekly trade volume on Uniswap reached a record high of $10 billion, after the positive market sentiment due to the Ethereum Berlin hard-fork. Progress in atomic swaps have sent the price of Monero to a 3 year high; these swap will allow trustless swaps between XMR and the likes of BTC, exciting times! Finally, WeWork has also announced that they will accept crypto payments and more importantly hold the crypto on its balance sheet. Institutional demand increases ever more.
Updates:
It's been a tumultuous week for the crypto markets to say the least! We have just started the recovery from a ~20% correction, caused by several factors. The first of these factors was a power cut in Xinjiang, China. The province has been widely linked to the price crash of Bitcoin down to below $54k, and coincided with the largest daily drop in Bitcoin hash rate in almost 4 years. The total market cap of the crypto market fell by more than $300 billion in the space of a few hours. Due to this lower hash rate though, over-leveraged long positions were liquidated at a greater rate than usual.
VeChain continues to perform amazingly, really frustrating that I didn't pick some up at $0.02! BINANCE added a VET/GBP pair on the trading platform, Crypto.com have also added support for VET as well. There is still some scepticism I have personally have surrounding the partnerships VeChain has, as well as the power plays taking place in China surrounding digital currencies on the whole.
Weekly Change: +0.41%
Monthly Change: +25.11%
All Time Change: +119.51%
Plans:
Invested in SLT this week using StellarTerm, and also converted all of my XLM position into it as well. Due to holding XLM since $0.10, my average price for SLT is ~$10. Hoping for a steady increase in price with the platform release expected by the end of the month! Along with the investing part of things, it allowed me to look into the Stellar blockchain further, as well as their cool laboratory protocol.
I'm stacking sats using OKEx's Rewards system, 500 sats per day for free is a pretty good deal. Still collecting my candies on CoinGecko as well, and also contributing on the cryptocurrency sub-reddit to earn some MOONs.
Moving forwards, I'm mainly looking at micro-cap alts similar to SLT, including:
TRAC - Supply Chain Management
PRQ - Analytics
GET - Ticketing
AGI - AI
FET - AI
API3 - Oracle
ERGO - Financial Contracts
