Parachains, Ethereum failures and the numbers that shocked the world in 2021 (weekly crypto updates)

What an up and down it was in this past week! Everyone rushing full or not so full of holiday's cheer, Bitcoin et company are predictablly swinging between 40-50K, with a last moment effort on Christmas to go over 51K, and the optimists already think they will see $60K before the year ends. Will we? Other than that, check the latest news bellow:

Bitcoin: Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) closed last week at a record 21.36% discount, but, while I am not sure, I think there is a six months lock-up on your initial investment. El Salvador bought the dip again, with another 21 BTC added to their treasury. SEC is doing what they know best, trying to stop a tidal wave with a spoon, rejecting two more applications for BTC ETF (by Valkyrie and Kryptocoin).
Ethereum: Ethereum testnet Kintsugi, one of the final stages before ETH 2.0, went live in order to prepare the Merge. Definitely good. If you do not know, Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold, and I find the analogy quite funny, as ETH is in dire needs to solve the fees high levels issue. Across protocol added Boba as their third Layer 2, after Arbitum and Optimism, for their Ethereum L1-L2 bridge. They are doing a great work in such a little time.
Altcoins: DEX trading volume reached 1 trillion dollars this year (858% up from 2020). Polkadot first five parachains are officially live, and the projects using them are Acala, Astar, Clover, Moonbeam and Parallel Finance. Close to $100M in DOT was collected during the auction process. Rumos has it that they are aiming for 100 parachains, or even more. Heck, even Instagram is exploring the NFT market actively right now. Binance Labs invested $60M in Multichain, formerly Anyswap (ANY). The cross chain protocol has more than 300K users and a TVL of $4.8B at the moment. Binance is quite bullish, signing a deal with Dubai World Trade Centre in the same week, assisting them to develop a crypto regulatory framework. Uniswap now is allowing to exchange tokens on Polygon, with lower fees and faster transactions. We got some interesting airdrops this week, with DappRadar first (check it in here), and theopendao.com SOS token second, so if you ever sold or bought something on Opensea, check them. Talking about DAOs, one of the most friendly team that I ever met, UMA project team, is assisting with the SuperUMANS DAO launch, very very soon. Add their Twitter to your list to find more about it. Fun fact about DAOs, the biggest crypto reserves for 2 of most active DAOs are $4B for Uniswap and $1B for Compound. Terra (LUNA) is now the second largest DEFI protocol, after surpassed BSC, with $18B TVL, as BSC has (only) $16.5B. Ethereum is still by far the best place to be, with more than $150B TVL. The experts say that Anchor is responsible for 42% of the Terra total TVL. Even Bitmex is not launching its own token called BMEX, soon to be airdropped. Talking about exciting stuff, RIDE was a token on Elrond blockchain launchpad, and apparently 2 whales bought most of it at $0.10 per RIDE, one of them, and $1.10 second, only to sell it moments later at $4-5 per RIDE, making a huge profit in minutes. Hint, they used bots in order to do this optimally. Which make me think that I want to learn how to build bots next. Rari Capital and Fei Protocol approved their merger, with 93% of their holders approving it. They will create a new token after the merger is done, called TRIBE.
NFTs: Kraken is working on a platform to support FTSs, moving some NFT activities off-chain in order to have low mint and transaction fees. Adidas sold more than $23M in one day, with their new collection 'Into the Metaverse', assisted by Bored Ape Yacht Club, Pixel Vault and the collector Gmoney. Meanwhile, in Chine, more than a thousand Chinese companies, mainly tech, applied for metaverse and NFT trademarks, despite the government November warnings, including Huawei and Hisense. Stephen Curry of Golden State Warriors partnered with Under Armour to launch a NFT collection of sneakers. Bored Ape Yacht Club flipped the floor price of CryptoPunks, with 53.9ETH versus 52.69 ETH. On Solana, Monkey Kingdom NFT project was hacked for $1.3M from their community, using a vulnerability of Grape (a validating solution on Solana blockchain) to gain control of an admin account and then posting a phishing link on Discord. Funny enough, NFT is the word on Google search, with Nice and Adidas joining the trend, and Snoop Dog, Mila Kunis and few others showing of their NFT collections. By the way, did you heard of Request Network (REQ)? Check them out.
Blockchain games: I found this Red Alert knock-off game on WAX, and I must to admit that took me a while to realize what I need to do, but I am getting there. If you just make the account and use the NFT you start with, you have a bonus drop chest every 1-2 day. So, even for that reason, is good to have it. Maybe is getting big later. On Splinterlands I managed to buy another 500 Chaos Legion packs, and I opened them all on a whim, but I regret nothing. Soon, I think 8th of January, we can finally buy them packs without vouchers. I only need another 225 packs to get another Legendary drop card, in fact two, with the next month airdrop. Axie Infinity, the sparkle is gone, and I am not playing it as much as in the past, just the daily missions for the 50 SLP and I am out. The SLP i use them monthly to either buy more AXS and stake it (still a nice 111% APY) or sell half for WETH and provide liquidity on Katana DEX. As I am thinking that they will start to airdrop their own Katana governance tokens at some moment, and you may need some to exchange or stake SLP, in order to pay the fees. If you like Skyweaver game and wants to beta test, looking to grab some Silver and Gold NFT cards, use this beta codeS: S34HTW8T23 and 8JLB92QH7H. First come, first served. PwC Hong Kong purchased some land on Sandbox.
Good news: Venture Capital funds used this year for crypto projects reached $30B, more than all the previous years combined. FTX is going up big, with 4 DC based teams sponsored by them (hockey team Washington Capitals, basketball teams W.Wizards - men and W.Mystics - women, and finally, Capital City Go-Go basketball team. SEBA Swiss bank asked to be whitelisted with AAVE platform, in order to assit their clients with their DEFI choices. Adam White is leaving Bakkt, and the CEO will become also President, with a big bunch of shares still allocated to him (we are talking millions). Figment (a staking provider) raised $110M in a funding round, leading to an evaluation of $1.4B. Crypto.com is looking to get their first Super Bowl commercial this year, and Matt Damon is appearing in it. Opera is looking to integrate a MATIC (Polygon) wallet in their browser in Q1 2022. Meta is aiming for deep compatibility with blockchain technology, their CTO said. Translation: Facebook is coming to get your money, dude!
Bad news: A dark day for Grim Finance DEFI protocol, as they got more than $30M stolen from their platform, with the exploit discovered into the vault contract. The hacker(s) executed a re-entrancy attack, allowing him to deposit fake additional deposits into the vault as the initial transaction was still processed. You need some serious firepower to do that kind of stuff. As a first legal precedent, we got a Canadian 19 year old math prodigy to be probably the first DEFI hacker to be actively pursued by law enforcement. He invoked the 'code is law' argument to keep the funds for himself. Japan passed a tax proposal on December 10, asking for 35% tax rate for the tokens traded on the active market, even if they do not sell. In response, most of the Japanese projects are now looking to relocate in other crypto-friendly countries.
Mass adoption: I am thinking to merge Mass Adoption and Good news into one single tab, as generally all the news about mass adoption are good news, right?
Joke of the week: As a first legal precedent, we got a Canadian 19 year old math prodigy to be probably the first DEFI hacker to be actively pursued by law enforcement. He invoked the 'code is law' argument to keep the funds for himself. If I got them, they are mine, he said. I wonder how this will work in the Court.

That's all for today.

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) and (CryptoBrewmaster - Beer factory sim).

_...get the higher rewards for your investments using Blockfi, Hodlnaut 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.