What is next in crypto-market?

Unnecesarry FUD and other so called coincidences made BTC go down again, but i am a firm believer that this is just horseplay, the big data wants to buy more bitcoin at discounted price. The ones holding it for another few years will be hugely rewarded. According to Chainanalysis the criminal activity associated with BTC fell dramatically in 2020. The buzz of the day was a so-called double spend on BTC network, proved to be untrue (just a normal user sending 2 transactions having the same amount). What happened was just a chain reorganization, a common occurence in the Bitcoin network, according to Andreas Antonopoulos, as Satoshi outlines in page 8 of the Bitcoin Whitepaper. You can check for yourself at height 666833 on BTC network. And some innocent fun time, after Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org were receiving allegations of copyright infringment from Craig Wright lawyers, many crypto firms started to publish the Bitcoin Whitepaper.

Coinbase is going out on shopping spree, wtih the latest acquisition, Bison Trails helping to accelerate the adoption of the blockchain technology using fully managed blockchain solutions. They will still operate as a standalone product for the moment. Bison Trails was a beneficiary of the Coinbase Venture investment program early 2019, and had a partnership with Coinbase Custody in 2020. Their aim is to help other companies build protocols and dAPPS.

Binance just burned $165 M worth of BNB, and will continue to do this until the supply will be 100 millions BNB. Until now 13% of the total supply was burned. The price was growing up steadily in January.

Hedera (HBAR) and Enjin (ENJ) moved up 41 and 37%. Even VET increased by 7% on Tuesday. Wendnesday they kept going up HBAR - 11%, ENJ - 37%. ICON increased also with 13%. New GreyScale Trusts were registered recently for LINK, BAT,MANA,LIVE and XTZ. As i have XTZ and BAT in my portfolio, i can only be happy right now for the free advertising.

Brave was the first browser to adopt IFPS - interplanetary file system - a decentralized P2P protocol aiming ti make the worldwide web less centralised, being able to avoid censorship. Previously accessed content can be viewed offline with IPFS. Enabling the IPFS node you can still access a network during internet outages and shutdowns, and is ideal for places where internet is expensive or the network doesn't have enough coverage. Cloudfare just announced last week that they will be able to connect to Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and IPFS.

Saddle is the latest decentralized finance system (DEFI) focused on preventing slippage in value between stablecoin and wrapped bitcoin mainly, and they raised 4.3 million dollars in seed funding from famous names such as Electric Capital, Polychain Capital and Framework Ventures. Splippage is the difference between expected price of a trade and executed price of a trade, as Uniswap users know very well. I would like to try it, once I will have enough time.

Xapo is now a proper bank, after they were approved in Gibraltar, with a fully accredited institution licence. They are focusing on wealthy clients from emerging markets. If you do not know, Xapo was one of the first BTC custodians, established in 2013 by an entrepreneur who is also involved in Paypal and Diem project. Opening in Europe, they will close their US enteprise by March 2021. To be a client, you need to have crypto amounts of minimum 30k up to 1 million dollars.

The world largest asset manager ($8.7 T in assets) BlackRock plan to get involved in BTC. They said that there is a clear demand for BTC and this will be a part of every asset portfolio in the near future.

While USDT weekly transactions on ETH network are $1.5 M on average in the last four weeks, with average fees between $8-$19, they increased greatly on TRX network from $900K to $2M, as you pay almost no fee in there ($0.01 on average).

CELO is working on a stablecoin pegged to Euro, after they already launched a USD pegged crypto - Celo Dollar in the summer of 2020. They are backed by a crypto-basket (a mix of CELO, ETH and BTC).

Ripple is having a high time with more and more comercial entities not trading XRP, but hey, you may be lucky, Pornhub is still aceppting it. They just introduced another 3 coins (USDC, DOGE and BNB) while dropping DASH.

SDT (StakeDAO) is trying to organize an airdrop similar with Uniswap, but they got few hiccupsas they set 1.5% for active members and this will also include the ones who donated for the Gitcoin Round 8. I was told that you will receive 68.35 tokens worth around $500. Who do you think will be the next few projects to airdrop tokens to their users in 2021?

And to finish with something good, Justin Roiland, the Rick and Morty guy, recently auctioned a NFT collection called 'The Best I Could Do', sold for $275.000 ETH equivalent on Nifty Gateway. All the money were used to help the LA homeless encampments.

Happy January days!

G.