What happened in crypto over the past 2 weeks? It is mostly about Bitcoin and its increased market dominance, as ETH and SOL struggle to keep up the pace. A presidential pump and dump scheme rolling over? Quite a rollercoaster! What else? Read below:
- Bitcoin: The crypto market shrank by 30% from its peak, losing $1.2 trillion since December, due to all that tariff talk, but Bitcoin got nearly 60% market dominance thanks to this nonsense (ended the week at 63.15%). And this week is up to 64.03%, quite a good look. Are we back in business? Then we had this Monday, when the fake news about a 90-day pause on tariffs for all countries except China pushed BTC from $76K to $80K, with other altcoins such as ETH, XRP and the rest experiencing similar spikes. Except that the 90-day pause never happened. Some Bitcoin user just made the most expensive typo of the year, paying a $60K fee to move $37K worth of BTC, after he used the RBF (replace by fee) feature. At Paris Blockchain Week, Adam Back claimed that Bitcoin can still challenge Gold as the premier inflation hedge over the next decade, despite its recent 30% correction. Not to mention that some countries started to use BTC for international crypto settlement, instead of the dollar, due to the uncertainty and trade war issues. The ETF are doing bad, though, with BlackRock alone seeing $253M leaving in one day, the third worst day on record. Cardano founder sees BTC at $250K, end of this year or the next. I see Bitcoin at one million one day, hope only to be still alive by then. Tether is playing the long game, shifting its Bitcoin mining operations to Ocean's pool, in a move aiming to boost the network's decentralisation. Even after Jerome Powell came close to being fired by Trump, Bitcoin is still close to $85K, for now.
- Ethereum: ETH underperformed BTC for 85% of all trading days, and the ETH/BTC ratio hit a five-year low of 0.018, after seven years of progress. Option trading has been greenlit for the ETH ETFs. HashKey has received regulatory approval to offer ETH staking services in Hong Kong. The SEC has postponed its decision on ETH ETF staking and In-Kind redemptions to June 2025. Residents of Panama City will soon be able to pay local taxes and fees using Bitcoin, Ether and popular stablecoins.
- Altcoins and stablecoins: If you are using the Arkada website for the Soneium airdrop already, you can link that with the RhinoFi bridge and gain some Rhino points, just in case we get an airdrop coming soon. A coalition of UK digital economy trade groups is calling on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to make crypto a strategic focus. The market is in chaos, and a memecoin doing what a memecoin does, Fartcoin, went up 10%, just because it can. There are talks about XRP surging 500%, overtaking ETH as the second-largest digital asset. I personally think this is a narrative pushed by interested parties to get some profit using other people's stupidity. A 10,000-year-extinct wolf was brought back, and the Solana memecoin market exploded, with multiple traders making millions out of the uninformed. Canary Capital is planning to create an SUI ETF. Binance is confusing everyone with its LDUSDT product, which lets you use it for futures trading while still earning 1.5% APR. Mantra CEO promised OM token recovery, as if this would ever happen. A few days later, the OM token crashed 93% as large investors were liquidated on a CEX. DEFI lending is coming back, but 3 CEFI lenders now control over 88% of the market (Tether, Galaxy and Ledn, if you are curious about their names). Canada unlocked its first Spot Solana ETF. PumpDotFun is breaking records daily, creating millionaires one after another. Raydium just created a direct competitor for it, LaunchLab, a token creation platform integrating its massive liquidity pools. Despite all these major wins, Solana is still bleeding.
- NFTs and blockchain games: I have enjoyed playing Golem Overlord lately on Hive, and it is quite profitable, I would say, with some significant updates lately. On Splinterlands, we have had the Land NFT new update and improved tokenomics introduced on March 18. I hope this may help the game by increasing speed and stability. Check my Holozing article to learn about a new blockchain game that looks full of potential. I am also playing a cute little game called Chain of Legends, which reminds me of Heroes of Might and Magic, even if the overlap is not 100%.
- Good news: Pakistan was not joking when it said it would make a name for itself in the crypto scene. It just added CZ of former Binance as an advisor to the Pakistan Crypto Council. Pakistan is considering using its surplus electricity to power Bitcoin mining and AI data centres too. Good job! Kraken now offers 11.000 US-listed stocks and ETFs commission-free in selected states. In some inspiring story, Janover want to be for Solana what Strategy is for Bitcoin, as they bought another 80K SOL, making them the first US-listed company with a Solana-focused treasury. Coinbase experts think that when the crypto winter ends and the sentiment finally resets, it is likely to happen rather quickly. Hidden bull signal? Ethena published proof of reserves, attested by some names such as LlmaRisk and Chainlink. South Korea's $890B Pension fund is exploring how blockchain tech could help manage its assets. Ripple acquired prime brokerage firm Hidden Road for $ 1.25 B. BlackRock has chosen Anchorage Digital to handle custody for a portion of its digital asset portfolio. Anchorage Digital is the only federally chartered bank in the US. Paul Atkins was confirmed as the SEC Chair. In some rare good intention, the US President has signed off on a congressional resolution that erases a contentious IRS rule aimed at DEFI, which would have treated DEFI platforms as brokers.
- Bad news: Inflation drop fuels the crypto surge. Slow and steady! Bybit is accused of charging projects $1.4M to list tokens and silencing student ambassadors, promptly denying everything asking for proof. Digital asset ETPs lost nearly $800M last week alone. Around $5M worth of ZK tokens were stolen from a compromised admin account, sending the price down by 20%. Bybit is aggressively shutting down everything related to Web3, including the wallet, NFT marketplace, swap, loyalty program and such, by May 31st. Strange moves at the Babylon staking protocol, with $1.26B withdrawn overnight from 4 addresses alone. Do they know something we don't? Argentina's congress launched an investigation into the $250M Libra token collapse, a cryptocurrency promoted earlier this year by its President, Javier Milei. Binance, Kucoin and other big names temporarily halted withdrawals Monday after a technical issue at Amazon Web Services disrupted the core functions of these platforms. After a $30M USDT wallet freeze, Russia wants to develop its own stablecoin.
- Joke of the week: Institutions buy as retail panics, and, on the funny side, while we had huge outflows from the US and Germany, we had Canada and Brazil buying the dip. Major investors are quietly loading their bags, using the chaos created by the Orange Agent. Or maybe he is right there with them, doing this intentionally. Maybe the culprit just spoke out of turn, a few days before the event, as Donald announced a 90-day pause later, with a lower rate of just 10% for countries that did not retaliate with their own measures. The Penguin invasion is getting near. Some commented that Monday was a test pump, and Wednesday was the real pump. So true! Probably just a coincidence, but the US Department of Justice shuts down its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. Who is gonna watch the watchers? Even Binance, getting close to the presidential clique lately, is seeking a two-month pause in its ongoing legal battle over crypto violations with the SEC. Next pump target? I would say it is SEI, as World Liberty Financial just bought $775K worth of it.
All the best,
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- a Hearthstone-like card game) (Golem Overlord - a Play2Earn game on Hive) (Upland - a real-life virtual land) (Holozing - a Pokemon-like game)and ( Chain of Legends - with a hint of Heroes of Might and Magic).
...get crypto 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 Hive.
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