I dreamed to change the world, the world changed my dreams! (weekly crypto updates)

What happened in the past week? ETH staking rewards are dropping, as people jump from ETH to BTC. UK is starting to regulate the crypto market, with major exchanges being warned and quickly complying. FTX media circus is still going on. What else? Read below:

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• Bitcoin: Bitcoin transactions plummeted at February levels as Ordinals are losing steam. Yet, altcoins suffer against BTC as market uncertainty continues. The BTC market depth dropped 33% year-to-date. Bitmain, that big mining chips manufacturer, froze employee salaries since September and eliminated all the bonuses and incentives, quoting lack of positive cashflow. Arthur Hayes said that BTC may be $750K to $1M by 2026, and Bitcoin started to go up to support this one, getting close to 29K today. People found out that the US Government owns more than 200K BTC, worth $5B right now. Funny thing, BTC whales are accumulating, ETH whales are selling. Are those the same people? Maybe.

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• Ethereum: Liquid staking is the largest sector in DEFI, with TVL recently hitting all-time highs. There is a supply growth of staking tokens like stETH and wstETH, leading them to become more linked to the rest of the ETH ecosystem. Look at AAVE, holding 21% of all wstETH and 7.8% of the stETH. stETH is now more than 32% of the TVL on AAVE, up from 15% one year ago. Yet, Lido having a 32.2% market share is raising concerns about ETH decentralization. Still, the upcoming Cancun-Deneb upgrade is aiming to make roll-up transactions more cost-effective, potentially close to the other rival alt-Layer-1s. Ethereum gas fees reached 2022 low, as the staking rewards dropped from 5-6% to 3.5%. Arbitrum is now available on the Coinbase Wallet.

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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Lending APYs are growing thanks to RWAs, this being attributed to an arbitrage opportunity presented by borrowing stablecoins at rates below 5% rates. As RWAs become more accessible, we expect stablecoins APYs to trend closer to real-world interest rates. Tangible stablecoin (USDR) lost its peg, losing 50% of its value, right after RUSD went to $0.52 previously, and did not recovered. China opened an industrial park in Shenzen to boost digital Yuan ecosystem. Truth to be told, they do have over 5 million merchants accepting it already. Mastercard completed a small trial to wrap CBDCs on multiple blockchains. zkSynk wants to decentralize their ecosystem, giving control over their block explorer and Portal Bridge. Metamask temporarily removed from Apple Store, concerning some, but this is more like a calculated more, right after news about a potential airdrop make it out to the online medium, dreaming about people getting rich with MASK token. BNB Chain was not performing as bad as Binance Exchange, as they did some interesting upgrades in Q2-Q3, with the opBNB mainnet, the BNB Beacon chain, CCIP integration and BNB Greenfield upgrade to be launched in Q4. Even TVB has grown by 23%, reaching $4.7M by the end of September. Solana Foundation partnered with Dubai Multi Commodities Centre.

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• Blockchain games and NFT: Blockchain gaming activity increased by 12% in the past quarter, with a daily average of more than 786K unique wallets, and Alien Worlds, Axie Infinity, Gods Unchained and Splinterlands are the headliners. I take offence in Alien Worlds being the top blockchain game, as that is a dead world right now, and cannot compare with the other three top games. Arbitrum Odissey returns, after a year break, and you can find all the details here, with the next 7 weeks' quests. Is anyone out there still not playing Golem Overlord? They added some interesting features lately. By the way, did everyone get their free Fox NFT from Shapeshift? Wombat Dungeon Masters' season has just started, and now the potions have Wombat requirements added too. On Splinterlands, the Land 1.5 feature will be online soon, as it is already on the test server, and then we will see some interesting moves on the game market, as the Rebellion pack sale may start before the land feature is launched.

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• Good news: UK FCA added major exchanges like Huobi, Binance and ByBIT TO ITS WARNING LIST. Major crypto exchanges team up with local entities to continue serving the UK market, in order to comply with the new crypto marketing rules. Coinbase and OKX are working with Archax, and Binance teamed up with Rebuilding Society, a licensed p2p lending company that has given $35M in loans since 2013. The new rules started on the 8th of October. A crypto aid Israel fundraising initiative was launched amid the Gaza War, accepting BTC, ETH and stablecoins, in a similar manner to the Ukraine help fund. Meanwhile, Israeli authorities are freezing Hamas-linked cryptocurrency accounts on Binance and other exchanges. Binance launched a copy trading feature for futures products, with the lead traders getting a 10% share of the profit a copy trader makes, as its market share declines for the seventh consecutive month. JP Morgan's Onyx and First Abu Dhabi Bank executed a cross-border payment test. Pro-crypto presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy dropped democrats to run as an independent. It seems that latin Americans prefer Centralized Exchanges over decentralized ones. Ferrari will soon accept crypto as payment. What Lambo bro, get me that Testarossa! The SEC did not challenge the court rilung on Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) becoming a spot Bitcoin ETF. Australia unveiled new strategy to regulate crypto platforms that oversee more than $1000 for an individual or $3.2M in aggregate.

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• Bad news: Coinbase has seen its spot trading volume fall by more than half this third quarter, registering a 52% decrease from the same period last year. This has nothing to do with Coinbase challenging IRS crypto tax proposal that would impose unprecedented, unchecked and unlimited tracking on the daily lives of the Americans. EU markets regulator highlighted that there are serious risks of harm in the DEFI sector for new investors. Brazil is preparing a new regulatory sandbox for tokenizing assets in 2024. Failed crypto hedge fund 3AC wants BlockFi to pay $284M, but a judge sent them to mediation. Trader Joe, the grocery store, filed trademark lawsuit against Trader Joe, the DEX. Talking about being funny! The case was dismissed.

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• Joke of the week: The FTX circus continues, as Caroline Ellison revealed in court that SBF 'directed' her to use customer funds to pay back loans, around $14B of it, and much more. That's how we found out how he set up the systems allowing Alameda to take money from customer funds, how he bought back FTX equity from Binance with customer funds in order to receive a large supply of FTX before the airdrop and how she was instructed to defend specific FTT price levels at times. Want more? The FTXs insurance fund was just a random number generator, was made up and poof! just disappeared into nothingness. SBF even wanted to be an US President, which before FTX implosion was even possible, as Caroline Erricson said during the court session. Quite unrelated, Elliptic suggested that the $477M FTX hack was linked to Russian hacking group, as the money laundering procedure was not as sophisticated as the one used by Lazarus Group, for example. Meanwhile, FTX staked 5.5M SOL worth $122M, customer's money, of course, in order to get some profit before selling it.

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All the best,

George

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Why not...

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...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands - Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) (Wombat Dungeon Masters NFT staking on WAX) and (X-Portal - Elrond all in one app, free NFTs, and more).

...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 Read.cash and Hive.

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