Survival is the ability to swim in strange water! (weekly crypto updates)

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What happened in the past week? Binance is the biggest investor, despite all the low numbers on everything, JP Morgan clients want tokenized real-life assets, not crypto, and Coinbase just issued Tokenized US Treasury ETFs on its Base blockchain. What else? Read below:

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• Bitcoin: Sam Altman praises Bitcoin, as the next logical step, and expresses concerns about CBDCs. Even if they look into Bitcoin, JP Morgan clients seem to be primarily interested in tokenized traditional assets, not in cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin financial services firm Sawn is launching a new collaborative custody using Blockstream's Jade hardware wallet.

• Ethereum: Nine ETH Futures ETFs were launched on October 2, five of them holding only ETH futures, while the other four track a combination of BTC and ETH futures contracts. They failed to impress on debutUBS launched a tokenized fund on ETH as part of the Monetary Authority of Singapore's Project Guardian. ETH's price and market cap fell by 10%, but it still outperformed BTC by 2%.

• Altcoins and stablecoins: Solana seems to be favoured lately by institutional investors. Celestia announced plans to allocate 6% of its native tokens in an airdrop split between public contributors, early rollup and IBC adopters on Ethereum, Cosmos Hub and Osmosis. Check it here: https://genesis.celestia.org/. A US federal judge denied the SEC's attempt to appeal a previous court decision favouring Ripple Labs. Sui plans to launch a $51.3M fund to grow the DEFI ecosystem. Friend.tech was averaging 6k-9k daily returning users in September, and one thing keeping users coming back is a weekly points system anticipating a future airdrop.

• Blockchain games and NFT: 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. I am slowly accumulating the needed DEC, but it is doing so well on Tribaldex in terms of SPS and BXT returns that I may as well keep it in there.

• Good news: It seems that UK regulators are quite busy these days, as Binance is starting to offer services like financial promotions of qualifying crypto assets, from 8.10.2023, partnering with Rebuildingsociety.com LTD. Also, Coinbase will add prominent risk disclaimers and make more information available within the Coinbase app, due to the new regulations introduced by the UK Financial Conduct Authority from 8.10.2023. You just need to download the new Coinbase app, the latest version. The SEC also doubled down on accusations against the Nasdaq-listed company, asking a federal judge to reject the exchange's bid to dismiss the lawsuit. Coinbase's Base blockchain welcomes the first real-world asset issuance with Tokenized US Treasury ETFs. This is big. Crypto trading firm GSR received a payment license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. British Treasury is seeking to launch a digital securities sandbox in Q1 next year. Hong Kong Stock Exchange launched Synapse, a settlement platform using smart contracts. Kraken acquires Dutch crypto platform BCM amid EU expansion.

• Bad news: HTX recovered $8M from the hacker who stole its funds. Binance worked with Thai Police to take down a crypto scam worth $277M. Su Zhu's $36M Luxury home was transformed into an eco-farm run by his wife. The house was acquired before 3AC. Zhu was apprehended at Singapore's airport on September 29, after attempting to flee the country. Hong Kong's $128M JPEX scandal news: the exchange rebrands to a DAO, but the user funds are locked for 2 years, with a claim that 68% of the users supported this move. A recent wave of SIM swap attacks targets Friend.tech users, but it is not limited to them. Even I was called and the procedure was quite interesting, with a call from a local number pretending to be my network and another one joining the conversation with the same number, while simultaneously they required a passcode to transfer the number to a new phone. I think the idea is that you close one call, but the second one still stays open, while you type the passcode into the second call instead of the real website. I was not curious enough to test it. If you do that they will use the passcode to transfer the number to another phone - theirs, getting access to all your accounts. Even Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin fell victim to one of these attacks, losing $691K in ETH. Avalanche social protocol Stars Arena was drained of $3M, and the linked Twitter account seems to have something to do with the exploit. What is happening? Even Galxe got hit by a $160K frontend attack, done by the same hacker behind the Balancer hack. Crypto venture funding has been trending down since Q2 2022, with a %36% decline in both funding and deal count. Binance Labs was the Q3 most active investor by far, with 23 deals, followed by Robot Ventures with 12 deals. I do not know how they do that, as Binance's spot trading has hit its lowest level since October 2020.

• Joke of the week: According to the latest book on the FTX ex-CEO, SBF, he proposed giving $5B (billion) to former US President Donald Trump in exchange for not running for the presidency. The jury pool selection in SBF's trial was reduced to 50 jurors, and on the second day, a further 12 were chosen, by Wednesday morning. Alameda's ex-CEO and the FTX execs who pleaded guilty may testify in the SBF trial. Opening arguments were delivered in the SBF trial. It seems that Alameda's employees only learned about the impending doom from its CEO Caroline Ellison's confession. FTX co-founder Gary Wang admitted that Alameda was allowed to withdraw unlimited funds. But funny enough, FTX employees discovered the $65B Alameda loophole months before the collapse. The world is falling apart and Elon Musk is streaming Diablo 4.

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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.