Don’t be afraid of the shadows. It only means there’s a light nearby! (weekly crypto updates)

What happened in the past week? Celsius is starting to pay its creditors soon. The long-awaited BTC ETF may be here soon. Binance and Coinbase are doing well this year. What else? Read below:

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• Bitcoin: BTC started January 2023 with $16K, as FTX went down. Then recovered to $24K, then down again. But lately, is repeatedly pushing around the $43K mark, and this may be just the beginning. Bitcoin dominance started the year at 40%, but now it is around 52%. Even the Colombian president just became a fresh BTC holder. The mining sector was generally quiet, but they did have two big spikes, with the introduction of the Ordinals NFTs. Which may or may not be a thing in 2024, when the patch will sort out the bug allowing them to exist. Bitwise is hoping for $80K, as soon as its ETF is approved. Hashdex names BitGo as a custodian in a bid for SEC approval on the spot bitcoin ETF. On December 21st, the SEC officials met with representatives from at least 7 big companies, to discuss the launch of the Spot BTC ETF. Bitcoin's mining power reaches new highs, 544 EH/s, impacting mining profitability, again. MicroStrategy used $616M to buy another 14620 BTC. Ark Invest sells 2.25M shares of GBTC and buys 4.32M shares of ProShares ETF.

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• Ethereum: With the Shapella upgrade and the next one to be, ETH will fix its scaling constraints, making it viable for gaming, NFTs, DEFI, and even other apps that we cannot predict. The ETH price is once again above the $1300 mark.

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• Altcoins and stablecoins: USDT invested $500M in BTC mining, and implemented new transparency practices, for the bonus points, but they also cooperated with the authorities and helped to block some accounts pointed out by the FBI, which will not really make them really trustworthy for the rest of us. Also, still dodgy, USDT reached an all-time high market cap of $90B. Paxos is expanding to Solana, on Jan 17.

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• Blockchain games and NFT: Wombat Dungeon Masters' current season is just starting soon. On Splinterlands, the Land 2.0 latest features blog post is available now on PeakD.

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• Good news: Real-world assets will enter a hypergrowth phase in 2024, tied to national Treasuries and other assets, with countries like El Salvador, Brazil and Singapore working on some major projects in the next year. Coinbase was quite down in its share value as 2023 started, but look at them now, building its own layer 2 blockchain, suing regulators and gaining big institutional investors. They did indeed crush its earning estimates. And they also told off Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was claiming that Coinbase is trying to obstruct the development of digital asset regulations? What regulations? They are not here yet, how they should be, anyway. Hong Kong has recently shown an increased openness to crypto, making the city a potential early adopter of Spot BTC ETFs. They are also thinking of proposing licensing requirements for stablecoin issuers. Nearly a decade later, Mt.Gox started to repay its creditors, using $36B. Celsius may start to work with Coinbase and PayPal to facilitate the customers' repayment.

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• Bad news: We had some bad hacks in 2023, and we all remember for example Kyber in November with nearly $54M, Curve with $73M from its stable AMMs, Euler with a whooping $197M lost in a flash loan attack, Multichain with $126M, which it was a rug pull, or maybe not, Atomic Wallet lost $100M worth, Mixin Network $200M in a cloud breach, and many smaller ones. One US district judge agrees with the SEC that Terra Labs sold unregistered securities.

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• Joke of the week: After one year of circus, more or less, SBF was convicted on all seven felony counts, looking at a 115-year sentence. With CZ stepping down as Binance CEO, there are not many emblematic figures to lead the crypto expansion. We do have a16z still, predicting crypto decentralization, modular architecture and AI expansion. Just a fun fact, last 30 days, CZ's net worth gained $25B as BTC went up, yeah, billions, the guy should not be worrying about puny Americans trying to get him.

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All the best,

George

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Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) (Upland - real-life virtual land) and (Rising Star - Music creators game).

...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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