On why everyone has their own NFT platform and what $1billion can do for it (weekly crypto updates)

This week was a funny one. We have SEC almost ready to approve a BTC based ETF, Polkadot getting their parachains ready and Binance saying words like Billion. One Billion dollars. What more, just read bellow:

• Bitcoin: US SEC just approved an ETF for companies with BTC exposure, and maybe one day a Futures based BTC ETF could be approved soon enough. As for the total value, Bitcoin is on its way to an ATH, already being 62K, and it's matter of days until the previous 64800 will be a thing of the past. Vitalik Buterin criticized El Salvador's president, saying that what they are trying to do is against everything that Bitcoin stands for. And, as I was expecting, now US is the largest bitcoin market, with 35.4% of the global hashrate, after the Chinese crypto ban. Kazahstan is next, with 18%, followed by Russia with 11%. No 51% attack danger anymore, and the future will tell us if this is good or bad for crypto.
• Ethereum: The total ETH held by miners reached the highest level since 2016 as ETH 2.0 implementation is getting closer. Some people are even talking about the Flippening (the moment when ETH will overcome BTC).
• Altcoins: Compound missing sign '=' resulted in 162 million dollars drained and was finally fixed after 7 days. This is DAO for you. ThorSwap is finally recovering after the last two exploits, and they got functionality restored for BTC, BCH, LTC and BSC, with plans to add LUNA and ATOM. As Kusama (the Polkadot canary network) parachain auctions plan went well, Polkadot parachains auctions will start on 11th of November 2021, with five of them, one every 7 days, and another seven parachains will be auctioned from December 23rd. Filecoin (FIL) has chosen Flow (FLOW) as the blockchain official storage partner, to store the NFTs minted on Dapper Lab's Network. Harmony is offering native tokens incentive to attract users and developers, while they are adding mobile-first, fintech access and trustless bridging to this sweet deal. Liquidity mining on Alpha Homora is extended from 13th to 27th of October, with extra 60K ALPHA to be distributed to V1 borrowers. Also Shapeshift finished their initial LP staking rewards on 13th of October, but a new round 2 started, with the only problem for small investors being that the ETH fees to unstake the LP staked on round 1 are more expensive that the rewards (I staked 400$, received 49$ in rewards, and the fees are around 100$, so, ETH really needs to fix this if they want more than institutional investors). Celo is working to make it possible to use stablecoins as digital currencies for unbanked population, after the succes achieved by Axie's SLP in some Asian countries. And some fairytale story, did you hear of Olympus DAO? I have only heard of them on UMA discord, if I am not mistaken, and I must tell you, of you are not there you are missing out. Basically UMA enables anyone to build decentralized financial products assisting many emerging DAO with different products like KPI for example, and you can even support them on various roles via their SuperUman initiative. There is a lot to learn in there, and their team is amazing (and I am not only saying that because my brother @pvmihalache is part of the SuperUmans). This is how I found that Volatility project is working on the second batch of their own KPI, after succesfully releasing their first one. What makes Volatility (VOL) special? Consistent returns above 500% on their staking, to name one reason. Check them too.
• NFTs: Starting with Dr.Who: Worlds Appart, if you have been active in there, signing for the Newsletter and Discord, then you may want to claim your 2 free NFT packs. Splinterlands are launching their new NFT packs Monday 18th, are you ready for them? McDonald's China released a series of 188 NFT to celebrate 31 years of activity, only for its employees and customers. They are built on Conflux (CFX) a blockchain I never heard of it before. The famed Creative Artists Agency (CAA), the Hollywood talent agency representing Beyonce and Shakira, just secured a deal with the NFT collector 0xb1. Axie is having a field day, with more than 2 million active players, as the number one Dapp by revenue, behind only Ethereum itself. Even more, now we have AXS staking, and more than 25% of the total supply is staked, after the AXS airdrop. You can even buy AXS and SLP on Ronin now, via card, using RAMP Network. More good news, FTX NFTs regulated marketplace is now working on SOL, with ETH to be added in the next few weeks. One Kanye West Mural is sold as NFT on YeahProbablyNothing .com on AVAX, and the owner will be linked with a QR code on the physical mural. How cool is that? After Lava labs and United Talent Agency, now Yuga Labs (the ones with Bored Apes) are partnering with Maverick (Britney Spears, Madonna, The Weekns and few others). And you may not have heard a lot about, but Coinbase NFT market is already made, and they have a waitlist to sign up, even if no official date was announced for the launch. More than one million users signed up for the waitlist in just 3 days. I am also trying to test this Pet Kingdom game on BSC, if I will manage to buy their PKD tokens, as Pancake is showing some kind of error. And Sotheby's auction house just launchedd its own NFT platform called Sotheby's Metaverse, where you can buy selected NFTs using ETH, BTC, USDC and fiat. Fox Entertainment got one NFT collection too, based on the Masked Singer competition, and they are working on their own blockchain project, for a NFT platform.
• Good news:Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powel said US is not banning cryptocurrency, and SEC Chairman Gary Gensler reinforced this idea. But regulation will follow soon, i am sure. Sri Lanka is one of the latest countries to adopt crypto officially. What about that, ONE BILLION DOLLARS are coming via an accelerator fund made by Binance in order to enhance the Binance Smart Chain adoption accros the finance technology sector. Big target to hit, well done Mister CZ! Can you see BNB reaching $500 now? And I did not checked yet, but yesterday Celsius announced their in-app swap feature with no fee involved. They even got a naughty graph with their name and no fee, Coinbase up to 3.99% and Binance with up to 0.1%. This will totally change the game if it will pass the local regulation. In order to do this, they raised $400M in a new equity funding round.
• Bad news: Binance is keeping up with the regulations, ceasing the marketplace for the Chinese Yuan over the counter trading. Also, one unlucky guy participating in the STRP token sale on the MISO Launchpad (SUSHI token sale platform) was taxed almost half a million in fees ($430K) for a failed transaction, and 105K to cancel a second one. Oh no, someone from the White House, Washington DC, may have read what I ramble in here, as I was just kindly inviting them last week to get a chair and learn about crypto. Seems that Biden administration will send an executive order soon, requiring the federal agency to study and learn about crypto (we are talking about Treasury, Commerce, National Science and NSA, to name few departments). This may also clarify what is the crypto related role for each agency. Meanwhile, in China, they are working on how to convict and sentence crypto related activity
• Mass adoption: There are 7 crypto-billionaires right now, and some of them you may have heard of, such as Sam Bankman Fried, Brian Armstrong and the Winklevoss twins. Bakkt teamed up with Google to introduce digital assets to its million users, using Bakkt Visa Debit Card added into Google Pay. Coinswitch, the Indian exchange, just raised $260M from big names like Coinbase Ventures and A.Horowitz, and now has been evaluated at $1.91B. Just imagine, $6.5B were raised for crypto start-ups just between July and September, in 339 funding rounds, and compare this with the $3.8B in 2020. We had FTX with $900M, Sorare with $680M and Genesis mining firm with $431M, being the first three on the top. A16z is on his way to Washington to advice on crypto regulation, and I think this is good for crypto. Coinbase is also trying to lobby for a crypto friendly regulation model, meeting with some government officials too. Miami goes forward into becoming a cryptocurrency hub, with a plan made by its mayor to pay their workers in BTC, if they choose this option.
• Joke of the week:UK Gambling Comission is investigating Sorare, yeah, that fantasy football NFT GAME, as they may be or may be not a casino. Come on people, did you ever played Hattrick? Did they even tried to play the game, as this would have beed the quickest way to check it there is a casino in there or not? Somebody need to send them UK GC a link to a NFT definition or some sort of tutorial.

All the best,
George

Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox_ - GamiFI NFT platform) and (CryptoBrewmaster - Beer factory sim)._

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