Salvadorian salvation minus Solana substitution = Splinterlands (weekly crypto updates)

This was an interesting week, with no major swings and plenty of good news. Mostly. Salvador is using BTC, even at McD, Solana was down for almost 20 hours, US Treasury sees USDT &co as an imminent danger to the banking industry, andthe NFT market is crazier than ever. What else? Check in here:

• Bitcoin: If you are to invest in El Salvador using Bitcoin, you are exempt from taxes. This is a good start, and hopefully some European countries will follow their example, so I can retire and enjoy life somewhere on the beach. Until then, work as usual. The Bitcoin Salvadorian wallet Chivo has 500k users already, but they suspended new registrations until some technical issues are solved. El Salvador president, Nayib Bukele, admitted that 3 months to adopt BTC was a challenge, and it is not done fully yet. Chivo ATMs are being set in fire in the country capital. All around the world, BTC used more energy until now than the whole year 2020. By the end of 2021, more than 91 TW will be used, enough electricity to power up a country size of Pakistan.

• Ethereum: Arbitum developement team, Offchain Labs, gave assurange that no funds were at risk during the 45 minutes downtime on September 14th. The issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed, they said.

• Altcoins: Cardano is closing the gap with Ethereum, as they adopted smart contracts with their latest Alonzo hard fork. Facebook Diem project is yet to be launched, even if they are working hard on the regulation aspect. EY (Ernst & Young) will move to Polygon for their OpsChain and Blockchain Analyzer, in order to sort out ETH scalability issues. Solana mainnet beta got some initial disruptions, causing a denial of service and the blockchain started to fork out. After that they reach what was called 'resource exhaustion, and Solana blockchain, failing to cope with 400.000 transactions per second, went offline, starting back 20 hours later. It still had longer lag times, and the larger centralized exchanges suspended SOL deposit and withdrawal. Audius (AUDIO) is a crypto based music streaming service, with 6M active users, and they just raised $5M funding to improve. Katy Pery, NAS, Jason Derulo and many others are joining in. Avax Foundation raised $230M to boost liquidity, and, until now, $2.6B are deposited on Avalanche, making it the sixth largest network in TVL terms. XTM (Torum) is the trending coin on DEXTools and increased x8 times in the first day of listing, being also the top 1 most visited coin in the last week on Cryptorank. If you are not on Torum, you may want to know that this one is a crypto-centric social media platform connecting cryptocurrency enthusiasts and blockchain fans all over the world. And some fun numbers, top tier exchanges are responsible for 91.75 of the total spot volume, with Binance having 65.2% of it. The rest of them are Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, Crosstower, Bitstamp and ItBit. Helium reached 150.000 hotspots around the world.

• NFTs: USDT founder, Will Quigley, it is very bullish in regards of NFTs. With an estimate of $10 trillion sales for 2021, I wil be too ( this is half of the GDP of the US economy). I wonder how long it will take to every government to realize the NFT potential. SpaceLoot, the latest NFT blockchain game on Terra (LUNA) is the latest rage, with only $0.2 to mint a NFT. Sotheby's sold their Bored Ape collection with $24M. I am keep hearing good stuff about DefiLand, a new play to earn game based on Solana, an agriculture bussiness simulation. I need to check it. A rare zombie cryptoPunk is auctioneed by Christie's, and the owner is plannig to celebrate his 40th birthday with the money from sale. Solana sold their first NFT worth more than $1M, a Degen Ape #7225.

• Good news: Brevan Howard, one of the world largest hedge fund, wants to launch a cryptocurrency unit soon. This is a massive piece of news for Europe. Meanwhile in UK, Post Office app can be used to connect to DEX, and once that was widely known, the politicians wanted to suspend the service right away. This can surely rise some question marks. Google partnered with Dapper Labs FLOW blockchain to develop web3 products and technology, in order to support NFT, blockchain games and Dapps. Immutable founding round secured $60M from some big names, including Alameda Research and Gary Vee's VaynerFund. They are known for their games Gods Unchained and Guild of Guardians. Huobi started a $10M initiative to invest in early stage GameFi projects. Play2Earn future looks bright. Splinterlands introduced new NFT reward cards, giving another boost to their already highly succesfull project. I still cannot believe that I am close to a $100K Splinterlands account. I start to hear about a new world, Splintermillionaire. Hope to reach that target too.

• Bad news: China is one of the few countries that realized the potential for crypto and blockchain. They did banned BTC mining, but their CBDC was the first to start the game. I am sure they have big plans. Two of their biggest stock exchanges started to use blockchain to reduce costs and increase transparency. Zabu Finance, a Avalanche DEFI App, got hacked for $3.2M in tokens, and asked AVAX and AVAX-based exchanges to help, nevertheless, their price dropped 99% in one hour. You may have heard something about Walmart adopting Litecoin payments, turns out it was just a fake news. Opensea head of product was discovered to use insider knowledge to succesfully trade NFT on the same platform, leading to new policies being adopted by OpenSea. Over 30 exchanges are expected to close the services offered in South Korea, after they adopted new policies. Russia central bank ordered all banks to slow down or stop crypto-related transactions. US Treasury is preparing a report related to stablecoins and the potential risks they pose to the banking industry. Somebody there finally started to do their homework.

• Mass adoption: Ark Investment is working towards an ETF fund in Canada, using Grayscale Bitcoin Trust as main investment. PSG - the football team - signed a sponsorship deal with Crypto.com. Coinbase wants to raise $1.5B via senior notes, for general corporate purposes, days after SEC threatened to sue them for their LEND feature, yet to be launched. Shark Tank Kevin O'Leary was calling BTC garbage in 2019. Now he just increased with crypto investments in his private portfolio form 3% to 7%. Conclusion? Skybridge Capital, the company founded by Anthony Scaramucci, intends to dabble into the crypo ETF world. Coinbase is taking steps to register for crypto futures trading. AMC is now accepting BTC, ETH, BCH and LTC.

• Joke of the week: Last Sunday, Elon told the whole world that he got a new shiba inu dog called Floki. Dogecoin copycat tokens called Shiba Floki and Floki Inu invaded the market shortly after.

Just as a side note, I decided to invest some time learning about NFT creation and maybe even launch a collection soon.

That's all for today.

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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