People do not lack strength, they lack will! (weekly crypto updates)

What happened in the past week? A lot of noise about BTC, not so much about ETH. Solana is doing well, with some key indicators establishing new records. Coinbase is also in the news. AI tokens value is on the rise. What else? Read below:
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• Bitcoin: Some strange event, as BTC ETF volume spiked lately, to over $250M a day, a 14 times increase, with no reasons or anything related to it. There is a strong resistance at $53K, and BTC struggled to break past it. Reddit revealed its crypto assets investments in new SEC fillings, confirming BTC and ETH, as well as Matic usage for services on its platform. This is so 2016, as two of the European Central Bank (ECB) employees are telling us that BTC has zero fair value, and the bubble will burst soon. Trying to get more supporters, Trump said that BTC's popularity warranted a measured embrace rather than reflexive opposition. Grayscale Bitcoin ETF outflows top $7B this year.
• Coinbase Commerce drops native Bitcoin support, leading towards EVM. A BlackRock ad marketed BTC as 'progress'. Jack Dorsey's Block reported a $207M Bitcoin gain in Q4.
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• Ethereum: ETH price went up 30% in February, ahead of the Dened-Cancun upgrade, but the ETH ETF speculation may also have a say in it. Breaking above $3K for the first time since April 2022, some optimistic experts expect $3.5K next. CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) will launch Euro-denominated Micro Bitcoin and Ether futures. A new layer 2, Mode Network, is all about its airdrop, but with a lot of restricted countries, including the US and the UK, I do not know what to think about it.

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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Worldcoin reached 1M daily active users this month, despite some controversy around the project, and being banned in some regions. Is this looking scammy or too revolutionary for now to comprehend it? Well, most of the AI tokens are going up lately, nearly 30% on average. SOL's new exchange, Backpack, tops the $1B volume in its first 5 days. I may need to take a close look at the Solana ecosystem soon. On top of that, the SOL-based NFTs all-time sales hit $5B this week. SUI, a project started by former Facebook employees, doubled its TVL since January, as they are processing 6000 trx per second in testing while maintaining low fees. USDC is leaving Tron blockchain right now, in February. Starknet airdrop is on (check https://provisions.starknet.io/ to claim it) and some people complain about airdrop hunters being favoured over community builders in this first airdrop. Will they sort this issue out with a second airdrop? At least Starknet reacted to the community, deciding to gradually distribute tokens over 3 years, instead of all at once as they first wanted to do. On Avalanche, Thursday, 9.5M tokens will be unlocked, the price being tested for sure. Ripple CEO was talking about a potential XRP ETF. Yet, Jupiter Asset Management retreated from XRP ETP amid regulatory pressures. Andreessen Horowitz invested $100M into EigenLayer. Aptos had quite a few metrics increasing in Q4, and two notable partnerships, with Alibaba Cloud mad SK Telekom. USDT market cap reached an all-time high of $97.3B and this is worrying me, as I have that strange sensation that all USDT related business is just a house of cards.

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• NFTs and blockchain games: Freshly launched token powering the ETH-based blockchain game Pixels went straight to the top 10, with a surprising $1.3B in exchange activity on the first day. On Splinterlands, the first round of Conflicts airdrop activity ended, with 3 Rage regular cards for me, despite paying 60 Vouchers to increase the chance for a Gold one, and I just wanted to say good luck to everyone participating. The second Conflict already started. One wagon can be bought with 50 Vouchers (around $2.30, less expensive) and deposit up to 5 cards and 100 Rebellion packs to get Airdrop points. You may also want to check Holozing - a soon-to-be-launched Pokemon-like game on the Hive blockchain. BAYC seems ready to start the Apechain and Apecoin projects on Arbitrum, voted by the community over Polygon and zkSync. Pudgy Penguins are selling their toys through Walmart.

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• Good news: ARK Invest sold nearly $90M in Coinbase stock, as they experienced some good earnings lately. Is this good or bad? I let you decide. My Coinbase shares are still 50% in red. Still, Coinbase provides custody for 90% of the BTC spot ETF assets. Talking about a single point of failure. Hong Kong's traditional financial institutions seem to have rushed tapping into crypto demand after regulators opened access. AMD, the leading chip producer, is partnering with Wormhole, to improve its interoperability and security. Crypto-friendly candidates get donations in crypto, as Gemini founders directed nearly $5M to a fund called Fairshake, backing lawmakers embracing crypto, making the fund warchest up to $70M, with much being donated by crypto giants like a16z and Kraken. Japan proposed a bill to allow crypto investments from investment funds. BlockFi is paying some of its creditors, probably a bit under 50% of their assets. Thieves!

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• Bad news: FixedFloat exchange was hacked this week, losing over $26M in BTC and ETH. Honduras banned all crypto activities, quoting money laundering, terrorism and fraud. The whole she-bang! Kraken is challenging the November SEC lawsuit, questioning the case's legitimacy.

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• Joke of the week: There is no joke with all these Nord Korean hackers, as they can do some serious social engineering. Jeff Zirlin, co-creator of the Axie Infinity blockchain game, was hacked this week and lost nearly $10M in ETH. The funds from his Ronin Bridge account bounced through intermediary wallets before being laundered via Tornado Cash.

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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) (Holozing - Pokemon-like game)and (Rising Star - Music creators game).
...Get ETH while writing on Publish0x blog, using 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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