Crypto pumps after Fed rate hike, Zuck pins hopes on Metaverse making hundreds of billions, and Tesla posts $64M BTC gain: Hodler’s Digest, July 24–30

Please fol­low and like us:
Pin Share

Com­ing every Sat­ur­day, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every sin­gle impor­tant news sto­ry that hap­pened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adop­tion and reg­u­la­tion high­lights, lead­ing coins, pre­dic­tions and much more — a week on Coin­tele­graph in one link.

Top Stories This Week

 

‘Bullish rate hike’ — Why crypto spiked in the face of bad news

Despite the U.S. Fed­er­al Reserve announc­ing a 75-basis-point inter­est rate hike on Wednes­day, the cryp­to mar­kets pumped sig­nif­i­cant­ly on the same day with the momen­tum con­tin­u­ing through the week. Quan­tum Eco­nom­ics founder and CEO Mati Greenspan jok­ing­ly called it a “bull­ish rate hike” and stat­ed that investors were clear­ly expect­ing far worse. Ana­lysts such as Swyftx’s Pav Hun­dal sug­gest­ed the recent ral­ly may be due to an eas­ing of infla­tion­ary pres­sures around gas and goods such as corn and wheat.

 

Ethereum dev confirms Goerli merger date, the final update before the Merge

On Thurs­day, lead Ethereum devel­op­er Tim Beiko revealed that the final Goer­li test­net merg­er ahead of Ethereum’s long-await­ed Merge and switch to proof-of-stake will occur between Aug. 6–12. In what has been a long and much-delayed roadmap since late 2020, the Ethereum net­work is now in the final stages of com­plet­ing its largest upgrade to date. The offi­cial Merge is slat­ed for Sept. 19 but could be sub­ject to fur­ther delays if there are issues with the Goer­li testnet. 

 

 

Zuckerberg unfazed about $2.8B metaverse division loss in Q2

Meta CEO Mark Zucker­berg stat­ed that he was unfazed by the com­pa­ny cop­ping a $2.8 bil­lion loss on its Meta­verse divi­sion in Q2. He high­light­ed that the company’s Meta­verse goals will take sev­er­al years to roll out, but he sees a “mas­sive oppor­tu­ni­ty” to make hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars, or even tril­lions, over time as the sec­tor matures. “I’m con­fi­dent that we’re going to be glad that we played an impor­tant role in build­ing this,” he said.

 

Cathie Wood sells Coinbase shares amid insider trading allegations

Cathie Wood’s invest­ment firm Ark Invest­ment Man­age­ment, which is one of the largest share­hold­ers of Coin­base (COIN), report­ed­ly dumped 1.4 mil­lion COIN shares on Tues­day. The shed­ding was done via three of Ark’s exchange-trad­ed funds (ETF), and the sale was esti­mat­ed to be worth around $75 mil­lion. The firm report­ed­ly held near­ly 9 mil­lion COIN shares in late June and has con­tin­u­al­ly snapped up the stock since it opened at rough­ly $350 last April. Since then, the price has tanked heav­i­ly to sit just below $63, and Ark prob­a­bly should have short­ed it when Jim Cramer called it “cheap” at $248 last August.

 

Tesla reports $64M profit from Bitcoin sale

The Elon Musk-led elec­tric vehi­cle mak­er Tes­la post­ed a respectable $64 mil­lion prof­it after sell­ing 75% of its BTC hold­ings in Q2. The gains seem notable con­sid­er­ing the com­pa­ny sold dur­ing the mid­dle of a bear mar­ket; how­ev­er, what’s more impor­tant and excit­ing is that Musk appears to be final­ly los­ing inter­est in cryp­to and we won’t need to hear from him any­more. The firm is said to still have 10,800 BTC on its books, which is worth around $255 mil­lion at the time of writing.

 

 

 

Winners and Losers

 

At the end of the week, Bit­coin (BTC) is at $23,559.86, Ether (ETH) at $1,674.34 and XRP at $0.36. The total mar­ket cap is at $1.08 tril­lion, accord­ing to CoinMarketCap.

Among the biggest 100 cryp­tocur­ren­cies, the top three alt­coin gain­ers of the week are Opti­mism (OP) at 75.71%, Ethereum Clas­sic (ETC) at 58.20% and Qtum (QTUM) at 41.89%.  

The top three alt­coin losers of the week are Huo­bi Token (HT) at 9.10%, Kusama (KSM) at 8.98% and NEAR Pro­to­col (NEAR) at 7.76%.

For more info on cryp­to prices, make sure to read Cointelegraph’s mar­ket analy­sis.

 

 

 

 

Most Memorable Quotations

 

“A lot of NFT projects are just spec­u­la­tion with no real tan­gi­ble spine, no real true sto­ry. Hav­ing a foot­ball club to root for every week? That’s a spine that peo­ple attach them­selves to.” 

Pre­ston John­son, co-own­er of Craw­ley Town F.C. and co-founder of WAGMI United

 

“Indus­try shouldn’t be allowed to write the rules that they want to play by.”

Sher­rod Brown, U.S. sen­a­tor and chair of the Sen­ate Bank­ing Committee

 

“We think it is more rel­e­vant for local projects to ben­e­fit the local econ­o­my, and not just take prod­ucts to the Unit­ed States to ben­e­fit traders there, for example.” 

Lou Yu, head of KuCoin Labs 

 

“Pow­ell is par­tic­u­lar­ly skilled at deliv­er­ing bad news. Clear­ly investors were expect­ing worse.” 

Mati Greenspan, founder and CEO of Quan­tum Economics

 

“The Meta­verse is a mas­sive oppor­tu­ni­ty for a num­ber of rea­sons. I feel even more strong­ly now that devel­op­ing these plat­forms will unlock hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars, if not tril­lions, over time.” 

Mark Zucker­berg, CEO of Meta

 

“I wor­ry about things that are not direct­ly relat­ed to blockchain and the Meta­verse. I wor­ry about cli­mate change and about social fragmentation.” 

Neal Stephen­son, author of Snow Crash

 

Prediction of the Week 

 

GameFi industry to see $2.8 billion valuation in six years

Absolute Reports pub­lished a Game­Fi-focused report this week esti­mat­ing that the play-to-earn NFT gam­ing indus­try will be worth $2.8 bil­lion by 2028. For it to reach the tar­get, Game­Fi would need a com­pound annu­al growth rate of 20.4% over six years, giv­en that the sec­tor was esti­mat­ed to be worth $776.9 mil­lion last year. The rea­sons for this lofty tar­get, how­ev­er, are locked behind a paywall.

 

 

FUD of the Week 

Solana-based stablecoin NIRV drops 85% following $3.5M exploit

The algo­rith­mic sta­ble­coin from Solana-based adap­tive yield pro­to­col Nir­vana Finance, NIRV, de-pegged by 85% this week after the pro­to­col was hacked for $3.49 mil­lion worth of USDT. The inci­dent was cit­ed as a flash loan attack which result­ed in the funds being siphoned from Nirvana’s trea­sury. Its native token, ANA, also dropped 85% as a result of the hack.

 

Phishing risks escalate as Celsius confirms client emails leaked

On Tues­day, belea­guered and bank­rupt cryp­to lend­ing firm Cel­sius emailed its cus­tomers, inform­ing them that a list of their emails had been leaked by an employ­ee of one of its busi­ness data man­age­ment and mes­sag­ing ven­dors, Customer.io. The firm has played down the inci­dent, stat­ing that it did not “present any high risks to [its] clients,” adding that they just want­ed users to “be aware” — although Cel­sius also said sim­i­lar things regard­ing users’ assets after paus­ing with­drawals sev­er­al weeks ago.

 

TikTok data policy debacle: Is user’s crypto at risk?

Pop­u­lar social media app Tik­Tok is fac­ing back­lash over its far-reach­ing data col­lec­tion poli­cies that could extract large amounts of sen­si­tive info from a user’s smart­phone or com­put­er. As such, cryp­to users are now wor­ried about whether Tik­Tok is capa­ble of scrap­ing crit­i­cal data such as pri­vate wal­let keys. “Tik­Tok is not just anoth­er video app. That’s the sheep’s cloth­ing. It har­vests swaths of sen­si­tive data that new reports show are being accessed in Bei­jing,” claimed U.S. Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion­er Bren­dan Carr.

 

 

Best Cointelegraph Features

The Merge is Ethereum’s chance to take over Bitcoin, researcher says

Ethereum’s immi­nent tran­si­tion to a proof-of-stake con­sen­sus mech­a­nism will trans­form its mon­e­tary pol­i­cy, poten­tial­ly mak­ing ETH more scarce than Bitcoin.

Tokenomics not Ponzi-nomics: Influencing behavior, making money

Eco­nom­ics is the study of human behav­ior involv­ing scarce resources — and the effects those behav­iors have on those resources, explains Rod­er­ick McKinley.

When worlds collide: Joining Web3 and crypto from Web2

A friend of mine who is a sea­soned Web2 tech exec­u­tive joined a Web3 com­pa­ny in June. A switched-on oper­a­tor, he asked to speak with all 16 staff before decid­ing to join the firm.

 

 

 

Source link

Please fol­low and like us:
Pin Share

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *