This week has been bustling with noteworthy updates across the crypto and blockchain landscape. Here’s a concise round-up of the most significant news, market insights, and developments.

Current Crypto Prices

– Bitcoin (BTC): $6o, 938

– Ethereum (ETH): $3,382

– Tether (USDT): $1.00

– Binance Coin (BNB): $571.36

– Cardano (ADA): $0.39

– Solana (SOL): $141.90

Market Highlights

• Bitcoin briefly touched $59K and now hovers around $60K with the sentiment index at “fear,” marking the lowest in 18 months.
• Lido (LDO), an Ether staking protocol, surged by 25% last week.
• AI Tokens are rallying even as NVIDIA experienced a 13% decline.
• Bitcoin ETFs saw nearly $1 billion outflow over the past week.
• Ethereum Traders are bullish, anticipating a new all-time high.
• Dogwifhat dropped 38% over the past 7 days, falling out of the top 50.
• Memecoins like Shiba Inu, PEPE, and FLOKI saw declines of 15.6%, 7.1%, and 15.9% respectively.
• Bitcoin and Ethereum transaction fees dropped to their lowest in 7 months.
• Tether will stop minting USDT on Algorand and EOS, continuing redemption on these blockchains for the next 12 months.

Blockchain Technology

• Permission-Based Repo Ledgers: Successfully handling over $1.5 trillion in securities financing per month.
• Big Banks: Testing ECB’s wholesale distributed ledger technology (DLT), including HSBC, J.P. Morgan, BNP Paribas, and Societe Generale.
• Matter Labs: Introduced a new “Elastic Chain” for ZKsync, aiming at interoperability akin to Polygon’s AggLayer.

Regulatory Updates

• SEC has dropped its investigation into Ethereum (ETH).
• European Central Bank (ECB): Released a progress report focusing on privacy provisions, promising pseudonymization, hashing functions, and encryption features.
• Louisiana: Updates legislation to ban the use of CBDCs and establish new rules for miners and node operators.
• Ripple: The SEC rejected Ripple’s request for a lower penalty.

Investments & Partnerships

• Bitcoin Mining Sector: Gaining investor interest post Core Scientific’s AI deal with CoreWeave. Iris Energy is well-positioned to capitalize on the growing HPC/AI opportunity.
• Japanese Institutional Investors: 54% plan to invest in crypto within the next 3 years, aiming for 2-5% allocation of AUM, according to a Nomura survey.
• Hut 8: Crypto mining firm received a $150M investment from Coatue Management for building AI-related infrastructures.
• Riot Platforms: Dropped its proposal to buy Bitfarms.

Cybersecurity

• SlowMist: Warns of increasing phishing attacks in the TON ecosystem.
• Alex Lab: Suspects Lazarus Group behind last month’s $4.3M exploit.
• MakerDAO: A key delegate lost $11M worth of tokens in a phishing scam.
• CoinStats: Experiences a security breach affecting 1,590 wallets, with swift action taken to suspend user activity.

Miscellaneous

• Mt. Gox: Scheduled to start repayments in July, returning funds in BTC and BCH to victims of the 2014 hack.
• Jump Crypto: President Kanav Kariya resigns amid pending CFTC investigation reports.
• Apple: Holds back AI releases in the EU due to the Digital Markets rule.
• Marathon’s Bitcoin Mining: Project is warming a town of 11,000 residents in Finland’s Satakunte region.
• Standard Chartered: Opens Bitcoin and Ethereum trading desk in London.

Stay tuned for more updates and in-depth analyses as we continue to monitor the ever-evolving crypto and blockchain landscape.