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.
ℹ️ 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.