TLDR: Uniswap Expand to Bitcoin Sidechain Rootstock, Marathon Digital Breaks Own Mining Record, Solana NFTs Surpass Ethereum NFTs, Celsius Unstakes $470M ETH to Fund Repayments, DYDX Chain Launch Incentives Seasons, Injective Volan Mainnet Proposal & Binance Earmark High Risk Tokens.

Bitcoin Highlights of the Week

Anticipated Mass BTC ETF Approvals

The fillings are in, last-minute discussions and changes has been made, and this coming week the crypto community anticipate the SEC will mass approve BTC ETFs as major exchanges post the fillings publicly.

Uniswap Expand to Bitcoin Sidechain Rootstock

In a significant development for the decentralized finance (DeFi) landscape, Uniswap version 3 (v3) has extended its reach to the Bitcoin sidechain Rootstock. This expansion, facilitated by GFX Labs, the team behind the Oku trading terminal, aims to amalgamate the strengths of Ethereum-based Uniswap with the security features of Bitcoin's proof-of-work network.

VanEck Pledge BTC ETF Profits for Development

While their BTC ETF application is pending for approval, the asset manager VanEck has already pledged future ETF profits. VanEck announced this week that 5% of its profits generated by their BTC ETF, will be pledged to BTC core developers through nonprofit organization Brink.

Marathon Digital Breaks Own Mining Record

The Florida-based BTC mining company, Marathon Digital, have surpassed their own previous mining record. Marathon announced, that in December 2023 it mined 1,853 BTC which was a 56% increase from November 2023 and a 290% increase from December 2022.

Cipher Mining Expands Capacity 

This week, BTC mining company Cipher Mining announced their latest purchase of 16,700 new miners ahead of Bitcoin halving, increasing their total mining capacity to 8.4 exahashes per second (EH/s).

Ethereum Highlights of the Week

Solana NFTs Surpass Ethereum NFTs

In December 2023, Solana NFT sales surpassed Ethereum NFT sales by a margin of $366.5M against $353.2M. This underlines Solana’s growing popularity in the crypto community.

Gamma Strategies Gets Exploited

The Arbitrum-based concentrated liquidity management protocol, Gamma Strategies, was exploited for at least $4.5M ETH this week. Initially security researchers believed CryptoAlgebra was the affected protocol, however the victim was later correctly identified as Gamma Strategies.

Celsius Unstakes $470M ETH to Fund Repayments

Celsius, the challenged crypto lending platform, has announced it has initiated liqudation of its ETH stakes to fund repayments to its creditors. Celsius has been in bankruptcy court since its Chapter 11 filing in July 2022, by which it was instructed to repay as many creditors as possible.

Etherscan Acquires Solscan

This week, Etherscan announced its acquisition of Solscan. Both companies operate explorers for their respective blockchains. The driver behind this acquisition from Etherscan, is to expand blockchain data services to multiple networks.

Arbitrum and Optimism Hit All-Time-Highs

Recently L2-platforms Arbitrum and Optimism have seen immense interest in the crypto community, and this week $ARB reached an all-time-high TVL of $2.57B in the protocol, while $OP hits an all-time-high of $4.10.

Cosmos Highlights of the Week

dydx Chain Launch Incentives Seasons

The first trading season of dYdx Launch Incentives ended this week, while season 2 started. With the dydx Launch Incentives program, traders can compete against other traders in their tiers and earn prizes and awards.

Evmos Burn or Transfer Proposals

The Evmos community had to decide whether 136M $EVMOS should be burned or transferred from the Usage Incentives Pool. If the burn proposal passes, 136M $EVMOS in the user incentives balance will be removed from circulation in the next upgrade. If the transfer proposal passes, the 136M $EVMOS will be transferred to the Evmos Community pool in the next upgrade. The community shall then decide what to do with the tokens.

Mettalex Update Tokenomics and Utilities 

Mettalex, the P2P order book and agent-based DEX has provided an update to $MTLX tokenomics and enhances utilities.

Injective Volan Mainnet Proposal 

The Injective Volan Mainnet proposal went live this week of which unmatched L1 infrastructure with novel advancements including; the world's first ever RWA Module, enhanced scalability and new token burn capabilities are proposed.

Persistence To Launch stkDYDX with pSTAKE

pSTAKE is gearing up to expand its liquid staking support to the dYdX chain with the imminent launch of stkDYDX. stkDYDX is expected to launch soon after the dYdX chain upgrades to enable ICA accounts on the chain.

Other Highlights of the Week

Orbit Chain $86M Hack

Orbit Chain's cross-chain bridge fell victim to a hack New Years Eve which resulted in the loss of $86M in stablecoins and other tokens. The hack comprised of separate transactions where; $50M in stablecoins, 231 wBTC (approx. $10M) and 9,500 ETH (approx. $21.5M) where sent to illicit wallets.

Binance Earmark High Risk Tokens

Binance has placed “monitoring tags” on a slew of coins and tokens — including several major privacy coins — warning that these assets may no longer meet the exchange’s listing criteria. The tokens in question are; $ANT, $FIRO, $KP3R, $MDX, $MOB, $REEF, $VAI, $XMR, $ZEC and $ZEN.

Avalanche Foundation Plan Mass Buy of Memecoins

Avalanche Foundation have announced plans to expand their asset portfolio by initiating investing in memecoins on Avalanche, dubbed the Culture Catalyst. Naturally, this announcement created a surge in price of many memecoins.

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