TLDR: SEC Approves BTC ETFs, CoinShares Acquires Valkyrie, Buterin’s Plan to Increase ETH Gas Limit, Injective’s Volan Goes Live, EigenLayer Unite Ethereum and Cosmos & Circle Files for IPO.

Bitcoin Highlights of the Week

SEC Approves BTC Spot ETFs

Finally, the day arrived. This week, the SEC approved 11 BTC Spot ETFs where most notably institutions such as BlackRock, Fidelity, Grayscale, Bitwise, VanEck, Valkyrie, Invesco, WisdomTree, Franklin Templeton, Hashdex, Ark Invest and 21Shares. Within two days, these ETFs traded a volume of $7.7B.

CoinShares Acquires Valkyrie

CoinShares, the European cryptocurrency investment firm, exercises its option to acquire US Bitcoin ETF issuer Valkyrie after they got the SEC’s approval for their BTC ETF.

Elon Musk Considers Using Bitcoin on Mars

Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk shared in a space hosted by ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood, that the currency he could consider bringing to his Mars settlement would be Bitcoin. Originally opposed to the idea due to transaction time, however now Musk considers BTC being the right asset for Mars.

Phoenix Group Increases Mining Capacity

The Bitcoin mining and blockchain company, Phoenix Group PLC, has increased its mining capacity with its latest $187M investment of Bitmain Development’s latest mining machines.

Bitcoin Core v27 Update Aiming to Eject Ordinals

The Bitcoin Core v27 Update aims at ejecting Ordinals, the Bitcoin NFTs, from its blockchain as Ordinal supporters consider a hard fork of Bitcoin similar to Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV in order to keep their NFT on-chain without the risk of their collectibles being nullified by Bitcoin core developers.

The Department of Justice Holds Bitcoin

The Department of Justice in the US announced that it has a BTC holding of 120K bitcoin, valued at $5.4 billion, making the US government a major bitcoin holder in the world.

Ethereum Highlights of the Week

Vitalik’s Plan to Increase Gas Limit

Vitalik Buterin’s recent suggestion to increase the gas limit on Ethereum has sparked concern in the Ethereum dev community. Buterin has openly advocated for a 33% gas limit increase to potentially improve network throughput.

Ethereum Foundation Change Account Abstraction Standard

The Ethereum Foundation is set to push through major changes to the account abstraction standard in the Ethereum ecosystem in order to reduce gas consumption, targeted for Layer-2s.

ETH Spot ETF's Likely to Be Approved

Following this weeks BTC ETF approvals by the SEC in the US, analysts across the board have speculated that ETH ETFs are very likely to be approved in the near future as ETH was classified as a commodity instead of a security which has been the main wording from the SEC when discussing BTC ETFs and thus the long approval process.

EigenLayer Unite Ethereum and Cosmos

EigenLayer is at the forefront of picking the best of both worlds by merging strongsuits from Ethereum and Cosmos with its latest innovation enhancing both by merging ETH's robust security and liquidity with Cosmos' innovative diversity.

Cosmos Highlights of the Week

Gelotto and Injective Team up

Gelotto announced they will be using Injective as official homebase in order to bring Gelotto mainstream. This also means, that Gelotto will bid farewell to its former homebase, Juno Network

Demex Lists $milkTIA on Nitron

Demex Exchange listed MilkyWay’s liquid staked TIA - $milkTIA - on Nitron this week as investors can use the token as collateral. Nitron is the first money market to do so. Investors can get rewards by lending $milkTIA on top of their staking APY.

Injective’s Volan Goes Live

Injective released its largest mainnet upgrade to date, Volan, ushering in a new age of RWAs, institutional adoption, scalability and Web3 finance. The upgrade enables the Injective ecosystem to grow faster than ever before.

Secret Network Announces HackSecret2024

Running from Feb 1st through March 3rd, Secret Network, has announced HackSecret2024 where participants compete to win prizes worth up to $10k; $5k to best Privacy as a Service project, $3k to best native application and $2k bonus to any team with SCRT Africa team members.

Other Highlights of the Week

PYUSD Gains Momentum

$PYUSD, PayPal’s stablecoin, has gained significant moment as its market cap increased more than 70% over the last month. PYUSD has become part of the third-largest liquidity pool on Curve, as the FRAXPYUSD reached $135 million in total value locked (TVL) since its creation on December 27.

Circle Files for IPO

The USDC stablecoin issuer Circle has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) to the SEC. IPO details such as share volume and pricing are yet to be determined. This is not the first time Circle explored an IPO, where latest in 2022 the valuation reached $9B.

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