TLDR: BTC ETF Approvals in Hong Kong, DEX Portal Raise Seed Capital, Starknet and Celestia Team Up, Final Ethereum Dencun Test, CALC Finance Introduces Streaming Swaps, FTX Trial Ends, Celsius Bankruptcy Process Ends & $JUP Goes Live on Solana.

Bitcoin Highlights of the Week

BTC ETF Approvals in Hong Kong

Amid mass BTC ETF approvals in the US, it seems Hong Kong is the next destination for mass approvals. Hong Kong regulators are set to approve the first BTC spot ETF in February. It’s estimated that there are ~10 asset managers exploring ETFs in Hong Kong.

BlackRock’s BTC ETF King of the Hill

Grayscale’s BTC ETF has been surpassed by BlackRock’s spot bitcoin ETF in daily volume. BlackRock’s IBIT registered $304M in daily trading volume compared to $292M for Grayscale’s GBTC.

DEX Portal Raise Seed Capital

Bitcoin DeFi receives a lot of love these days. DEX Portal, which is Bitcoin’s cross-chain, has raised $34M in seed funding with investors being Coinbase Ventures and OKX Ventures to name a few. The raise was 2x oversubscribed due to interest in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Velar Secure Funding

Velar, the Bitcoin-based perpetual swaps platform, raised $3.5 million in venture funding. Velar builds its platform on Stacks’ upcoming Nakamoto Release and its synthetic Bitcoin token, sBTC.

Bitcoin Ordinals Struggle 

Bitcoin Ordinals sales took a drastic fall in January. The Bitcoin-native NFTs has seen slowing interest of late, yet the upcoming halving could reignite interest eco insiders claim.

Ethereum Highlights of the Week

TreasureDAO Possible Migration to Optimism

The Optimism co-founder, Ben Jones, has proposed Arbitrum’s TreasureDAO to migrate to Optimism. Ben Jones argues, that Optimism will provide enhanced scalability, integration into the OP Stack's web of L2s, and a community dedicated to decentralized gaming.

Final Ethereum Dencun Test

The Ethereum eco will go through its final test for the Dencun upgrade. If it’s successful, the real upgrade could be scheduled for the end of February or early March.

CoinShares Launch Staking Dividends

Clients and investors of CoinShares Physical Ethereum ETP will start earning staking rewards. In a move to become a more attractive business case, CoinShares has initiated paying our ETH staking yields to cliens of 1.25% per year.

Orbiter Finance Announces Own L2 Network

Orbiter Finance announces detailed plans for their Orbiter Rollup. Orbiter Rollup is set to be a new zero-knowledge proof powered Ethereum layer 2 network.

LayerZero V2 Goes Live

LayerZero launches their V2 upgrade. With V2, users get a new iteration that enable developers to build apps and tokens that work the same way across every blockchain.

Cosmos Highlights of the Week

Starknet and Celestia Team Up

Starknet and Celestia announces partnership. This partnership enables creations of high-throughput L3s to be made in Cosmos.

Wormhole and Dymension Integration

Wormhole and Dymension have announced their plan to integrate. Dymension allows chains to scale with minimal overhead using shared security. With Wormhole, users can transfer their assets to RollApps and leverage Dymension's shared liquidity!

OmniFlix Network Proposal #29

This week OmniFlix Network Proposal #29 went live for voting. The community shall decide upon OmniFlix Hub v2.1 upgrade for improved oNFT query, streampay Fee Update with sender paying fees, and collection-based royalty splits.

CALC Finance Introduces Streaming Swaps

CALC Finance introduces Streaming Swaps. This enables traders to make more efficient trades compared to market swaps.

Archway Launch NFT Pioneer Grants Program

Archway Launch NFT Pioneer Grants Program. With this program, NFT builders, designers, founders, and explorers can apply to be granted funds to fuel their innovative projects.

Other Highlights of the Week

FTX Trial Ends

The legal battle upon FTX collapse has ended. The conclusion is, that FTX will be repaying its customers in full based on market fiat prices of assets tied to when FTX declared bankruptcy. FTX is estimated to pay back $30-35B to around 15M customers.

Celsius Bankruptcy Process Ends

Celsius’ bankruptcy process ended this week. Celsius will begin paying back $3B to creditors, facilitated by Coinbase and PayPal. By end February the Celsius app will retire.

$JUP Goes Live on Solana

The native token $JUP went live on Solana. $JUP is the native token of Jupiter, which is Solana’s largest decentralized exchange platform. The token has settled at around a fully diluted valuation of just under $6B, at a price of $0.592 per $JUP.

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