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- Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cosmos and more Week 7 2024
Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cosmos and more Week 7 2024
Keeping you updated on crypto, web3 and blockchain
TLDR: BlackRock’s BTC ETF Surpass 100K BTC, Starknet Foundation Announces STRK Distribution, Telefonica and Chainlink Team Up, MilkyWay Announces mPoints, First Dymension Governance Proposal Passes, Puffer Finance Becomes Second Largest Restaking Protocol & Celsius Pay Back Creditors.
Bitcoin Highlights of the Week
75% of new investments into Bitcoin are coming from ETFs. BTC ETF investments has increased to 2% of the total historical investment in Bitcoin in just one month as measured by the realized market capitalization.
BlackRock’s BTC ETF, iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), has surpassed 100K BTC under management. IBIT amassed 105,280 BTC in holdings on Feb. 13. The iShares Bitcoin Trust became the first spot Bitcoin ETF in the United States to reach 100,000 BTC in managed assets on the 22nd day of trading.
This week, BTC rose nearly 10% to $53k. Driven by ETF inflows, subsiding Grayscale sales, and, of course, the Lunar New Year. As a result, Bitcoin's market cap reached $1T.
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has donated $3.6M to Brink. Brink is a nonprofit organization supporting developers for the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Bitcoin mining difficulty, the difficulty to solve complex cryptographic puzzles used in the mining process, passed 80 trillion this week. In Bitcoin’s proof-of-work consensus mechanism, a higher difficulty means miners require more computational power and energy to find the correct hash.
Ethereum Highlights of the Week
Starknet, the Ethereum layer-2, built on zk-rollup technology, anounces STRK distribution. The introduction of STRK is intended to decentralize and govern the network. The STRK token will have 7% of its supply distributed to 1.3 million wallets via an airdrop.
Uniswap Foundation have announced it is planning to launch Uniswap v4 in Q3 of this year. The upgrade will optimize smart contracts for complex functionality due to the Dencun upgrade.
DeFi platform Sushi has announced its intentions to launch a decentralized derivatives exchange named Susa on Layer N, an Ethereum layer-2. Susa will offer builders the capability to develop custom applications on top of the exchange, utilizing Layer N's Nord Engine for rapid transactions.
Spain-based telecommunications company Telefonica form partnership with Chainlink Labs. The aim is to enable Polygon smart contracts to interact with Telefonica's networks. The collaboration aims to introduce new use-cases and enhance security by allowing smart contracts to securely query information from Telefonica and enable actions such as secure account creation and fraud detection.
Puffer Finance becomes second largest restaking protocol hitting $850M TVL. Since launching Feb. 1st, Puffer Finance has seen tremendeous support from the crypto community.
ETH perpetual futures open interest has surged on centralized exchanges, hitting an all-time high on Deribit. The rise in the ETH perpetual futures funding rate since the start of February on Deribit suggests an increasing demand for long (buy) positions.
Cosmos Highlights of the Week
MilkyWay announced launch of mPoints, which will be followed by a Mass Drop. When MILK token launches, a whooping 10% of the total supply will be distributed to mPoints holders.
Demex goes live with season 1 of Carbon Credits Reward Program. For this campaign, a total reward pool of 400,000 SWTH is up for grabs.
After Dymension’s mainnet launch, the first governance proposal has passed. The proposal enables the network to meet the high demands of the Dymension ecosystem.
stOSMO vaults goes live. This enable users to mint the stablecoin IST against stOSMO and earn staking rewards.
Akash Network, the first supercloud to provide permissionless access to cloud resources, has gone live on Astrovault. By doing so, Astrovault can now offer new staking pools with $AKT.
Other Highlights of the Week
Animo and Moonbeam are teaming up to launch a crypto game for PlayStation. The companies are bullish that the web3 gaming market could grow by nearly 400% over the next decade.
Celsius, the crypto lender that filed for bankruptcy in 2022, has begun paying back creditors. Celsius has distributed $2B worth of crypto to creditors. 20,000 BTC and 301,000 ETH has been paid to creditors.
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