- Over the weekend, Bitcoin price has been fluctuating between USD 22,300 and USD 22,500. This week, the markets may be affected by the appearance of the head of the Federal Reserve (FED) in Congress on Tuesday.
- The Rollkit team, working with "rollups," claims that such technology can already work on the Bitcoin blockchain. Their emergence was inspired by Ordinals, as the developers realized that a similar principle could be used to launch "rollups" on Bitcoin. However, at the same time, there are disputes over the terminology used by "Rollkit" and whether it actually means what is claimed, how it would work in practice, and how it differs from existing similar solutions. The Ethereum camp also protests, accusing the developers of deception and stating that the terminology used is misleading, and Bitcoin rollups are not the same as Ethereum rollups.
- Over the weekend, pressure intensified on the largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) official hinted that Binance.US is likely in violation of U.S. securities laws, and The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) wrote that Binance.US and Binance are essentially the same company, which could lead towards serious serious trouble with the SEC.
- WSJ also claimed that the most popular stablecoin, Tether (USDT), faked documents in order to open bank accounts, which Tether denied.
- In response to the sanctions applied to Tornado Cash for money laundering, Ethereum (ETH) developers launched a "mixer" called Privacy Pools that enhances crypto user privacy in hopes that regulators will not target it.
- Struggling US crypto bank Silvergate has closed its platform, which institutional investors used to transfer money to cryptocurrency exchanges. The real consequences of this are unclear, though it is known that many clients had already severed ties with the bank earlier.
- The pace of Ordinals aka "NFTs on Bitcoin," has doubled - it took about two weeks to create the first and second 100,000 of such NFTs, but the number from 200,000 to 300,000 jumped in just a week. As of writing, there are already over 322,000 of them.
- Gemini exchange informed its clients that their data had been leaked and used in attempted theft due to the fault of third parties.
- Uniswap complained that Apple is not approving the exchange's "wallet" application for "unknown reasons."
- The bankrupt crypto platform Celsius exchanged almost 23,000 units of WBTC 23,000 worth approximately USD 515 million for BTC. It is not yet clear why this was done.
- Analyst Noelle Acheson wrote that the current price drop is more "structural," that is, caused by the derivatives market (e.g., forced selling) and lower liquidity. This leads to greater price fluctuations, but not an overall change in sentiment in the market. According to her, if the sentiment was actually significantly reduced, prices would continue to move downward and would not be stuck in the ranges seen now. At the same time, she believes that the bankruptcy of Silvergate could greatly affect the US crypto ecosystem.
- Last week's sell-off was not significant, according to The Bitcoin Layer analysts, but they emphasized that better-than-expected data from the world's largest economies in recent times is changing sentiment in the market. It is now believed that the FED has more opportunities to raise interest rates/keep them high for longer, which would hurt riskier investments as they would become less attractive.
- One of the dominant topics over the weekend was the legendary investor Mark Mobius, who complained about not being able to withdraw his money from China and not receiving any explanations as to why it is currently impossible.
Prepared with DESSENTER.