Bitcoin on its historical highs

Phase 0 of Ethereum 2.0 was successfully deployed on December 1st.
This is the first step in the implementation of Ethereum 2.0, which aims to improve the capacity and security of the network and is based on a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism.
The new network will be fully deployed after Phase 2, in approximately two years.
More than $500 million of ETH has been staked on the new chain.

Ripple sells 33% of its stake in Moneygram.
At the beginning of 2019, the $30 million investment had made a lot of noise, as a first integration of cryptoactives with traditional finance.
Moneygram’s shares have since then almost doubled in value, and Ripple justifies its action as a profit taking.

Chinese authorities seized $4.2 billion in cryptocurrencies.
These funds came from PlusToken, the largest ponzi scheme created to date based on payments in cryptocurrencies.
195,000 BTC, 800,000 ETH, as well as BCH, LTC, EOS, DASH, XRP, DOGE and USDT were confiscated by the Chinese national treasury.

VanEck, an American asset management firm, launches a Bitcoin ETN (Exchange-Traded Node) on the Deutsche Boerse Xetra marketplace.
ETNs are regulated debt products similar to bonds.
Professional investors are fond of this type of product which allows them to gain exposure to Bitcoin through traditional products they are familiar with.

Following the launch of a blockchain to manage document sharing between its various government bodies, Australia is launching a new trial to use a blockchain as a means of exchanging government documents with Singapore.

In one week, 5 mergers between Yearn and DeFi protocols were announced.
The Cream, Cover, Akropolis, Pickle and Sushiswap protocol teams will therefore join Yearn, and the resources of the various projects will be pooled.
Andre Cronje does not present this as a merger, but more as a collaboration or partnership: the protocols will continue to exist, but their teams will pool resources and developers.
In addition, the liquidity of the two protocols Yearn and Sushi will also merge.

Following an abrupt change in the price of the DAI, more than $88 million of collateral was liquidated on Coumpound.
The DAI increased by 30% on Coinbase Pro, and the Coumpound protocol, which uses the Coinbase oracle for the price of the DAI, saw many of its loans under-collateralized and therefore liquidated.
At the same time, nearly 8 million were also liquidated on the dYdX protocol.

Libra, Facebook’s stablecoin, is expected to be launched in January 2021.
Libra will rely only on USD at launch, with other currencies added later. It will be remembered that the major problem raised by the American authorities was the use of a basket of currencies as an underlying for the currency.

Loopring has released the beta version of its mobile wallet, a smart-contract wallet similar to Argent.
It natively integrates the loopring protocol to make free and instant ETH and ERC20 transfers.
The upcoming release of loopring 3.6 will allow AMMs, market places such as Uniswap, Sushiswap or Balancer, to be able to operate in L2 on loopring if they wish.

Figures of the week

Bitcoin on its historical highs…

Bitcoin reaches its historical high at $1,832. You have to go back to December 2017 to see such a price level.

…Ethereum also, on the researches

While Google searches for the keyword Bitcoin are very low compared to 2017 levels, searches for the keyword Ethereum are at an all-time high.
The last peak was in January 2018.

A number on Aave

Since its launch in January, Aave has managed more than $1 billion in flash loans.

CME, at the top

CME has now become the largest derivative market for cryptoactives.

More Ethereum nodes than Bitcoin nodes

There are now more nodes in the Ethereum blockchain (10980) than in the Bitcoin blockchain.