Bitcoin’s capitalization reaches 7% of gold’s

Tetragon, the lead investor in Ripple’s Series C, is filing a complaint against the company.
The complaint follows recent actions by the SEC, the U.S. regulator, which accuses Ripple of selling financial securities without going through the regulatory process.
Tetragon is seeking to recover its investment and wants to exercise its contractual rights to prevent Ripple from spending their Series C funds until they have repaid them.

The first stablecoin appears on the Tezos blockchain.
Baptized Kolibri, with the symbol kUSD, it works on a principle similar to MakerDAO on the Ethereum blockchain.
For the moment in test phase, it is nevertheless a significant advance for this new development space.

Dan Larimer, CTO of Block.One and founder of the EOS project, announces his departure from the project.
This news should weigh on confidence in the project, which is currently unable to establish itself on the market as a smart contract platform.
Dan Larimer had previously founded the BitShares and Steem projects.

Pension funds are getting into Bitcoin.
According to Grayscale, after investment funds, it is the turn of American pension funds to invest in the crypto market.
It seems that 36% of financial institutions in the United States now hold crypto assets.

Blockchain is put to work in the fight against COVID.
An app now provides digital certificates on the VeChain blockchain for each person vaccinated.
The app is already being used by hospitals in Cyprus.

As of Wednesday, January 6, derivatives based on crypto assets are banned in the UK.
This ban affects futures, options, and products with a crypto underlying.
Players in the UK crypto industry regret this decision, claiming that it will drive customers interested in these products to offshore platforms.

Again in the UK, HSBC bank is now blocking transfers to and from crypto asset trading platforms.
The use of HSBC credit cards is also blocked.
The reason is again the fight against money laundering and dirty money.

Sushiswap announces its roadmap for the coming year. If some projects, such as BentoBox or the V2 of the Sushi protocol were already known, the team also announced new projects, such as a Crosschain exchange, an implementation on Polkadot, or even hints for the potential change of name of the protocol.

In the continuation of its tests for a digital yuan, China is launching the installation of vending machines.
These machines allow users to exchange yuan for the digital currency, and vice versa.
This initiative is taking place in Shenzhen, where digital yuan were distributed during a lottery recently.

The Avalanche network plans to deploy several bridges to the Ethereum chain in the coming months. These bridges are based on the ChainSafe system, and will allow to send Ethereum tokens or NFTs to the Avalanche chain.

Layer 2 solution Optimism will launch a preliminary version of its system on the Ethereum mainnet on January 15.
Optimism is one of the most promising layer 2 Ethereum projects, alongside Loopring and zkSync.
This first version will be tested by the Synthetix Network project, which will deploy all of its contracts on Optimism. The project leaders expect bugs in this first version and expect to release a final version by March.
It is the first to ensure almost complete compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and its smart contracts.

Figures of the week

Bitcoin is approaching the total capitalization of gold

The capitalization of Bitcoin reaches 7% of that of gold.

A statistic about Bitcoin

$379 billion in Bitcoin was traded on online platforms in December.

New record for Ethereum

Google searches for the word Ethereum are at an all-time high.

Bitcoin takes its place alongside traditional currencies

Bitcoin is now the fifth most valuable currency, after the dollar, euro, yuan and yen.

A statute on decentralized finance

The total value locked within the DeFi protocols exceeds $20 billion.