Blackrock incorporates Bitcoin futures contracts into its financial products

The rumor that a double-transaction took place last week on Bitcoin is false. The rumor is that this double-transaction has damaged the fundamentals of Bitcoin and caused a 12% drop in the price of BTC.
Two blocks were simultaneously mined, with a competing trade on each, but the problem was resolved on the next block. This is a phenomenon foreseen by the protocol and without any impact on the security of the blockchain.

The Grayscale investment fund incorporates six new products: LINK, XTZ, MANA, BAT, LPT and WIRE, which does not necessarily mean that these products will be offered to customers at this time.
In addition, the premium on their flagship product GBTC has fallen below 5%, down from 40% a month ago, which may reflect lower demand from institutional investors.

Rick and Morty’s creator, Justin Roiland, sold his first collection of digital art, in the form of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), for 1300 ETH, or $1.65M.
This collection is composed of 16 more or less rare works.
The smintons", whose physical version sold for $15k on Ebay, sold for $290k on its NFT version.

Still on the theme of NFTs, Alex Masmej launches tryshowtime, which he presents as the NFTs’ instagram.
This new platform allows digital art creators to present them to the world and to build a base of followers.

The world’s largest investment fund, Blackrock, will include Bitcoin futures in two of its products.
One of the firm’s executives said that Bitcoin will become an asset that investors will use for a long time to come.
This decision reinforces the idea that the current market is being driven by institutional investors.

KyberNetwork is about to begin a major update of its protocol.
The goal is to move from a simple liquidity protocol to a network of liquidity protocols that are all specialized on specific tasks.
A new mechanism called DMM (Dynamic Market Maker) is expected to be 100 times more efficient than the current AMM (Automated Market Maker).
This evolution will be carried out in two distinct phases throughout 2021.

Several automakers, including BMW and Ford, have launched an initiative to create certificates for their vehicles on the blockchain.
These certificates will be used to track the registration or maintenance of a car, but also to combat fraud.

The "Banque de France" launched in December a simulation using a CBDC to manage money market funds. This simulation was made thanks to the technology of SETL, a British company specialized in DLT for financial institutions.
The simulation managed nearly 2 million euros of volume through the CBDC.

The Enjin protocol becomes the first regulated token for gaming in Japan. In the Japanese ecosystem, where the video game industry is strong, this should boost not only the Enjin protocol, but also games based on the blockchain.

Although earlier in 2020, the Yearn protocol governance had decided not to issue any more YFI tokens, a new proposal to issue the token has just been proposed to the project governance. This proposal would issue the equivalent of $200 million in YFI, increasing the number of tokens in circulation by 22%, to be distributed to protocol contributors and added to the project’s cash flow.

Figure of the week

Bitcoin finds some of its superb in the DeFi

The number of BTCs used in DeFi is back to its highest level, with 153k BTCs tokenized on Ethereum.