Tesla invests $1.5 Billion in Bitcoin and boosts price

Tesla invested 10% of its reserves in cash on Bitcoin.
The amount amounts to 1.5 billion dollars.
This makes Tesla the second largest BTC owner after MicroStrategy.
Such a gamble coming from one of Silicon Valley’s largest companies may convince other large companies to follow this strategy, which lends itself well to the current economic uncertainties.

According to a report by Outlier Ventures, the Ethereum blockchain is the one that attracts the most developers today, twice as many as on Bitcoin, and 14% more than Cardano.
If protocols such as Polkadot, Cosmos or Avalanche attract more and more computer scientists, Tron, EOS, Quantum or Komodo are in decline.
The number of developers and their activity is one of the most objective indicators of the interest of a blockchain project in the long term.

In the United States, Bitcoin is taking the place of gold as the 4th favorite investment of Americans.
A study by Bitflyer shows that 76% of American respondents have a positive opinion of investing in cryptocurrencies.
The same study conducted in Japan shows that the Japanese are much more reticent, with only 22% of favorable opinions.

In Germany, an inhabitant was incarcerated for 2 years for maliciously mining Bitcoin by installing malware on unknown machines.
1700 Bitcoin should be recovered by the German justice system.
However, the hacker simply refuses to give access to his Bitcoin wallet.
The authorities therefore have no way to access his Bitcoins without his consent.

Future contracts on the CME (Chicago Stock Exchange) ether were launched.
Futures are regulated products that seek to put a price on the future value of an asset.
8 contracts with different maturities have been deployed.
In addition to broadening the range of ETH investment products for traditional players, these contracts allow to better gauge market sentiment by providing another indicator on the market price of ether.

PayPal speeds up the pace.
The payment giant is investing massively in a new department specialized on crypto with a well developed roadmap.
From the end of the quarter, PayPal should allow its users to feed their accounts with crypto.
This will already allow holders of cryptocurrencies to use them at the 29 million merchants that accept PayPal as a means of payment.

Billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, along with other renowned investors, is launching a new $72 million VC fund dedicated to crypto.

Bitfinex has finished repaying its debt to Tether. In 2018, the company had drawn $900 million from Tether’s reserves, following a dispute with its bank partner who had blocked the equivalent of this amount. This problem has raised many doubts about Tether’s solvency. Even if the repayment has been made, the American justice system will continue to investigate this movement of doubtful funds.

On Thursday, February 4, the Yearn protocol was attacked and lost $11 million. This complex attack, using flash loans and nearly 160 internal transactions, targeted Yearn’s Vault yDAI v1 protocol, using the Curve protocol as part of its attack. The attacker recovered the equivalent of $2.7 million of the $11 million, and $3 million became a charge within the Curve protocol.
Tether reacted, freezing the 1.7 million USDT of stolen funds.
On Yearn’s side, governance is considering using the newly issued YFI tokens to open a position on Maker and pay back the DAIs lost in the Vault yDAI v1.

New from Balancer who gave more details on the V2 of its protocol.
This new version of the protocol will be based on a new architecture that will significantly reduce transaction costs, while offering new solutions to its users as well as to the arbitrators on the platform.
Today, funds under management in the protocol amount to $1.13 billion.

Two new synthetic active ingredients have been developed at UMA.
These allow to bet on the evolution of Bitcoin’s dominance on the market.
BTCDOM increases in value when BTC’s dominance increases, while ALTDOM increases in value when Bitcoin’s dominance decreases.
It is one of the most watched indicators to gauge the beginning and end of Altcoin market cycles.

The tokens arrive on the Cardano blockchain. It will now be possible to create your own native assets on the project. Unlike Ethereum or Tezos which use smart contracts, the tokens will be native, so it is one of the few truly multi-token blockchains. On the other hand, the project remains in the test phase, despite a very strong increase in value.

China continues its trials for the digital yuan, with a new distribution via a lottery system. This time, it is the equivalent of 5 million dollars, distributed to 150,000 inhabitants of the city of Suzhou.

The Bridge between the Avalanche and Ethereum chains is deployed. This allows users to transfer their ETH or ERC20 tokens to the Avalanche channel, and thus to use the DeFi protocols present on Avalanche.

Figure of the week

Increase of visitors on the exchanges

The number of visitors on the exchanges is increasing, with 344 million visitors in January 2021.

A statistic on Ethereum

The one billion transactions on Ethereum has been exceeded.

A statistic on the dollar

75% of the outstanding dollars were issued after the creation of Bitcoin.

A record for Bitcoin

+8,870; the largest daily candle in Bitcoin’s history took place on February 8th.