Ecosystem
Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon unveils plan to restore UST peg
Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon has set out his plan for restoring UST’s peg to the dollar. The proposal to increase minting of Luna was put forward on Terra’s governance forum. So far 80 million Luna has voted in favor of it with not a single Luna being used to vote against. This will allow traders to sell UST for Luna at a faster rate. Currently only so much UST can be sold per day, and the proposal states that this is causing Luna to be minted at a worse price, resulting in excess minting of UST. By increasing the amount of UST that can be swapped for Luna, it will increase the rate that investors can exit their UST positions through Luna. This increases the amount of Luna minted short term and therefore puts pressure on LUNA price but should, according to Do Kwon, help restore the UST peg and which should stabilize LUNA price.
Many investors decided to sell their LUNA to avoid further loss but not everyone had this chance. Those who staked their LUNA had a lockup period of 21 days. Excluding liquid staking, 30% of the total LUNA supply or 152 million LUNA is staked at the moment.
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is still calling for stablecoin legislation by the end of the year. She specifically highlighted the weekend’s drama surrounding UST pointing that this rapidly growing product implies rapidly growing risks. Senator Toomey for his part noted an "important distinction" to be made between alogrithmic stablecoins like UST and USD backed stablecoins like USDC and USDT.
Avalanche drops 30% on fears Terra’s LFG will dump AVAX next
Since the Luna Foundation Guard is emptying its crypto reserves to bring its stablecoin back to its $1-peg, there is a risk of a massive AVAX selloff. Frightened by this possibility, the market dumped a lot of AVAX pulling the price from $38 to $28 within 30 minutes. AVAX though quickly recovered and is as of the time of writing above $35. LFG holds at the moment 2 million AVAX representing about $75 million.
Meta will test digital collectibles on Instagram starting this week
According to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta was planning to “bring similar functionality to Facebook soon” and working on “augmented reality NFTs” for Instagram as well. The move would seemingly allow Instagram users to display NFTs as profile profiles as Twitter first announced in September 2021. Reddit is currently testing this feature and Onlyfans already implemented it since December 2021.
Banks and Institutions
Nigeria upgrades CBDC as crypto restrictions cripple fintech industry
The Central Bank of Nigeria is moving ahead with plans to upgrade the country’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) to be used on a wider range of goods and services such as paying electric bills or flight tickets. The upgrade was launched to make onboarding easier, touting its wallet that had no charges and was faster than internet banking. It is also maintaining harsh crypto restrictions that cripple the country’s fintech sector.
Technology
House sold in Portugal for 3 bitcoin in country’s first-ever direct transaction
An apartment in Braga, Portugal was sold for 3 BTC on Thursday in the first-ever real estate sale directly and entirely made in bitcoin. The feat was possible thanks to the new portuguese rules that became effective last month setting the directives as to how owners and real estate agents could sell properties for cryptocurrency directly.
TRON DAO Reserve Launches USDD on Over Seven DEXs and Names First Member and Whitelisted Institution
The TRON DAO Reserve rolled out a decentralized algorithmic stablecoin named USDD (Decentralized USD). The TRON DAO Reserve oversees the issuance and administration of reserves. USDD is algorithmically pegged to the U.S. dollar. The timing of this annoucement is quite questionnable as the crypto space is going crazy with the UST depeg ongoing.
Polkadot now lets you natively send tokens across parachains
Polkadot has enabled a messaging system called Cross-Consensus Messaging format (XCM). This allows all Polkadot-based blockchains to directly communicate with each other for the first time. XCM is not dependent on traditional bridges that rely on the "wrapping" of assets to move them from one blockchain to another. This will make it easy for users of these blockchains to send tokens from one parachain to another through this Relay Chain which is a central hub that secures all parachains.
Figures
- VeChain Foundation reports $1.2B crypto treasury.
- Yuga Labs’ Otherdeed virtual land NFT sells for record $1.5 million.
- El Salvador announces new purchase of 500 BTC.
- NFT markets slump as weekly sales volume dives 30%.
- Bitcoin price is down 50% from november ATH.
- The market had its first 6-week losing streal since 2014.
