Elon Musk and social networks are shaking up the financial markets

India is preparing to ban Bitcoin and other cryptoassets. A law is in preparation that will ban “any private currency” from the country.
However, the government emphasizes the value of the blockchain and could quickly create a state-owned cryptocurrency, like other central banks.

In Switzerland, Tokenized assets now have the same status as traditional assets. This decision could have a major impact on the entire market, as these assets are now considered to have the same value as a written agreement.
As a result, several players in the Swiss ecosystem have generated assets that are already usable.

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla among others, blew up the Bitcoin stock price last Friday, replacing his Twitter bio with “#Bitcoin”, followed by a tweet a few minutes later saying “In retrospect, it was inevitable”.
The price movement of more than 15% upward caused $420 million in losses to traders who had open short positions on BTC.
Elon Musk also said that Bitcoin was “something good” and was about to be accepted by traditional finance as an asset in its own right.

In addition to promoting Bitcoin, Elon Musk also promoted Dogecoin, a joke currency. The result: a 500% increase in the value of DOGE, driven by the fever of Reddit users, already heated by the Gamestop saga.

Al Kelly, Visa’s CEO, suggested that the payment giant may well add some cryptocurrencies to the list of 160 currencies supported by the service.
He had previously referred to Bitcoin as “digital gold” which had not been specifically intended for use as a payment method until now.
Visa would therefore be well positioned to help Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies to be used globally and securely as a means of payment.

A partnership between SBI Holdings and SMFG will create Japan’s first market place based on blockchain technology.
The platform will be launched in Osaka and will compete with the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

The dydx decentralized exchange platform, well known to decentralized finance adepts, announces that it has raised $10 million from investors including Three Arrows Capital and DeFiance Capital.
These funds should enable the platform to continue its development, notably by offering derivative products such as futures contracts, and by further decentralizing its operations.

Parastate, a bridge project between Ethereum and Polkadot, received $1.3 million in funding. If completed, this project will allow Ethereum’s dApps to make an easy transition to Polkadot.

Grayscale dives more and more into crypto, and launches 6 new backgrounds. The new tokens are : Aave, Polkadot, Monero, Cardano, Cosmos and EOS.

AlphaFinance Lab has just launched v2 of the AlphaHomora protocol, a project aimed at creating automated farming pools based on existing DeFi platforms.
This launch allows users to migrate their positions directly from v1 to v2. At the same time, the project distributed a NFT linked to this v2 to some of its users.

Figures of the week

Ethereum miners have a smile on their face…

Ethereum miners received $800M in revenue in January 2021, the highest ever. 40% of this income came from commissions on transactions.

And Bitcoin miners even more!

For Bitcoin, more than a billion dollars of income was distributed to miners over the same period.

The DeFi, a privileged field of attack for hackers

In 2020, 50% of cryptos thefts are attacks against DeFi protocols, with nearly $130 million in losses. En 2020, 50% des vols de cryptos sont des attaques contre des protocoles de la DeFi, avec près de 130 millions de dollars de pertes.

Uniswap continues its amazing ascent…

In January, the Uniswap protocol volume was $30 billion, twice as much as the previous month.

And the DeFi as well!

The $30 billion mark under management has been exceeded for DeFi protocols.