Banks and Institutions
El Salvador is already spending some Bitcoin profits
A new veterinary hospital will be built in the capital, paid for with the 4 million dollars profit that the country has generated from it’s investments. The president of El Salvador has also stated that four times as many bitcoins are bought instead of being sold, and are increasingly used for remittance from the USA, for instance.
SEC pushes back decision on BTC ETFs to end of the year
The SEC was supposed to come up with a decision on four different Bitcoin ETFs during the next few days, but has now decided to push back this decision until at least the end of november. Global X, Valkyrie, WisdomTree and Kryptoin are the four different projects awaiting approval.
110 countries are working on CBDCs
According to the IMF managing director, 110 countries are at various stages of developing a CBDB, or state cryptocurrency. A recent IMF report actively encourages emerging countries to develop CBDCs in order to improve financial stability. Currently, the Bahamas is the only nation with a state-backed digital currency launched in 2020. China is the largest economy working on a CBDC so far, and is still testing the digital yuan.
Institutions are buying Bitcoin instead of gold
According to JP Morgan, the recent price increase of Bitcoin has been led by institutional investors trying to hedge themselves against inflation. Several investment fund managers have stated that they are abandoning gold in favor of Bitcoin, seen as a better store of value at least in the short term.
Crypto ecosystem
Binance could settle in Ireland
The Binance platform, well-known for being a nomad company emphasizing “decentralized principles”, could settle in Ireland, under the pressure of regulators from different countries. Binance has initially located it’s headquarters in China, then Tokyo, beforme moving to Malta. As of 2020, the government of the island has denied that Binance was operating from the Malta.
MakerDAO gets some competition
Abracadabra.money has now reached a collateral of one billion USD. The multichain platform offers a service similar to makerDAO, where users can stake their Curve and Yearn related tokens such as yvUSDC or yvcrvIB and borrow a stablecoin called MIM (Magic Internet Money). Farming is also available using the internal token Spell.
Ethereum dominates the NFT market
97% of all NFT exchanges are done on Ethereum, despite the high commissions of the protocol. The Flow blockchain represented a challenge during the beginning of 2021 through it’s adoption by the NBA Top Shot platform, but has now dwindeled to almost no volume. Collectible NFTs now represent almost 100% of the market.
An interest rate trading platform to be launched on DeFi
strips.finance is being lauched on october 13, allowing investors to trade interest rates, after a 8.5 million dollar token private sale. Traders will be able to swap interest rates on the platform, going long or short.
Technology
Compound solves a costly bug
The bug on the Compound platform which distributed about 50 million USD should now be fixed. Proposal 64 has been adopted unanimously and will severely limit the production and distribution of COMP tokens until the problem is solved once and for all. Tokens erroneously distributed will remain so.
Tether reserves once again under scrutiny
Tether has reportedly lent billions of dollars from their reserves to crypto companies which provided BTC as collateral. Celsius Network for instance has received one billion dollars through a 5 to 6% interest loan. There have also been several rumors about Tether owning corporate bonds of chinese firms, which have not been denied, raising doubts about the real contents of the reserves.
NFTs used as collateral for loans have unexpected consequences
On the nftfi.com platform, NFTs can be locked as collateral for loans. A lender just received a NFT worth 340,000$ for a 3.5 ETH loan that hadn’t been paid back. The “Elevated Deconstructions” NFT increased largely in value after being endorsed by a well-known Twitter account.
Latest figures
- The Bitcoin market cap is back above one trillion dollars.
- More than 31 billion USD have been exchanged during one single day, 70% of all transactions are worth more than 10 million USD.
- There is on average one transaction per day on all combined Cardano smart contracts.
- 500,000 ETH have now been burned.
