Date: 10/01/2021
“If you sell your bitcoin because an authoritarian government doesn’t like it, you don’t understand Bitcoin.” — Lina Seiche, editor and managing director at the BTC Times
Weekly News Report:
1. Bitcoin shot to nearly $48,000 during Oct. 1 as a classic “short squeeze” liquidated over $270 million of crypto positions in under an hour. The mood was just as buoyant among major altcoins, which in some cases saw gains of over 10%, matching BTC/USD.
2. Axie Infinity’s price surged to a record high above $118 following the release of a huge airdrop to early supporters and the launch of staking for AXS token. Since bounding off a low of $47.92 on Sept. 21, the price of AXS has stormed 145% higher to establish a new record high at $118.00 as its 24-hour trading volume surged from $421 million to $1.95 billion.
3. After hitting a low of $8.42 on July 20, the price of OMG has climbed 380% to reach a daily high at $13.52 on Oct. 1 on a record $3.37 billion in 24-hour trading volume.
4. The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) has approved the Crypto Market Index Fund as the “first crypto fund according to Swiss law,” the authority officially announced on Wednesday. Cryptocurrency adoption continues gaining momentum in Switzerland as local financial authorities grant more regulatory approvals for crypto investment instruments.
5. The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) is considering creating its own utility token to capitalize on the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies. TAT Coin “would involve the transfer of vouchers into digital tokens that could help operators gain greater liquidity,” according to the report.
6. The National Bank of Ukraine, the country’s chief monetary authority, has recently taken to professional social network LinkedIn to promote its blockchain developer job opening. The development marks another sign of the digital hryvnia project picking up steam.
7. Ripple Labs is launching a fund for creators, marketplaces and brands to explore new use cases for nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, on its ledger. In a Wednesday announcement, Ripple said the $250 million fund would be focused on accelerating adoption in the crypto space by working with nonfungible tokens, or NFTs.
8. Crypto mining firm Argo Blockchain has agreed to buy 20,000 mining machines for the data center it is building in West Texas. The Bitmain Antminer S19J Pro machines will increase London-based Argo’s hashrate, a measure of computing power, by more than 2 exahash to a total of 3.7 exahash by the end of the third quarter of next year.
9. The blockchain space outfit Copernic Space and space robotics company Lunar Outpost will sell the payload space aboard the craft in the form of nonfungible tokens or NFTs. They are set to launch a public sale for tokenized payload space in a lunar lander headed for the moon in Q4 2022.
10. SEBA Bank AG announced Wednesday the approval of a CISA license from the Swiss Financial Market Authority, or FINMA, to facilitate an institutional-grade custodian service for nation-native collective investment schemes. This announcement enables the bank to become Switzerland’s — and indeed one of the world’s first — digital asset-centric banks to gain a custody license.
11. NFT marketplace Metaplex has hired a new CEO and appointed an advisory board comprising some of crypto’s most influential voices, setting the stage for the continued growth of the Solana-based project.
12. EMURGO, a global blockchain technology company and commercial arm of Cardano, announced earlier this week that it will be investing $100m into the Cardano (ADA) network. The investment will be used to improve the decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) capabilities of the network.
13. Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday at the Code Conference in Beverly Hills said that the U.S. government should steer clear of trying to regulate the crypto market. “It is not possible to, I think, destroy crypto, but it is possible for governments to slow down its advancement,” Musk said.
