Date: 11/08/2021
“If this is your first crypto bull market, hold on tight, your mind can’t even comprehend what you are about to experience.” — Ran Neuner
Weekly News Report:
1. Bitcoin on Monday blew past $67,000 for the first time, hitting $67,523.28 in recent trading. At the same time, ether also set an all-time high, hitting $4,794.99. The total value of the cryptocurrency market shot past $3 trillion Monday morning as the price of bitcoin and other major cryptos rose in a bull market.
2. The stocks of crypto mining companies, which are heavily exposed to the prices of the cryptocurrencies they mine, surged on Monday after the price of bitcoin approached record highs and ether hit an all-time high. Marathon Digital led the surge, with the stock soaring almost 20%, while peer Riot Blockchain climbed 17%.
3. The stablecoin market cap has grown to $137.7 billion from $20 billion a year ago. The banking industry will most likely try and capitalize on the demand for stablecoin deposits on the back of the market’s exponential growth, says Morgan Stanley.
4. Cryptocurrency exchange Huobi Global will move its spot trading services to Gibraltar, after receiving approval from the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC) to begin the transition.
5. While at the inaugural Solana Breakpoint conference in Lisbon, Portugal, Jules Urbach, the CEO and founder of OTOY, announced Render Network’s integration with the Solana blockchain, as well as a partnership with NFT minting platform Metaplex.
6. During Solana’s Breakpoint conference in Lisbon, Portugal, executives at Brave and Solana Labs announced that the Brave browser would integrate with the Solana (SOL) blockchain and feature Solana decentralized applications, or dApps, on its browser. Simultaneously, Solana will promote the adoption of Basic Attention Tokens (BAT), the native digital currency of the Brave Browser, among its dApp users.
7. It’s hard to find words to describe the crypto phenomenon that New York is witnessing right now. Last week’s NFT.NYC conference, which was first held in February 2019 as a quirky curiosity before an audience of a few hundred early enthusiasts, was spread across six venues, with three days of programming covering 600 speakers.
8. San Francisco-based game developer Zynga will work on integrating NFTs and blockchain into its existing portfolio in addition to developing new NFT-based games. Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) scored another win with gaming giant Zynga’s announcement of the upcoming integration of NFTs and blockchain into the publisher’s portfolio.
9. Axie Infinity showed the gaming industry just a sliver of what blockchain-based gaming can achieve, and the industry is set to explode in the near future. The global gaming market is currently worth $180 billion. Experts predict that the number of online streamers of online games will rise to one billion by 2025 — one in nine people today.
10. Decentralized finance protocol Acala announced Monday that they have raised 8.5 million DOT (worth $451.8 million at time of publication) from over 53,000 participants. The protocol is also set to win the first parachain auction on Polkadot.
11. An important milestone for SIX Digital Exchange (SDX), the digital-asset subsidiary of Switzerland’s main stock exchange operator SIX Group, was the receipt of two licenses from Swiss markets regulator FINMA in September. SDX will go live later this month, according to two people familiar with the plans.
12. In a presentation made during the Singapore Fintech Festival, Annerie Vreugdenhil, chief innovation officer of ING, announced the firm is working on a trial of its decentralized finance, or DeFi, peer-to-peer lending protocol with the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets.
13. The Bank of China has shown a machine that converts foreign currencies into digital yuan. The machine is likely in preparation for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, when the central bank digital currency (CBDC) is set to be introduced to the rest of the world.
14. The payments giant PayPal’s posted a total payment volume of $310 billion in the third quarter, up 24% from the year-ago period. It added 13.3 million net new active accounts in Q3 versus 11.4 million in Q2. But it also posted revenue of $6.18 billion in the third quarter, which was short of estimates of $6.23 billion.
