The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek! (weekly crypto updates)

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What happened in crypto in the past week? Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the following altcoins went first up, and then down, giving us a shot or two of adrenaline. I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. Prediction markets are heavily manipulated if you have the money to do it. What else? Read below:

• Bitcoin: First we had BTC breaking past $97K, liquidating more than $680M in short positions. Bitcoin broke out of its sideways chop, climbing 5.69% this week. But then whales just dumped over $4B in BTC, sending the price toward $90K. Geopolitical tensions rattled the global market too, and we have seen strange moves like Strategy shares falling 6% despite them buying $2.1B in Bitcoin. With BTC reaching $88K, some are talking about $80K, or even $58K next. There is a pattern now, called overhead supply, used by Glassnode to explain why Bitcoin went close to $98K, just to drop back under $90K. No conspiracy theories this time. When you are lucky, you get the Bitcoin lottery, as two solo miners proved that this week, each of them mining roughly $300.000 payouts. Steak'n Shake announced its Bitcoin treasury grew by $10M, and they are accepting Bitcoin since May 2025, with every BTC payment going to their treasury reserve.

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• Ethereum: Almost 30% of the entire ETH's entire supply got staked. Ethereum outperformed surging 6.68 last week. Yet, there is a talk about an unwieldy mess, as the entry queue hit its highest level since July 2023, with 45 days to wait for new stakers. As Bitcoin dropped, even ETH dipped below $3000.

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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Mantra announced a restructuring, as their OM token is trading 99% below its all-time high. Dash is up 48% and XMR just got a new ATH. Privacy coins seems to rally when Bitcoin chashes. Winklevoss twins donated one million dollars worth of ZEC to fund independent Zcash development. BNB was testing $950. BNB destroyed 1.37M tokens worth $1.2B in its 34th quately burn. Ripple just backed LMAX Group with $150M to push its RLUSD stablecoin into institutional trading. Metamask added Tron to its wallet. Pump.fun is preparing a rewamp. AI marketcap dropped by half a billion (-2.1%). Grayscale is looking to launch a NEAR ETF.Solana Mobile launched massive token airdrop, the SKR token even jumping sharply in the hours before launch.

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• NFTs and blockchain games: Axie Infinity shows sharp swings. Some cute game called World of Trinity, I had some fun playing it, you get some gold to buy few packs, and then you build a deck, with support cards too, with a simple enough math behind it. Try it! I have also enjoyed playing Golem Overlord lately on Hive, and it is quite enjoyable, I would say, with some significant updates lately. On Splinterlands, we have had the Land NFT new update and improved tokenomics, and the new rewards cards from the Conclave collection are up and running.

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• Good news: South Korea lifted its nine year ban on crypto, enabling investment of up to 5% of total equity into top 20 crypto by market cap. CME Group is rolling out Cardano, Chainlink and Stellar futures on February 9. NYSE is building a blockchain platform for 24/7 trading of tokenized stocks and ETFs. India Central Bank is pushing to connect digital currencies across BRICS nations. Its Indian e-rupee has 7M users. CFTC chair, Michael Selig, launched a future proof initiative to overhaul how the CFTC regulates digital assets. BitGo went public with the ticker BITGO. Vietnam started accepting crypto exchange applications this week, after years of planning. Circle's CEO fired back at banks, saying that stablecoin yields won't cause bank runs.

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• Bad news: Some new very dodgy stuff in the US, the new Senate crypto bill draft would let Treasury to freeze crypto transactions for 30 days without a court order. Dubai allegedly bans privacy tokens and tightens laws surrounding stablecoins in a move to reset its crypto regulatory framework. Kaito sunsets Yaps. Trump family's crypto profits just hit one billion, that is quite a bit of a steal, right? A trader outsmarted Polymarket, with $233.000 made in one move, as they bought UP shares while XRP's price dropped, and then they bought 1M into XRP two minutes before settlement, spiking the price, only to sell as the contract settled. Insider trading on prediction markets is a real issue, like it was the case with someone betting on Maduro's removal hours before it happened. Hungary and Portugal banned Polymarket, citing ilegal gambling activities, reaching 33 countries where it is now geoblocked.

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• Joke of the week: Traditional ETFs got $46B in six days. Bitcoin ETFs? Barely $660M on the best day in the whole year. Solana and Ethereum adopted opposite strategies for survival, as SOL want speed, and ETH is thinking that too many features create bugs and centralization risks. Yet, at Davos, Trump said that America is the crypto capital of the world, and that he will sign comprehensive digital asset legislation in the near future.

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All the best,

George

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Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- a Hearthstone-like card game) (Golem Overlord - a Play2Earn game on Hive) (Upland - a real-life virtual land) (Holozing - a Pokemon-like game)and ( Chain of Legends - with a hint of Heroes of Might and Magic).

...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog, using the Presearch search engine to maximise your income with PRE tokens. Use Torum instead of Twitter. I am also writing for crypto on Hive.

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