Come every Saturday Hodler’s Digest will help you keep track of every single important news that happened this week. Best (and worst) rates, launch and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and more – a week on Cointelegraph in one link.
Top stories of this week
Elon Musk: US has ‘passed peak inflation’ after Tesla sold 90% of Bitcoin
With Tesla now selling 90% of its Bitcoin holdings during the bear market, Elon Musk says the US economy has “past the peak of inflation” and predicts only a “mild to moderate” recession may lie ahead. “We have some insight into where prices are going over time, and the interesting thing we’re seeing now is that most of our goods, most things that go into a Tesla — not all, more than that Half of prices – trending down in six months,” Musk said at Tesla’s 2022 annual meeting.
Available earlier: ETH developers are moving the date for merge
The long-awaited merge appears to be ahead of schedule, with Ethereum core developers Tim Beiko and Terence Tsao agreeing to a developer call on Thursday to tentatively set the merge date as September 15. The date previously estimated by Beiko was September 19, indicating that the final preparatory work is going smoothly after the final Görli testnet merge went smoothly this week.
Coinbase Posts $1.1B Loss in Q2 on “Fast and Furious” Crypto Downturn
Major crypto exchange Coinbase posted a whopping $1.1 billion loss in the second quarter, citing a “rapid and severe” crypto downturn during the quarter. The company noted that the second quarter was a “rough quarter” as trading volume and transaction revenue fell 30% and 35%, respectively. It’s the second straight quarter of loss for the company this year. “The current downturn has been rapid and severe, and we are seeing customer behavior reflecting that of past bear markets,” the company wrote in a letter to shareholders released on Tuesday.
Decentralized apps on Polygon hit 37,000 and grew 400% this year
The number of DApps on Ethereum scaling platform Polygon surpassed 37,000 this week, a 400% increase since early 2022. The project provided a breakdown of DApp projects built on Polygon, notably showing that “74% of teams are exclusively integrated on Polygon, while 26% are deployed on both Polygon and Ethereum.” Polygon also stated that its Ecosystem has now seen more than “142 million unique user addresses and $5 billion in secured assets,” with approximately 1.6 billion transactions processed on the network to date.
Anonymous user sends ETH from Tornado Cash to prominent figures after sanctions
A day after the US Treasury Department sanctioned cryptomixer Tornado Cash for its alleged role in money laundering operations, intervals of 0.1 Ether transactions were leaked from the smart contract to prominent figures including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and American TV host Jimmy Fallon Posted. The move appears to be a critique or satirical comment on the current US government policy of also sanctioning addresses that have interacted with Tornado Cash.
Winner and Loser
Bitcoin at the end of the week (Bitcoin) is at $23,840.93ether (ETH) at $1,882.20 and XRP at $0.37. The total market capitalization is at $1.13 trillionaccording to CoinMarketCap.
Among the top 100 cryptocurrencies, the top three altcoin gainers of the week are Celsius (CEL) at 93.85%, arrival (ANKR) at 46.99% and Decred (DCR) at 26.34%.
The top three altcoin losers of the week are ApeCoin (MONKEY) at 9.03%, Curve DAO Token (CRV) at 5.01% and Kusama (KSM) at 4.53%.
For more information on crypto prices, see Cointelegraph’s Market Analysis.
Most Memorable Quotes
“A senior living community has almost no exposure to the crypto ecosystem unless their grandkids tell them about it.”
Owen Robertson, Marketing Associate at Dominant Strategies
“The fact that I have no alternative to Facebook is why Facebook is a monopoly. But if it were on a blockchain, I could transfer data freely, it could become [different] Facebook’s.”
Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands
“Over the last six months we have seen company valuations come down to slightly more realistic valuations and it is a great time to start allocating capital.”
Gerard Berile, venture and investment principal at Wave Financial
“For the future, this mentality is very important in terms of risk management, while remaining optimistic in the long term. […] You can be bullish on crypto, but you can still sell out of the market.”
Jeffrey Gao, CEO of Cypherpunk Holdings
“Scalability isn’t just a boring thing that you just need scalability for, like ‘the cost goes down’, I think it actually enables and unlocks whole new classes of applications.”
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum
“So I think institutional adoption is the way to go, and the institutions are what’s going to make that possible […] This killer consumer app to really take crypto and DeFi to the next level.”
Boris Alertant, Head of DeFi Markets at Ripple Labs
forecast of the week
$29,000 Bitcoin is closer than you might expect, according to derivatives data
As the price of bitcoin continues to struggle against the $24,000 resistance and was rejected on Aug. 10 but managed not to be knocked out of the 52-day ascending channel, Cointelegraph market analyst Marcel Pechman suggested that the price up Eventually it could reach $29,000 in October. He pointed out a bullish chart formation with a support level at $22,500, suggesting that the price could rally close to $30,000. Pechman also noted that while BTC derivatives data shows a lack of interest from leveraged longs, there is no indication that a surprise crash is being priced into the market.
FUD of the week
ASIC Chairman Concerned About Sheer Volume of ‘Risk-Taking’ Crypto Investors
Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) Chair Joe Longo has sounded alarm bells about the number of Australians investing in “unregulated, volatile” crypto assets during the pandemic. In a media release on Thursday, Longo pointed to a November 2021 ASIC research that found crypto was the second most popular investment product, with 44% of respondents saying they hold it. Of those investors, 25% said crypto assets were the only asset class they had exposure to.
Cross-chain bridge RenBridge has laundered $540 million in hacking proceeds: Elliptic
According to a Wednesday report by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, crypto bridge RenBridge has enabled at least $540 million in hacking proceeds since 2020 to launder one cryptocurrency into another and move it across multiple blockchains.
Tornado Cash co-founder reports being kicked from GitHub as industry responds to sanctions
Tornado Cash co-founder Roman Semenov claimed his account on developer platform GitHub was suspended on Monday. Semenov noted that while he was not individually named as a Specially Designated National by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, he appears to have faced backlash related to Treasury Department claims that Tornado Cash held more than $7.00 worth of crypto billions of dollars laundered.
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