This week in coins. Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.
Like last week, the news cycle has been dominated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and market leader Bitcoin has been hurt by the conflict. Bitcoin was trading at just $37,500 on Monday, but a curious mid-week rally sent the price up 20% before that wave peaked, with prices down to $39,533 at the time of this writing.
Overall, Bitcoin’s quick gains and losses have mostly leveled off, with it up 0.78% over the week. Ethereum fared worse, dropping around 4.3% over the past seven days to $2,670.
Despite a generally bearish climate — total cryptocurrency market capitalization fell 2.1%, to about $68 billion, overnight — most cryptocurrencies entered the weekend virtually unchanged, with no significant losses among the top coins, save for Algorand’s 9% drop. . At the time of this writing, the Proof-of-Stake scalable blockchain token is trading at around $0.77.
The cryptocurrency pair has risen over the past week, with the NEAR protocol up 13% to trade at $10.43 and LUNA Terra gaining 14% to hit $86.
News of the week
The Canadian division of global accounting giant KPMG started the week with some surprise news – it acquired the World of Women NFT – though it wasn’t KPMG Canada’s first foray into digital assets, as it only acquired bitcoin and ethereum last month. However, the Big Four accounting firm taking over NFTs is huge news for non-fungible tokens.
On Tuesday, the Cambridge University Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF) announced a “public-private collaboration on digital asset research” with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
The goal of the project is to gain insight into the emerging digital economy through “joint research involving public and private stakeholders.” Participants will include British International Investment, Ernst & Young, Fidelity, the World Bank, Goldman Sachs and payment giants Mastercard and Visa.
Last week, we reported that the European Union added a provision calling for a ban on energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency mining to its set of draft rules. If approved, the ban would mean the end of bitcoin mining due to the network’s PoW consensus mechanism. (The bloc aims to be carbon neutral by 2050.)
According to Stefan Berger, chairman of the European Parliament’s Economic Committee, the vote on the bill was delayed due to concerns that the draft package “could be misinterpreted as a de facto ban on bitcoin.” On Tuesday, Berger confirmed that the paragraph in question had been removed in its entirety.
American burger chain Shake Shack is rolling out an intriguing Bitcoin loyalty scheme midway through this month in partnership with Cash App. Customers who pay for meals with a Cash App debit card, Cash Card, or through the app’s Cash Boost rewards program will receive a 15% refund of their meal in BTC.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict prompted Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to continue pushing for regulation of cryptocurrencies in the US during a speech before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday.
In addition, Ukraine’s beleaguered leadership, which began raising cryptocurrency donations via Twitter on Feb. 26, said on Thursday that crowdfunding has already raised more than $50 million.
https://decrypt.co/94463/this-week-in-coins-bitcoin-reverses-rally-as-luna-and-near-protocol-surge
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