Welcome to Around the Blockchain, Huobi Learn’s daily rundown of the crypto markets.
A bill for a digital euro, a central bank digital currency (CBDC), will be proposed in early 2023, with a “targeted legislative consultation in the coming weeks”, said Mairead McGuinness, finance chief of the European Commission (EC). Eurozone governors must approve the implementation of a digital euro, whereupon it could be ready for issuance by 2025. As it is, the European Central Bank (ECB) is experimenting with designs and systems for a digital euro; a prototype is expected late next year.
Unlike other international markets, China’s corner of the Metaverse will likely not involve decentralized infrastructure, say experts. According to a NewZoo report, the Sino Metaverse is likely to follow in the footsteps of the Internet as it functions behind the Great Firewall. But while Chinese companies like Baidu and Tencent are investing heavily in the Sino Metaverse, a 27 Jan Reuters analysis has said China’s Metaverse efforts are still lagging behind due to “less investment by domestic tech giants” and China’s banning of “industry-leading products” like Meta’s Oculus VR headsets. Furthermore, gaming and user content generation — essential components of the Metaverse — face stringent regulation from the Chinese government.
White hat hacker and iOS jailbreak software developer Jay Freeman has been rewarded with one of the largest bug bounties so far — a total amount of $2,000,042 — for discovering a critical bug on Ethereum Layer 2 scaling project Optimism earlier this month. Developers have since patched the bug, which could have enabled hackers to create as much ‘ETH’ as they wanted in an Optimism account balance. According to Freeman, it would have allowed an attacker to “replicate money on any chain using their OVM 2.0 fork of go-ethereum”.
Samson Enzer, a lawyer for the New York couple arrested on suspicion of laundering $4.5 billion in BTC stolen during the 2016 Bitfinex hack, has argued that they are not a flight risk as they want to remain close to the frozen embryos of the wife, Heather Morgan. Enzer claimed the couple had previously frozen “several of her embryos at a hospital in New York in anticipation of starting a family together, as she can only conceive through IVF because she suffers from endometriosis”. As such, he added, they would “never flee” the country for “risk of losing access to their ability to have children, which they were discussing having this year until their lives were disrupted by their arrests”.
Forbes has received a $200 million investment as “the first step into a marketplace that has really high potential when it comes to adoption of Web 3.0-based tools”. Forbes said the investment by Binance will be an assumption of subscription agreements “representing $200 million of commitments in the $400 million private investment in public equity (PIPE)”, previously announced with Forbes’ plans to go public through a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) deal with Magnum Opus. These deals are expected to maximize Forbes’ “brand and enterprise values and use its proprietary technology stack and analytics to convert readers into long-term, engaged customers” of Forbes.
Show me the money
According to data from Huobi Global, BTC is currently trading near 43,400, while ETH’s overnight trend converged with BTC’s and it is now located near 3,080, with daily charts showing signs of an upward trend for both BTC and ETH. In terms of contracts, Huobi Futures data found that the open interest (OI) of both BTC and ETH futures remained stable, with slightly increased volume amid a relatively inactive contract market.
The price of BTC fell 1.29% to $44,125.82 yesterday, coinciding with a greater pull-back in US equities as the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield hit a high of 2.05% for the first time in three years. Oanda senior market analyst Edward Moya said Bitcoin’s institutional investors were “focused on Treasuries as that momentum trade appears to be rather straightforward”, adding that crypto seemed set to “consolidate between the $40,000 and $50,000 level over the short-term”.
26 fintech specialists from price comparison portal Finder have predicted that the price of ETH will hit $6,500 by end-2022, $10,810 by 2025, and $26,338 by 2030. These predictions were more bearish than in Oct 2021, when they thought ETH would reach $15,364 by end-2025 and $50,788 by 2030. Finder said the positive outlook on price growth in crypto was “heavily affected by increasingly tightening international regulations and tumbling current values in early 2022”.
A PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report has found that the total value of crypto-related mergers and acquisitions (M&A) rose to $55 billion in 2021, up 50 times from $1.1 billion in 2020. The US accounted for 51% of all 2021 transactions, while those in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) and APAC comprised a respective 33% and 16% of all deals. However, in terms of deal dollar values, EMEA came out tops at $25.5 billion, followed by the US at $24.5 billion and APAC at $5 billion.
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