Welcome to Around the Blockchain, Huobi Learn’s daily rundown of the crypto markets.
In the Metaverse’s very first marriage, Ryan and Candice Hurley from Phoenix, Arizona got hitched using their digital identities over the weekend. The ceremony was officiated by Associate Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court Clint Bolick, and attended by witnesses and a virtual crowd of 2,000 guests. Rose Law Group, whose Decentraland estate was used as the wedding venue, was hired by the couple to legally formalize their union. The firm developed a “meta-marriage framework” by incorporating a Virtual Premarital Agreement that verified identified the couple’s virtual identities and digital assets as recorded on the blockchain. A Meta-Marriage License was also used to identify, record and tokenize their virtual identities and marriage location as an NFT.
Didi Taihuttu, patriarch of the so-called ‘Bitcoin Family’, is migrating with his wife and three children to Portugal for the country’s favorable crypto tax laws, which include a 0% tax on BTC. The Dutch family liquidated all they owned in exchange for BTC and a nomadic lifestyle in 2017, when BTC’s price was about $900. While the size of their crypto fortune remains a secret, Didi has said it is safeguarded in secret vaults on four different continents. His brother and sister may also join him — they are in the midst of selling their homes and investing their earnings into BTC. Additionally, the family told CNBC they wanted to “disrupt the typical expat experience” by building their own crypto village in Portugal.
Google revealed during its recent Q4 earnings call some details of its Web3 and blockchain strategies, with CEO Sundar Pichai saying the company’s Cloud team was “looking at how they can support our customers’ needs in building, transacting, storing value and deploying their products on blockchain-based platforms”. Head of strategy for digital assets at Google’s Cloud unit, Richard Widmann, said the firm was considering the different kinds of services it could offer directly to blockchain developers, while Google’s Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said it has identified potential development areas, including retail and healthcare.
BuzzFeed is being accused by Web3 community members of ‘doxxing’, after the former revealed the identities of two of the four original Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT collection founders, Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow — previously known only as ‘Gordon Goner’ and ‘Gargamel’, respectively. BuzzFeed journalist Kate Notopoulos, who outed them in an article entitled We Found The Real Names Of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Pseudonymous Founders, defended herself by pointing out that the BAYC NFT collection founders could not be “held accountable” if no one knew who they were. Crypto podcaster Cobie said Buzzfeed was “doxxing people for clicks and ad revenue”, while venture capitalist Mike Solana said there was no reason to do so as they were “literally cartoon apes”.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has suggested adding a feature like “blob-carrying transactions” in a “near-future hard fork” to solve the data transfer gas problem and deal with scaling issues, in light of ETH’s rising price. In an explainer published on Reddit, he said such transactions “contain a large amount of data that cannot be accessed by EVM execution, but whose commitment can be accessed”. He further said the format, which would be connected to the beacon block and consensus nodes, was meant to be “fully compatible with the future Danksharding spec”.
Show me the money
According to data from Huobi Global, BTC is now up slightly at $42,420, after falling below the trend line twice and then returning above the trend line in the last two weeks, indicating that the market is going through a process of finding a stage bottom. The approaching support level is around 41,000, with possible resistance at 42,800. ETH has shown an upward trend in the past week, rising 25% from 2,450 to 3,050. Its gains and losses in the last two days have offset each other and the price is expected to either stabilize or show a slight downward trend in the near future.
BTC’s weekend trading volume across major centralized exchanges significantly lower than Friday, but in line with most weekdays in the last week. Spot trading volume was reduced over the past week, as major crypto markets in Asia were off for the Lunar New Year holidays. Gaming tokens, on the other hand, rallied over the weekend: prices of Axie Infinity (AXS), Decentraland (MANA) and Gala (GALA) rose by double-digit percentages in the last 24 hours.
Total crypto market capitalization in the past week rallied 10% to $1.68 trillion, a 25% recovery from the 24 Jan bottom, though it is still too early to say if the market has found a bottom. Still, two key indicators — The Tether / CNY premium and CME futures basis — have recently flipped bullish, signaling that positive investor sentiment is driving this price recovery. Data remains bearish, however, suggesting the US Federal Reserve has less room for rate hikes; market analyst Lyn Alden recently suggested it could postpone the hikes after discouraging US employment data was released on 2 Feb.
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