Welcome to Around the Blockchain, Huobi Learn’s daily rundown of the crypto markets.
Craig Wright, a man who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, has been ordered to pay $100 million in damages to a company he and his now-deceased business partner founded. A Florida court found that he had cheated his late friend, Dave Kleiman, of a rightful share of the proceeds from early Bitcoin mining, as well as the IP for Bitcoin. Lawyers from both sides claimed victory, and no definitive proof of Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity has yet been shown.
Wikipedia is jumping on the NFT bandwagon by issuing the first ever Wikipedia edit as an NFT. Auction house Christie’s estimates that it could sell for $100,000 to $150,000, and the proceeds will fund Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ social media project WT.Social, along with several charities. The landmark edit in question is a simple “Hello, World!”, published on 15 January, 2001.
South Korean investment firm Hashed is under investigation by the nation’s tax authorities. No specific reason for the audit has been given, and the investigation has yet to lead to any prosecution. Hashed, which has investments in Axie Infinity, Terra (LUNA) and The Sandbox, said that it has complied with the authorities’ requests for information.
NFT demand has shifted from art to the digital scene in the last week. Although collectibles still account for the bulk of the $300 million in NFT volume, sales of digital real estate on The Sandbox, Decentraland and other metaverse platforms accounted for about 25% of the market, overshadowing the volumes traded in the art category.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin believes that the “endgame” for ETH 2.0 is a system where block production is centralized, but with a “second tier of staking, with low resource requirements” for decentralized validation. Buterin suggested that this could be enabled by fraud-proof or ZK-SNARKS and added that “no single roll-up succeeds as holding anywhere close to the majority of Ethereum activity”. It will be interesting to see how this dovetails with Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap, or whether Buterin is seeing real limitations in his earlier strategy.
Show Me the Money
BTC climbed past the $51,000 mark, showing signs of recovery from a red-ink weekend that saw it lose 20% of its value. Other tokens and altcoins also followed the rally, strengthening by 10% to 30%. Analysts continue to caution that indicators remain mixed, however.
The recovery was certainly not hindered by one particular BTC whale buying the dip to the tune of 2,700 BTC (about $137 million). Pundits observed the wallet swelling to 118,017 BTC just as the market rallied to the $50,000 support level, and while it is not definitive that the wallet belongs to a private investor, observers say movements on the wallet address do not correspond to typical institutional behaviour. You can watch the whale at this address.
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