Updated Litecoin, Irreplaceable Bitcoin, DeFi Wormhole, Indian Hopes and 20 Crypto Jokes

Time to look back at the week behind us. Bitcoin trading volume during four market crashes suggest that sellers are giving up, MicroStrategy bought an additional BTC 660 for USD 25m, Litecoin released its long-awaited fungibility and scalability upgrade MWEB, and Luna jumped as Terra asked USD 38M from community to fund an undisclosed sports partnership. Fidelity said that Bitcoin is ‘fundamentally different’ from other cryptos and unlikely to be replaced, while Meta is set to say goodbye to Diem though the buyer Silvergate Capital may launch its own stablecoin. Meanwhile, Woori Bank started accepting blockchain-powered driver’s licenses as an official form of authentication. Then the news broke that Wormhole lost USD 325m in the 4^th largest crypto hack. Meanwhile, Caribbean CBDC has been offline for more than two weeks amid technical issues.

In the world of exchanges and wallets, BitMEX airdropped BMEX 1.5m to its users and released the litepaper, South Korean crypto exchanges are looking to retain their staff by paying them massive Lunar New Year bonuses, and FTX is readying to set up shop in Japan via the acquisition of the Liquid Group, while the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board keeps investing in FTX which is not available in Ontario. Trezor ditched a controversial KYC feature, planning features to ‘cut off regulatory overreach’, and ex-FinCEN officials urged calm after the return of the US Treasury’s ‘unhosted wallet’ regulation proposal. As for NFTs, Kanye West will not be releasing any, at least for now, Pak will collaborate with Julian Assange to release an NFT collection ‘Censored’, and once LooksRare’s USD 8.3bn in wash-trades was removed, OpenSea remained the dominant NFT marketplace.

India Finance Minister fueled hopes for crypto legalization with a new tax proposal, while the Finance Secretary said crypto regulation in India is still an ongoing debate. Russian Central Bank still wants to ban bitcoin and crypto mining despite the backlash, and the Finance Ministry said that the crypto regulation compromise is coming ‘within a month’. El Salvador is trying to reboot its Chivo app by teaming up with the USA-based AlphaPoint, and Lebanon allegedly plans to forcibly convert foreign currency holdings to its LBP, once again building a case for bitcoin. Reports said that the IRS was set to refund a couple’s XTZ staking tax bill, and the UK updated its own guidelines on DeFi returns. Meanwhile, the Year of the Tiger may be the year of the digital yuan as China is celebrating with more CBDC adoption. While all this was happening, two men who spiked a crypto YouTuber’s coffee in order to steal crypto were sent to jail for 3 years.

Now, the jokes for your weekend laughing pleasure.

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GM, CT! What’s up?

Question: can we have the 100K BTC by Thursday?

Let’s see how BTC is doing.

Don’t be the panic seller.

‘Fooey’.

I’ve never been more terrified of volatility.

Commentary on the Ethereum roadmap.

More developers sharing their views.

That’s some standing alright….

‘Callin’ mah coins shitcoins, this little shitcoin…’