Position Obliteration, FTX Reboot, Funds Freeze and 20 Crypto Jokes

This week in crypto: a Bitcoin rally led the price into the mid-$30,000s and obliterated millions worth of short positions, Shiba Inu had a higher market capitalization than Tron, and Dogecoin was pumping too, while a film chronicled the life of Kabosu, the Shiba Inu featured in the famous Doge meme. Mike Novogratz advised investors to long Bitcoin and Ethereum as ‘clearest trades’, while Warren Buffett again said that BTC is a gambling token with no intrinsic value. Bank of America saw the latest trend as an indication of a lower ‘sell pressure’ on BTC, and Ethereum L2 solution dedicated to AI development CryptoGPT raised $10 million at a valuation of $250 million.

Twitter and eToro teamed up to allow social media users to buy and sell crypto and other financial assets, MetaMask added a new feature enabling users to buy crypto with fiat directly from its Portfolio Dapp, and El Salvador issued a historic first digital asset license to the Bitfinex exchange. While the billionaire Winklevoss twins invested $100 million in the Gemini crypto platform, the little-known FTX co-founder Gary Wang was cooperating with prosecutors after pleading guilty to fraud in December, and FTX was considering rebooting its platform as it recovered $7.3 billion in assets.

MiCA is expected to be debated in the European Parliament and get a final vote next week, Russian politicians will debate a long-awaited crypto regulation bill before the end of the current parliamentary session, and G7 aims to help developing countries in the introduction CBDCs that adhere to international standards. More than 420,000 merchants in Changsha now accept payments in the digital yuan, and in Hong Kong, the Financial Chief is pushing for Web3 adoption despite the market volatility.

Meanwhile, South Korean prosecutors want to freeze crypto holdings and cash belonging to the Terra founder Do Kwon, and legal experts are unsure if Terra’s “victims” will ever be able to recoup their funds with $37bn now “missing.” As this was happening, Bitmain faced a nearly $4 million fine for unpaid taxes in Beijing.

Yearn Finance fell lost some $11 million worth of crypto in an attack, SushiSwap suffered more than $3.3 million in losses after a hacker exploited a bug in a smart contract, and Tether blacklisted a validator address responsible for draining $25 million from MEV bots. The $178m Brazilian ‘crypto scam ring’ fled the country just before the police launched a probe into it, and a couple in South Korea confirmed that they gave money to the suspected killer of a 48-year-old woman.

Weekly news summary completed. Let the jokes begin!

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Good morning, CT.

What’s on your mind, CT?

Let’s check how BTC price action looked this week compared to an earlier period.

Source: markets_crypto / Instagram

You see what happens to your head when you sell at the bottom?

It could. It just may. It might.