Bitcoin Price: US$ 37,011.39 (-3.58%)
Ethereum Price: US$ 2,567.83 (-2.07%)
UST Demand Surges, Markets Turn Sour, & Ember Sword Alpha
- Over the past 2 weeks, UST supply has grown by 818M, or 7.2%. This has led up to a net burn of ~11.8M LUNA over the course of 2 weeks.
- Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) recently announced a $450M LUNA burn to capitalize Anchor Protocol’s Yield Reserve, which was the key driver of LUNA burns and UST Mints. LFG has finished converting the allocated LUNA to UST, which can be tracked on their Terra address.
- The launch of Mars Protocol’s Lockdrop could be yet another catalyst for UST demand. Lockdrop allows users to lock UST into Mars’ Red Bank in exchange for a distribution of $MARS tokens that are claimable once the protocol launches.
- Mars Protocol’s Lockdrop goes live today, and you will have until February 25th (This Friday) to participate.
- February has proved to be an extremely volatile month for Bitcoin and the wider range of crypto assets, with prices making large moves to both the upside and downside. The first two weeks of the month saw prices rally off of the January lows at $33K to about $45K. Although moves like this happen more frequently in crypto and crypto natives tend to get jaded by larger percentage moves, this was still a big move for any asset (BTC included), topping out at around 40% from the lows.
- Revisiting the weekly chart, it immediately becomes clear that BTC is still struggling to shake off this multi-month sell pressure. After the initial rally and move off of the lows, price has stalled for the last two weeks, while failing to reclaim any weekly support structure, or the midpoint of the yearly range. In addition, the weekly chart is also leaving wicks to the upside, indicating sellers are still in control.
- The creators of Ember Sword, Bright Star Studios, aim to open up alpha testing for NFT owners in the first quarter of 2022. They will also announce the second land sale, which will occur around the same time. Bright Star plans to continue releasing more gameplay-focused alpha versions throughout 2022.
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Law Decoded: Bitcoin’s censorship resistance capacity enters the spotlight, Feb. 14–21
- Recent events in Canada sparked a global conversation about financial censorship and crypto’s potential to guard against it.
- Amid the barrage of last week’s regulatory news, from rumors of Joe Biden’s upcoming executive order on digital assets to another round of the Russian government’s crypto tug of war, the storyline that was arguably the most consequential for the mainstream narrative on the social effects of crypto has been the one around the Canadian government’s standoff with the Freedom Convoy. The government’s invocation of emergency powers to put down a protest movement — combined with the movement’s financial infrastructure being one of the main attack vectors — has led many observers to appreciate with renewed vigor Bitcoin’s capacity to resist state financial censorship.
- If a government as “civilized” as Canada’s can arbitrarily cut off a group it doesn’t like from the financial system, then any state can potentially do the same to any group, the argument goes. While there is, as always, much more nuance to this situation. What matters is a simple, digestible notion with which the global audience walks away from the shocking news. So far, the main takeaway seems to be this: Financial censorship is scary, but crypto offers a way around it.
pSTAKE Finance brings liquid staking and a new airdrop to the Cosmos ecosystem
- The pSTAK project is part of the Persistence (XPRT) protocol, a multi-chain tech stack that supports Cosmos (ATOM), Ethereum (ETH) and other Tendermint-based chains. The long-term mission of Persistence is to create an ecosystem of multi-chain Web3 products designed to stimulate global liquidity and enable simplified value exchange.
- The project got a boost in November 2021 after it successfully completed a $10 million seed funding round from investors that include Three Arrows Capital, Galaxy Digital, Coinbase Ventures and Alameda Research.
- pSTAKE is focused on increasing the size of its community and expanding its offerings by adding support for other projects in the Cosmos ecosystem.
- As a way to help increase community support and reward early adopters, the project launched an airdrop of its pSTAKE token, which will see 30 million pSTAKE distributed over the next six months to a variety of addresses including ATOM, OSMO and XPRT stakers.
Kazakhstan likely to lose Bitcoin hash rate leadership in next index update
- Kazakhstan, one of the world’s top Bitcoin (BTC) mining locations, is likely to lose its BTC hash rate share leadership in the next hash rate distribution update, according to industry experts.
- According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI), Kazakhstan was housing over 18% of the world’s BTC hash rate as of August 2021, following only the United States.
- Bitcoin mining would eventually drop in Kazakhstan, mainly due to unsustainable power subsidies, as expected by Phillip Ng, vice president of corporate development at the data center company Soluna Computing.
- Another reason for Kazakhstan to potentially lose its BTC mining leadership is the country’s reliance on the oil and gas industry, according to Origin Protocol co-founder Josh Fraser.
Bitcoin network activity down 30% from highs as ‘tepid’ demand mimics mid-2019
- Bitcoin (BTC) is now seeing “tepid” demand just three months after hitting its latest all-time high, according to on-chain analytics firm Glassnode.
- In a tweet on Feb. 18, researchers flagged a sea change in Bitcoin on-chain activity compared to just three months ago.
- Each day, the Bitcoin network sees around 275,000 active entities transacting, compared to over 400,000 in November 2021.
- That reduction means that daily active entities are now at the same levels as in mid-2019 and even well below the peak of the last halving cycle in December 2017.
