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Crypto weekly update
23. December 2021  • clock 3 min •  Daniel Mitrovsky

Adidas enters NFT space – Crypto weekly update

This week, the total market capitalization exceeded 1.99 trillion EUR. Decrease at the 7-day interval is 0.25 %. Bitcoin decreased by 2.65 % during the week to a current value of over than 42 600 EUR. Bitcoin dominance is 40.3 %.

Source: Coinmarketcap

Adidas enters NFT space

The globally recognized sports footwear and clothing giant Adidas has made a relatively successful debut in the sale of non-fungible tokens (NFT). Adidas made approximately $23.4 million (€20.3 million) in a single afternoon from its debut “Into the Metaverse” NFT drop.

In addition to making its successful debut, Adidas’s NFT collection called “Into the Metaverse” has also become the TOP NFT collection of the week. According to the OpenSea, volume of Adidas NFT has exceeded 12,258 ETH (EUR 44.13 million) in the last seven days, surpassing popular collections such as CryptoPunks and CloneX.

The drop was a collaboration with Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC, itself currently the seventh biggest collection by sales volume), PUNKS Comic NFT creator Pixel Vault, and private NFT collector gmoney, who has more than 160,000 followers on Twitter.

There were a total of 30,000 Adidas Originals NFTs up for grabs, minted on the Ethereum blockchain, with 20,000 of them first offered to holders of Pixel Vault NFTs, Bored Ape or Mutant Ape NFTs, and Adidas Originals POAPs.

However, one special curiosity happened during the sale. One customer managed to circumvent the cap by deploying a custom smart contract that generated 165 sub-smart contracts, each with a unique address, to mint two NFTs apiece from Adidas’s smart contract in one transaction, before sending the 330 tokens over to the creator’s main ETH address. The investor managed to buy up to 330 Adidas NFT tokens. He paid approximately $252,000 (€220,800) for the NFTs as each NFT was sold at an initial price of ETH 0.2.

The drop is great news for Adidas, which has made a concerted effort to gain an early foothold in the metaverse. Last month it announced a Coinbase partnership as part of its metaverse strategy. Around the same time, Metaverse game The Sandbox announced that Adidas had a parcel of land earmarked for its use. Source

Kraken acquires Staked

Major cryptocurrency exchange Kraken announced that it purchased blockchain infrastructure platform Staked, primarily focused on staking and lending services.

In Tuesday’s announcement, Kraken said it had added Staked to its portfolio of yield products following the acquisition. The company described the Staked deal as “one of the largest crypto industry acquisitions to date” but did not disclose the amount.

According to Kraken CEO Jesse Powell, Staked users will have access to Kraken’s portfolio of yield products.

Staked CEO Tim Ogilvie cited the exchange’s “commitment to supporting proof-of-stake networks” as well its track record on customer experience and security in its decision to move forward with the deal.

The crypto exchange said its staking business had grown by more than 950 % since the beginning of the year to reach $16 billion (€14.13 billion) in November. This is also one of the main reasons why Kraken continues expanding in staking business. Source

Millennials love cryptocurrencies

With institutional crypto investments and millennials turning millionaires becoming familiar headlines, 2021 has proven to be the year of crypto adoption.

A new CNBC survey has revealed that a majority of millennial millionaires have invested a significant chunk of their portfolio in crypto and plan to continue their crypto investments in 2022. The survey polled investors with assets of $1 million or more, and 83% of the polled millennial millionaires revealed they had made crypto investments.

Almost 53 % of the survey’s respondents said they hold 50% or more of their portfolio in crypto. Nearly one-third of the respondents have invested at least three-quarters of their wealth in crypto assets. While the poll results might come as a surprise to many, those who have been following the crypto boom in 2021 would know that cryptocurrencies are the biggest investment opportunity of recent years.

The CNBC survey also revealed a massive generational gap in terms of investment. On one side, millennials are investing as high as 50% of their wealth in crypto, while on the other side, only 4% of the older generation have invested in digital assets and only one-fourth of the GenX owns crypto. Source

Polkadot has lanuched parachains

The long-awaited parachains are finally here! Polkadot launched the first five parachains on its network last Saturday, officially kicking off the blockchain’s path to becoming an interoperable ecosystem.

Polkadot has been hosting parachain slot auctions since Nov. 11. Projects hoping to win a slot hosted crowd loans to raise DOT and staked the tokens they received to bid on parachain slots.

The first five auction winners were Acala, Moonbeam, Parallel Finance, Astar, and Clover, projects focusing on decentralized finance, cross-chain interoperability, and other use cases. Each project now has a parachain lease until Oct. 20, 2023.

Polkadot will ultimately allocate 100 parachain slots in batches to different blockchain projects built on its network over the coming months While the first batch of parachain slots was allocated via an auction process, Polkadot said it will not provide all slots through a similar process.

However, it has commenced preparations for the second batch of the parachain auction process, which is slated to begin on December 23, 2021, and will feature a total of six auctions. Source

Dubai as the world’s new crypto center?

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) continues to become one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency jurisdictions.

According to the latest news, the Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) will a comprehensive zone and regulator of cryptocurrencies, products, operators and exchanges, DWTC officially announced Monday.

As part of the initiative, the DWTC will design a comprehensive ecosystem for this progressive sector within Dubai and collaborate with the private sector to set up an “attractive environment for the sector.” The project also aims to enforce rigorous standards for investor protection, Anti-Money Laundering measures and combating the financing of terrorism.

The initiative comes in line with Dubai’s growing efforts to support the crypto development as both Dubai and the UAE have been working for the local economy to benefit from blockchain technology as well as nonfungible tokens and cryptocurrencies. Source

Curiosity: Recovered bitcoins

The fact that cryptocurrencies and bitcoin have changed the lives of countless investors around the world is no surprise. A similar story happened earlier this week, when an unknown investor recovered his wallet with more than 300 bitcoins.

The wallet had not been used since 2013, barely a few years after the mysterious Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared. The wallet has 321 BTC. After eight years, the value of this amount has increased from $6,594 (€5,825) to a staggering $15,103,046 (more than €13.3 million). By now, the funds in the wallet had appreciated almost 2,300 times.

However, it is not yet known who owns this wallet or why the account was reactivated after almost nine years. In recent months, several dormant Bitcoin wallets from 2011–2013 have been reactivated, each containing tens of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. A similar case happened in September, where the owner of a dormant Bitcoin wallet emptied their account and transferred all 616 BTC to different accounts. Source

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Daniel Mitrovsky

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