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

Facebook reverses crypto ad ban – Crypto weekly update

This week, the total market capitalization exceeded 2.07 trillion EUR. Decrease at the 7-day interval is 10.38 %. Bitcoin frcreased by 14.6 % during the week to a current value of over than 43 800 EUR. Bitcoin dominance is 40.00 %.

Source: Coinmarketcap

Facebook reverses crypto ad ban

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, has relaxed its rules for cryptocurrency advertising, allowing crypto exchanges, wallets, and other crypto companies to advertise across all its platforms.

Technology conglomerate Meta announced Wednesday that it had updated the eligibility criteria for running cryptocurrency ads. Previously, companies could only use one of three regulatory licenses in their advertiser applications. Now, Meta has increased the number of accepted licenses to 27, allowing more cryptocurrency companies to advertise on its platforms.

Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp enforced an advertising ban for cryptocurrency exchanges, trading platforms, crypto wallets, mining hardware companies, and other crypto firms following a period of heightened interest in cryptocurrencies in January 2018. The ban was mainly aimed at cryptocurrency start-ups promoting initial coin offerings (ICOs).

“Over the years, the cryptocurrency landscape has matured and stabilized and experienced an increase in government regulation, which has helped to set clearer responsibilities and expectations for the industry“ stated n a press release announcing the updated requirements.

The latest move to allow cryptocurrency-related ads hints at the company’s commitment to its new direction. In October, Facebook rebranded to Meta as part of a long-term plan to build out the Metaverse, a concept closely linked to Web3 and blockchain technology. Source

21Shares listed first crypto ETNs

21Shares, a Swiss-based investment products issuer, listed on Tuesday its first two physically-backed Exchange-Traded Notes (ETNs) on Nasdaq Stockholm. However, the underlying assets of these notes are for the first-time cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin and Ethereum.

According to a recent press release, Nasdaq released a new segment for ETNs, a type of debt securities that track specific assets and trade on a major exchange like a stock.

Exchange-traded notes are similar to bonds but do not have periodic interest payments. ETNs are financial instruments that are mostly issued by banks or other financial institutions.

“We are excited to become the first issuer of physically-backed ETNs for Nasdaq Stockholm, one of the most tech-forward global exchanges. Our partnership is a strong endorsement of 21Shares’ mission to make cryptos more accessible in a simple and regulated manner ”21Shares CEO Hany Rashwan said.

21Shares is a company that currently manages more than $3 billion in its more than 20 investment products. Source

Final phase of Ethereum 2.0

The launch of Ethereum 2.0 is one of the events that the entire crypto community is eagerly waiting for. The ETH 2.0 launch process began in November 2020, and the network’s switch to proof-of-stake consensual algorithm is expected to make ETH a deflationary asset and solve the scalability problem.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined his vision for a “plausible roadmap” for ETH 2.0, presenting a future where the largest smart-contract platform can increase its scalability while meeting high standards for trustlessness and censorship resistance.

In a post titled Endgame Buterin presented a thought experiment for how the average big blockchain — defined by very high block frequency, high block size and thousands of transactions per second — can still be considered sufficiently trustless and censorship-resistant. The obvious trade-off for this level of scalability is the centralization of block production.

With respect to the solutions, Buterin suggested “a second tier of staking, with low resource requirements,” to carry out distributed block validation. ALso, he introduce either fraud-proof or ZK-SNARKS to let users directly (and cheaply) check block validity directly.

Buterin said block production would remain centralized even with the implementation of so-called “rollups,” which are layer-two solutions that execute transactions outside of the main Ethereum chain. “No single rollup succeeds at holding anywhere close to the majority of Ethereum activity. Instead, they all top out at a few hundred transactions per second,” he said.

The Ethereum co-founder concluded that there is a high probability that that block production will end up centralized regardless of the path to scalability that the network takes. However, Buterin does not consider centralized block production to be a risk to the decentralization of Ethereum itself, as the verification of the blocks will continue to be decentralized and censorship resistantSource

Bitmart suffered an attack

Bitmart, a cryptocurrency exchange, suffered an attack yesterday that exploited some security vulnerabilities in order to gain access to the funds of the exchange. The attack targeted the hot wallets of the platform, specifically the Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain-based wallets. The hackers managed to take almost $200 million (€177 million) in tokens from the platform.

The issue was first identified by Peckshield, a blockchain security and auditing company, that raised the alarm about a possible hot wallet vulnerability on social media. The involved wallets were those that held ETH and BSC-based tokens.
Bitmart acknowledged the situation and at the time stated that the losses due to the attack accounted for a small part of the exchange holdings.

According to Peckshield, all of the Binance Smart Chain and Ethereum tokens were exchanged for ethereum using 1inch, a decentralized exchange platform, and then were sent to Tornado.cash, an obfuscation protocol that allows users to make transactions less susceptible to tracing.

It is one of the biggest attacks on crypto centralized exchanges in 2021. As a result of this attack, Bitmart temporarily suspended withdrawals for all assets until it conducts an investigation and a new security review of the platform and its vulnerabilities. Source

Croatian giant accepts cryptocurrencies

Croatia is undoubtedly one of the most popular holiday destinations in Europe. Konzum, the largest food producer and retailer in Croatia, has became the first retail chain in Croatia where customers can pay with digital assets. Currently, such transactions are available only in the online store, but the company plans to introduce the service across its supermarkets in the near future. Supported cryptocurrencies include BTC, ETH, BCH, EOS, DAI, XRP, XLM, USDT and USDC.

To enable such payments, Konzum cooperated with the domestic fintech company Electrocoin and its PayCek system, known as Croatia’s first cryptocurrency payment processor. Uroš Kalinić – Member of the Management Board of Konzum for Finance and IT – noted that Konzum is constantly monitoring global trends hinting that the cryptocurrency industry is one of them.

Konzum is not only the leading supermarket chain in Croatia but also the biggest in the Western Balkan area. Apart from its homeland, it stretches to two other countries – Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. The retail giant serves over 650,000 customers each day in its more than 700 stores. Source

Curiosity: Whales accumulate bitcoin

Price corrections in the cryptocurrency market represent an opportunity for many investors to grow their investment portfolio. The third-largest bitcoin whale has taken advantage of the current price drop for other big purchases.

The address – which currently holds 118,405 bitcoin worth nearly $6 billion (€5.31 billion) – has bought a total of 3,090 BTC in three separate purchases in recent days:

  • On December 7, the whale bought 2702 BTC at $50701/BTC
  • On December 8, the whale bought 230 BTC at $50,678/BTC
  • On December 8, the whale bought an additional 158 BTC at $50,535/BTC

However, it remains a mystery who owns this address. Currently, this is the largest bitcoin address where the owner is still unknown. CryptoQuant analyst noted that while it was possible the address in question is a cold wallet for a crypto exchange, but, the transaction volumes and patterns of BTC acquisition suggest it is an individual private investor. Source

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Daniel Mitrovsky

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