The crypto world has been on a rollercoaster this week, with Bitcoin making a surprise pump back up to prime 2017 levels, students in the USA are now learning about Bitcoin, and a fake Pokémon NFT game has been infecting computers. Let’s explore all of this and more in this week’s crypto news digest!
Shiba Inu Ranked 3rd Most Watched Crypto in 2022
In what was arguably a depressing year for crypto, 2022 proved to be quite spectacular for a handful of cryptos. This week Binance announced that the memecoin known as Shiba Inu (SHIB) was its 3rd most watched cryptocurrency in 2022. It beat out the likes of Solana, Polkadot, Cardano, and even Terra Classic (LUNC) to take 3rd place.
SHIB has become a mainstay of the yolo portfolio, with investors able to pick up millions of coins for a handful of dollars. The SHIB community grew significantly over the course of the year, with a grand total of 1,267,276 unique addresses holding the coin as of December 11, 2022.
American College Launches Bitcoin Courses
What better way to grow the crypto world than by teaching Bitcoin to college students. Students at Texas A&M can now enroll in a Bitcoin-centric class dubbed “Bitcoin Protocol”. It’s currently available to more than 74,000 students throughout the college. In a 4-part Twitter thread, Professor Korok Ray announced that “Programming Bitcoin” will be the next class in the Bitcoin series, teaching students how to build a Bitcoin library from scratch. Guest lecturer and Bitcoin legend Jimmy Song is slated to make a guest appearance to help teach the students!
Bitcoin Bounces Back to $21,000
Wen moon? Any time soon!
Bitcoin kicked off 2023 with a bang, rocketing to December 2017’s peak of $21,000 on January 13th, a level not seen since November. After a painfully long 2022, investors and market enthusiasts were hopeful that the uptick in Bitcoin’s price would be here to stay, but unfortunately the movement tapered off and it appears to be cooling off.
However, optimistic industry veterans are hopeful that this is the end of the bloodshed and crypto winter. Speaking to Arabian Business, Dhruvil Shah, Senior VP of Tech at Liminal said:
“It will be interesting to see if investors with a high-risk appetite will make a move on the early signs of a bull run as the crypto market is inching toward the $1 trillion mark led by Bitcoin and Ethereum.”
If optimistic investors pounce, they could send Bitcoin to the moon and beyond, ending this torrid crypto winter once and for all!
Fake Pokémon NFT Game Gets Infectious
NFT bros and web3 enthusiasts are constantly shilling the metaverse and NFT games, but this time it appears to have gone wrong. In a Team Rocket style attack, scammers planted malware behind a legitimate looking executable app that can be used to play a fictitious Pokémon NFT game. However, these crooks managed to get away with a bunch of loot, with dozens of users reporting their wallets being drained.
NFT markets have taken a major hit as crypto markets continue to look gloomy, and with attacks like this, it could impede the growth of web3 and delay the return of NFT mania.
Iran and Russia Teaming Up for Gold-Backed Stablecoin
Back in the depths of World War 2, the United States was facing a crisis. Unable to fund its war efforts with its gold backed currency, known as the Gold Standard, it decided to remove the pegging. This allowed money printers to go “brrrrr” and churn out infinite money, kickstarting the inflation crisis that millions of Americans are grappling with to this day.
In a bid to create a currency that’s actually backed something rather than lies and false promises like the US Dollar, Iran and Russia are teaming up to create a gold-backed stablecoin. What is set to be known as “token of the Persian Gulf region”, the new digital currency will be fully backed by gold, creating a finite supply of the currency, and therefore preventing any inflation issues. It would also allow the pair to break free from OFAC’s tyranny and trade quite happily with the rest of the world. If the duo manages to go ahead, there’s chance that other nations could join the group, imposing a threat to the US Dollar’s “dominance” in the oil markets.
Twitter’s Crypto Price Index Grows to 30 Tokens
Back in December 2022, Twitter announced a feature known as “$Cashtags”. Simply put, searching for a cryptocurrency on Twitter using its ticker or symbol will reveal its live market average price. It launched with Bitcoin and Ethereum but has now grown to include a whopping 30 tokens. This number is growing by the day, with many postulating that Twitter could have more than 100 live and searchable by the end of February!
What Does the Week Ahead Hodl?
That’s it for last week’s crypto news highlights, but we’ll be back next week with more. Will the USA finally launch crypto regulations? Perhaps Sam Bankman-Fried will get jail time! There’s tons on the cards already, so stay tuned to hodl.fm for more breaking crypto industry news!
