The road to heaven is full of pain, the road to hell is full of pleasure! (weekly crypto updates)

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What happened in crypto in the past week? I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. Bitcoin is jumping up. Is the BTC price still suppressed by unknown actors? ETH and SOL seems to be the preffered altcoins this year.What else? Read below:

• Bitcoin: Strategy bought 1286 BTC, now hodling 673.783 BTC, over 3% of the total supply. Bitcoin spiked after the inflation report, from $92K to $96K.

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• Ethereum: Bitmine now holds 4.14M ETH after they added another 32977 ETH in its latest purchase. Ethereum upgrades went live nicely, PeerDAS is already on mainenet, and zkEVMs hit production-quality performance.Vitalik said that resilience means surviving political exclusion and infrastructure collapse, while ETH prioritizes sovereignty, unlike SOL looking to handle massive transaction volumes at speed. We will see which of two will achieve more success in 2026. The comparison of ETH being the Linux of blockchain made us smile, but there is an open source system we talk about, so I can see this one. Standard Chartered said that 2026 will be ETH's year.

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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Finally I found some decent place to park some stablecoins. Blend is offering a good 8% return on USDC, with an airdrop coming soon. Check them! Privacy coins crashed as memecoins started to rally. All while Bitmex founder said that the privacy will be the crypto's dominant narrative this year. Monero just reclaimed the top privacy coin spot. AI marketcap hits $19.6B, raising 15.4%. Polymarket drops its Zero-fee promise, adding a taker fees to its 15-min crypto prediction market, without any previous announcement. Doge breaks above key price level, rising 17% in a week, while DOGE ETFs pulled in nearly $4M for two consecutive days. Lighter DEX rolled out continuous weekday trading for equity perpetuals covering major stocks and they already surpassed Hyperliquid's monthly trading volume in both November and December, while they also raised $68M and launched its native LIT token last week. SOL marketcap is up 14.1%, with Bonk being up +58% and PUMP 42%. On BNB Chain, we had $4.5B added, a +6.9% increase, with the price on $900 being reclaimed. The last BNB Chain update shashed the block time in half, to 0.45 sec. Binance launched TradFi perpetual contracts, with 24/7 trading on traditional finance assets via perpetuals. Jupiter Exchange announced JUPUSD, a Genius-compliant stablecoin backed by Blackrock's BUIDL fund and USDC. Optimism wants to buy-back OP tokens.

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• NFTs and blockchain games: I have enjoyed playing Golem Overlord lately on Hive, and it is quite enjoyable, I would say, with some significant updates lately. On Splinterlands, we have had the Land NFT new update and improved tokenomics, and the new rewards cards from the Conclave collection are up and running. Nike sold its NFT bussines in December, with no price and no buyer name disclosed.

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• Good news: I use Freetrade to buy BlackRock in UK, works quite well, and they also have UK Treasury bills, so, quite happy to build a £10K portfolio here, to test how it is working. . Morgan Stanley files for BTC and SOL ETFs. JPMorgan is launching JPM Coin on Canton Network, the second blockchain after Base. Ripple got approval to Operate in UK. In a surprising move, Dubai FinancialServices Authority let licensed companies to decide for themselves which tokens meet regulatory standards. Franklin Templeton converts funds into stablecoin reserves.

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• Bad news: We heard that the entire Zcash developer team left Electric Coin Company, the company supporting the development of Zcash, after a board dispute. 30% of the ZEC supply now sits in shielded addresses. Vitalik had a busy week, still found time to identify three structural problems in decentralized stablecoins: price tracking, oracle security and stacking yield competition. India tightens crypto rules with face recognition, as users no need live selfies and head movement tracking to prevent AI deepfakes. Trump's crypto project launches lending product. Crypto investments bled $454M last week.

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• Joke of the week: Bank of America lets advisors to push Bitcoin ETFs to clients. Fear and Greed is back to Neutral. Whale accumulation added 56227 BTC since December 17, while retail investors sold, reducing supply and mirroring the 2021 rally. There is this rumor still about the price being controlled by hidden actors, aiming to accumulate more BTC while the weak hands are selling, and the numbers actually support the theory. We also have the institutions buying the altcoin crash focusing on ETH and SOL.

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All the best,

George

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Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- a Hearthstone-like card game) (Golem Overlord - a Play2Earn game on Hive) (Upland - a real-life virtual land) (Holozing - a Pokemon-like game)and ( Chain of Legends - with a hint of Heroes of Might and Magic).

...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog, using the Presearch search engine to maximise your income with PRE tokens. Use Torum instead of Twitter. I am also writing for crypto on Hive.

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Posted Using INLEO