Your Favorite Crypto Digest From TradeCrypto.com #163

Daily statistics update:

Today's market is red. BTC is now trading above $20,800, ETH is trading around $1,550.

💪 Bitcoin dominance: 40.7%

📉 Total Cryptocurrency Market Cap: $ 0.983 tr

😲 Fear and greed index: 33 (Fear)

🚀 Gainers (Top-100)

• STEPN (GMT)+6.41%

• Polygon (MATIC)+4.18%

• Litecoin (LTC)+2.23%

😭 Losers (Top-100)

• Arweave (AR)-17.71%

• Aptos (APT)-12.27%

• Solana (SOL)-12.25%

As announced in the Google Cloud tweet 📲 thread, the Solana-Google collaboration is a really big deal. In addition to Google now being one of the validators of the network, they’re working together on bringing the Blockchain Node Engine to Solana by 2023, simultaneously adding Solana’s data to Google’s BigQuery warehouse, as well as stressing the support of new devs by the tech giant’s active participation in the Solana’s startups selection with Cloud Credits program.

Solana's founder Sergei Yakovenko said 💬 that Google will greatly assist the network in solving "hard engineering problems" by speeding up the application development process and solving the "unsolved problem" of storing seed phrases.

No wonder Solana (SOL) rose on the news. Congratulations to them.

According to announcements of Polygon’s co-founders, the popular Ethereum scaling solution, the team is working ⚒ hard on rolling up an update to become a layer-2 protocol such as its competitors, Arbitrum and Optimism. Unlike Layer 2 protocols, Polygon is a completely separate blockchain from Ethereum, meaning Polygon does not post its data to Ethereum and is much less decentralized.

However, as we know, a lot has changed since Polygon was created, not to mention Ethereum. And if it made sense before, as Vitalik Buterin said 🔉 about Polygon, 'to trade decentralization for speed and affordability for very pragmatic reasons,' then with the coming zkEVM rollup, Polygon may leave all scaling solutions far behind given the well-established and successful "untrue L2" performance.

Last week, Twitter was blossoming with an update, Tweet Tiles NFT pilot program, and it was widely expected that Twitter's main NFT marketplace partner would be OpenSea. But Elon Musk didn't ❌ share the terms with OpenSea, and among other potential partners like Rarible, Dapper Labs and Jump.trade, Magic Eden was a solid choice. Especially after Magic Eden overtook OpenSea and became the largest marketplace by the number of monthly transactions. You can now advertise NFTs on Twitter and click a special click-through button directing you to Magic Eden. Magic indeed.

We hope you haven't started hiccuping yet, because another well-known beverage brand came to the NFT place with a drop 📢 of Café 11 collection of 1765 NFTs, costing 450$ each. It’s designed by NY-based artist John Dessereau, and Friends With Benefits DAO serves as a creative agency. Café 11 is named after the hour the Hennessy Tasting Committee meets, and it looks pretty cool.

To celebrate the drop, Henessee will host a real-life event in the upcoming Art Basel Miami. Of course, if you haven't bought 💸 an NFT, you won't be allowed to taste cognac accompanied by pretty music and thoughtful faces, but let's all cheer together for those who will be tasting these marvelous human creations.

The overall decline in market activity affected Coinbase, which lost 📉 44% in transaction revenues in the third quarter. The news is not comforting, however, compared to Q2, the company managed to significantly reduce losses.

Coinbase CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong is holding strong, stating: 💬 “I think there’s an opportunity at some point for the crypto prices to potentially decouple from the broader macro environment. And we don't know if that’s gonna happen, but I think it’s one of the possibilities and regulatory clarity is one of the things that could help kick that off.”

If you're wondering why this news is important, you may not have been on 🌐 Twitter because the collection of 2000 NFTs by Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland has created a furor. And it blew up.

Although the project looks interesting, with its internal mechanics, focus on the community, and so-called “belly-gallery”, the NFT community 👥 does not like when influencers don’t say if they are paid to participate in the project. Especially if the project team stresses its transparency and equality. Turns out a lot of them sold the NFT immediately after dropping the collection.

You can guess the rest.

Very few politicians in the upcoming race are actively using the crypto agenda in their election campaigns, which may seem strange enough, because about 45% of voters have an established opinion about crypto. While crypto lobbyists poured millions 💰 into campaigns, overall it seems it’s not good enough. In the current market situation and outright dislike of mainstream media for crypto, it's hard for candidates and voters to find common ground. Michelle Bond, the crypto advocate and so-called crypto queen, said to Coindesk: “Crypto needs to do a much better job in the mainstream media.“

Well, she’s totally right. We need to push it in 2024.

Conclusion: Sometimes you read the news, and you want to bury yourself under a blanket. Today, as a stroke of luck, that's not the case. Working together, we achieve more, like Google and Solana. By persevering toward a goal, we achieve it, like Polygon. And there will always be some real-time beverage events, but if you’re a true fan, go for it. Well, that's enough for today.

What is Crypto Ping Pong digest?

TC lads here are working quite hard and from time to time we gotta chill. Recently, we got ourselves a ping pong table to complete our lazy-bag-stuffed chill zone. As you all know our main hobby is Crypto, so even while we play we don’t really shut up about it. Ever.

So memes, leaks, gossips naturally come about – we collect them and share them with you in this interstellar space on our site we like to call Crypto Ping Pong digest.