Your Favorite Crypto Digest From TradeCrypto.com #162

The statistics:

Market is green. BTC is now trading above $20,600, ETH is trading around $1,550.

💪 Bitcoin dominance: 41.4%

📉 Total Cryptocurrency Market Cap: $ 0,981 tr

😲 Fear and greed index: 30 (Fear)

🚀 Gainers (Top-100)

• OKB (OKB)+21.50%

• Loopring (LRC)+20.74%

• Fantom (FTM)+15.55%

😭 Losers (Top-100)

• Arweave (AR)-14.00%

• Flow (FLOW)-10.04%

• Dogecoin (DOGE)-9.22%

How awful. New York-based Instagram influencer Jebara Igbara—who went by the online pseudonym Jay Mazini—has pled guilty to an assortment of crimes including 💸 stealing $2.5 million worth of Bitcoin from his followers.

Igbara reportedly posted on his Instagram and other social media accounts that he was willing to pay above-market prices for various cryptocurrencies, usually around 3.5% to 5% over their market value. According to the court filing, after receiving the crypto, Igbara would then 📲 send his victims doctored images of wire transfer confirmations that purported to show he had sent money for the cryptocurrency as promised. In reality, the payment was never sent.

Quite competitive. Investment giant Fidelity today announced an early-access waitlist for its new crypto product Fidelity Crypto—which will let retail investors trade Bitcoin and Ethereum from their phones without paying commission fees. The Boston-based firm, which last month launched 📢 an Ethereum trading service for institutions, said retail investors would soon be able to “trade crypto with as little as $1 while also having an integrated view of both your traditional and crypto investments.” The move now places the company in direct competition with established players in the U.S. crypto market like Coinbase and Robinhood.

Fans will be happy. Haas F1 Team, the only American-owned team in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship, announced today a partnership 🤝 with OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace by trading volume. The new deal will include the production of a line of branded NFTs and cross-promotion during racing events where the OpenSea logo will appear on the Haas F1 Team VF-22 series cars.

"NFTs have the incredible power to unlock new experiences and give us a canvas to bring people together around the things they love in new ways," 💬 said Shiva Rajaraman, VP of Product at OpenSea, in a statement. "We're looking forward to bringing innovative collections to life with the Haas F1 Team, building new experiences for their community of dedicated fans, and providing new ways for everyone to get even closer to the action."

An interesting proposal. Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs will soon provide institutional clients with an online resource that explains and categorizes cryptocurrencies. Called Datonomy, the service will help institutional investors who may be strangers to the space wrap their heads around the hundreds of coins and tokens which now make up a $1.05 trillion industry. Coins and tokens will be rated 📈 in “consistent, standardized way to help market participants view and analyze the digital assets ecosystem,” the statement added.

Trying to compete with Twitter? Social media platform Instagram is set to introduce a number of nonfungible token (NFT)-related tools ⚒ that will allow creators to mint, show and sell NFTs. Meta says creators will have an “end-to-end toolkit” for creating, showing, then selling NFTs within the platform and has chosen the Polygon blockchain as an initial partner for this functionality.

In addition to its current lineup of supported blockchains that include Ethereum, Flow and Polygon, Meta also revealed its support for the Solana blockchain and its popular Phantom wallet. Support for video 📺 NFTs will also be added and metadata such as names and descriptions for select NFT collections will be pulled from NFT marketplace OpenSea.

Not a bad start. Kraken, the world’s sixth-largest cryptocurrency exchange, is launching its new NFT marketplace, even as sales for digital collectibles continue to drop. It will initially host over 70 Ethereum and Solana-based NFT collections, and will also allow customers to store 🔐 their NFTs on Kraken at no extra cost, including any already owned. The company spokesperson added that Kraken’s stringent security protocols to keep any “malware-embedded NFTs out of the platform,” which will help clients use Kraken NFT “with complete peace of mind, without fear of their crypto wealth being compromised.”

Wow, that's we call progress. Multinational banking firm JP Morgan has successfully executed its first-ever cross-border transaction using decentralized finance (DeFi) on a public 🌐 blockchain. The trade was facilitated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Guardian — which was established as part of a pilot program to “explore potential decentralized finance (DeFi) applications in wholesale funding markets.”

Conclusion: The NFT market is now in a more difficult situation than cryptocurrencies. Purchasing power is gone and interest too. Nevertheless, we see that large corporations continue to develop in this direction. Kraken has joined the list of exchanges that have an NFT marketplace. We hope that it will soon become a mandatory part of all exchanges.

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.