Your Favorite Crypto Digest From TradeCrypto.com #147

The statistics:

Market is green. BTC is now trading above $19,800, ETH is trading around $1,300.

💪 Bitcoin dominance: 41.98%

📉 Total Cryptocurrency Market Cap: $ 0,905 tr

😲 Fear and greed index: 24 (Extreme Fear)

🚀 Gainers (Top-100)

• Ethereum Name Service (ENS)+16.51%

• Quant (QNT)+13.19%

• Uniswap (UNI)+11.90%

😭 Losers (Top-100)

• Convex Finance (CVX)-2.73%

• Klaytn (KLAY)-2.56%

• Casper (CSPR)-1.59%

Who'd have thought? Five people have been charged in France on allegations that they fraudulently acquired $2.5 💰 million worth of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), mainly targeting Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) owners. Noted online crypto sleuth "ZachXBT" played a key role in helping French authorities uncover the fraudulent Bored Ape NFT scheme.

The prosecution alleged that the suspects used a phishing operation to acquire the assets, luring victims via a fake website that promised to animate their NFTs. The charges levied against the 🔍 suspects, all of whom aged between 30 and 24, include “include fraud committed as part of a criminal gang, concealing fraud and criminal association.”

The crypto bear market may have scared off retail investors, but it hasn’t driven away venture capitalists looking to fund DeFi projects. Uniswap announced 📢 its latest raise of $165 million today, led by Polychain Capital. Joining Polychain Capital in the Series B funding round are a16z crypto, Paradigm, SV Angel, and Variant. “I’m so excited to announce that we’ve raised $165 million in Series B funding,” Uniswap founder Hayden Adams said in a post announcing the raise. Very impressive.

A fine choice. Cryptography hardware technology company Fabric Systems raised $13 million in a seed round from investors to build energy-efficient Bitcoin mining hardware. The money came 💸 from early stage investment firm Metaplanet, run by Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, crypto exchange Blockchain.com, and venture firm 8090 Partners.

The investment from Metaplanet is not Tallinn’s first foray into crypto: a keen Bitcoin enthusiast, the Estonian engineer previously admitted he holds most of his wealth in cryptocurrency, and has donated digital assets to companies before. Silicon Valley-based Fabric Systems will use the money to build ⚒ an “immersion-native” Bitcoin miner and a general purpose accelerator for cryptographic algorithms.

Binance completed its 21st quarterly burn of BNB tokens, effectively compensating for the losses incurred from its bridge hack last week. Burn 🔥 took 2,065,152.42 BNB, worth over $549 million at current prices, off the market. By comparison, an exploit of the BNB Chain bridge last week netted the attacker exactly 2,000,000 BNB, conjured out of thin air using artificial withdrawal proofs. The net value of the stolen BNB was worth roughly $566 million at the time. A nice twist.

This is always a good idea. Japanese gaming giant Konami is seeking to expand its crypto-versed talent pool while it eyes the development of Web3 and metaverse “experiences” and a nonfungible token (NFT) 🌐 marketplace. The gaming giant is the latest in a lengthening list of big names signaling interest in expanding its Web3 offerings by seeking to acquire new talent.

The company announced that it was recruiting a “wide range of talent” for "system construction and service development,” relating to future metaverse and Web3 platforms. Konami stated that it has been conducting research 🔍 and development to incorporate the “latest technology” into its games and content, adding it also has plans to launch an NFT trading platform where players can trade their in-game digital items.

Crypto asset investment and trading group CoinShares has launched an experimental Twitter bot, CoinSharesNFTAI, that can calculate a “fair price” for a given NFT. CoinShares’ Twitter bot aggregates data and tells users at what price a specific NFT could be bought or sold for. “A simple tweet can let you know how much an NFT might be worth,” CoinShares tweeted Thursday. CoinShares has even developed a method for determining the “hype” surrounding an NFT collection. Should be quite helpful.

A nice partnership. The government of Dominica has partnered with smart contract blockchain platform Tron to issue Dominica Coin (DMC), a token that promotes 🔈 the Caribbean nation’s natural and cultural heritage. The release describes the Tron blockchain as “one of the leading global blockchain platforms, known for its efficient and cost-effective crypto settlement system.”

Conclusion: Annual inflation slowed down from 8.3% to 8.2% (forecast: 8.1%). All the bears began to cheer the fall, but not for long. The market instantly reversed and the Bitcoin exchange rate rose. Uniswap is starting to raise funds. More and more news suggests that the bull market is closer than we may think.

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.