Your Monday industry catch-up 📰

Crypto & Blockchain Update: December 9-15

📈Market Highlights

- Bitcoin breaks new ATH $106,000, up by 6% over last 7 days, currently at $104,000
-Ethereum hits $4,000 again with 1.5% increase last week, currently at $3,900
- Last week’s top 3 gainers were VIRTUAL (+87%), AAVE (+43%), and ONDO (+30%), while top 3 losers were WIF (-21%), BONK (-19%), and TAO (-19%)
- Crypto market’s Fear & Greed Index is at 80 Extreme Greed today
- Crypto market capitalization at $3.67 trillion, up 1.24% since yesterday
- Stablecoins market capitalization is up by 2.12%, currently at $204 billion
- NFT sales volume is up by 19% in the last 7 days while total sales are up by 24%
- Ethena’s USDe surpasses DAI and becomes 3rd largest stablecoin by total market cap

🎮Blockchain Tech & Gaming

- ZKsync announces goals to reach 10,000 TPS (transactions per second) and reduce transaction fees to as low as $0.0001 in 2025
- Solana breaks Ethereum’s reign of 8 years as the top ecosystem for new developers, while Ethereum is still first globally in total developer activity
- Ubisoft and Arbitrum to launch web3 shooter game “Captain Laserhawk” on December 18th with coinciding NFT mint via Magic Eden

📃Regulatory Updates

- BiT Global is suing Coinbase for $1 billion over wBTC delisting to promote its own competing product cbBTC
- Vancouver passes motion to become a “Bitcoin-friendly city”
- Coinbase prepares to delist Tether’s USDT in Europe

💰Investments & Partnerships

- Sui blockchain partners with Ant Digital to tokenize real world assets focusing on the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) space
- World’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, said 1-2% portfolio allocation is reasonable range for Bitcoin exposure, for investors who wish to hold $BTC
- Avalanche raises $250M in private locked-token sale ahead of their launch of Avalanche9000 network upgrade
- Beam Foundation to debut a $150M gaming venture fund Beam Ventures in Abu Dhabi in 2025

🛡️Crypto Security

- Bitcoin ATM operator Byte Federal suffered a data breach that potentially affected 58,000 customers, now urging clients to reset login credentials
- A hacker exploited a vulnerability in the Dogecoin network, which resulted in the crash of 69% of nodes
- Scammers are using social engineering and Telegram verification bots to inject crypto-stealing malware that raids crypto wallets

🗞️Miscellaneous

- Bitcoin to gold ratio hits new record at 40 gold ounces per $BTC
- Liquid restaking TVL (total value locked) on Ethereum network increased by almost 6,000% in 2024
- Riot Platforms bought another $500 million worth of Bitcoin last week
- Major scientific journal Nature with 9 million monthly viewers featured DeSci (decentralised science) project ResearchHub in their article
- Crypto travel platform Travala announces plans to launch a Bitcoin and Ava reserve

PS! Stay tuned for an exciting announcement this week from @swapincom 👀

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Have a successful new week ahead!🤝