It is Bitcoin surging 34 percent since last Friday, for its best week since January 2021. Now at its highest level since last June, crypto-linked stocks are also coming along for the ride. The Marathon digital coinbase microstrategy is also seeing huge games.
This week, with Marathon jumping more than 50 percent, what did you call it now? Was it that fat pitch? Is that the term? I just find it very interesting. If you think about Bitcoin and how it acted last year in the period that we’ve had the highest inflation in 20 years, one of the pillars of the bull case was as an inflation hedge.
Now it’s obviously acting well, as you know, with centralised financial systems and everything like that going haywire. I just don’t find it that interesting, and then you think about all the money that’s pouring into Coinbase up 100 of the year. You know, that doesn’t look interesting to me either if you think about how much market cap has been lost in the traditional banking sector.
This is a 17 billion dollar market cap company. This is one way to express this view: I don’t think it’s going to be a good long-term one well, and what’s the biggest risk right now, relative to banks and everyone else who’s flying to bitcoin because of, what’s going on with banks, it’s regulation, and what’s the biggest risk to bitcoin going forward, it’s regulation, and it’s probably just gotten worse, so it makes me sceptical.
it’s worse I think, it does because, they’re already in the crosshairs and I think now generally speaking the regulatory environment get sturned up, and I think Bitcoin it’s interesting that ,because I think there’s a an angle for it to be less because, they’re focused so much on banks right now.
Ethereum is 26 days away from the biggest update of the year, and we may also have big airdrop news, polygon news, and coin news files in its history. Stick around until the end, because I have some shocking revelations coming from the Federal Reserve.
But first, our old buddy Ethereum is just one step away from users finally being able to unstake the damn coins and withdraw Ethereum should they choose to do so, and also, most importantly, to claim their taking rewards, the Ethereum developers have completed the Shanghai upgrade on the Goily testnet, which is the Network’s final testnet to be upgraded.
Of course, the next step in this scenario is to push the live update to the Ethereum mainnet for everyone to use and ban, but this final test net upgrade did come with a few unexpected hiccups. The developers said that the processing of deposits wasn’t going as they had hoped and expected, and by the way it did what happened.
Why do we test nets? So we can find these things out before we risk billions and billions of dollars in value. Anyway, this is all due to multiple test net validators not upgrading their client software in time. Ethereum core developer Tim Baiko came out and said one challenge with test net validators is that given the eth is worthless, there’s a lot less incentive to actually run a validator and monitor it, so that’s a problem.
He expects validators to carry out the proper preparations ahead of the actual main net launch where all the monetary value is sitting, and we now have a target for the Shanghai upgrade of April 12th that’s just 26 days away.
Man, when the Shanghai upgrade finally does get rolled out to the main net, it may take a little bit of time for the rest of the Ethereum ecosystem to actually start catching up to that and, of course, to implement the feature into their services.
For example, Lido, which is one of the biggest staking protocols for Ethereum, announced their plan to launch the staked withdrawals feature sometime in May due to the Ongoing validation of its V2 platform Lydo has spent a total of $1.2 million on seven different validations of its platform to resolve issues or vulnerabilities with the performance before that upgrade comes.
Obviously, this is very important because Lido has so much money locked up in their platform. Now that they’ve spent so much money, they’re not going to let the Shanghai upgrade come in between their plans, so it’s going to come in May at some point if you’re using the light of staking service.
Now it’s exciting to be on the precipice of such a big event for ethereum, only 26 days away it’s game changing the biggest upgrade for ethereum, this year next arbitrum has announced a token airdrop, finally ethereum’s layer 2 arbitrum finally getting the token coming out for people it’s called ARB and the new token will be airdropped out to community members on March 23rd.
Now the airdrop launch will mark the arbitrum’s official transition to being a decentralised autonomous organisation, or Dao, which means that ARB holders will be able to vote on key decisions across the arbitrum, including the arbitrum at Nova Networks.
The transition to Dow status is actually going to take control away from arbitrageurs and off-chain labs, and they’re totally fine with this process. The off-chain lab CEO has come out and said that for me, the most exciting part is the decentralisation.
The fact that off-chain Labs will no longer have any control over the future of the arbitrum chain means that they will be a service provider, and if the Dow calls on us to build software for it, then we can do that. It’s pretty cool to see the CEO thinking about decentralisation.
What’s best for the community? The snapshot has already been done, so that happened in February to decide who’s going to get the airdrop. So it’s going to depend on a lot of different factors, as well as the number of transactions you did, how many apps you used, etc. how long you’ve been using the arbitrum network for all these different things, now you can find out if you made the cut by going over to arbitrum dot foundation.
I hope you got this airdrop; I do, and I hope it’s worth a lot of money for you. Now let’s talk about the big news for file coin: the network just launched smart contracts, so file coin has successfully launched its virtual machine.
Now the upgrade unlocks a lot more utility for file coins, such as perpetual storage financial services for mine owners, and allows for developers to actually then run applications from the Ethereum ecosystem on top of the file coin network, obviously great for compatibility issues.
According to the developers, there is already huge demand coming in from different crypto projects in different companies that want to integrate into the file coin network. Because it is a popular network, we already have confirmed integrations, including anchor axelar, brave, seller Ocean Sushi Swap, and Teller, all of whom are bringing in the new virtual machine enabled services to users.
Now the virtual machine launch also kicks off the final step for file coin’s masterplan, which is to basically bring large-scale computation and the ability to power web-scale applications to the world’s largest decentralised storage network. All very cool stuff; good work, file coin.
Now let’s talk about polygons and polyamory. It’s the one polygon is the king of partnerships, and they just keep adding more the network has added a few new interesting partners, here, so polygon Labs partnered up with Unstoppable Domains to bring customizable domains to the network.
Users can also now create polygon domains so dot polygon domains to be able to log into web3 applications to make use of a simple wallet address and to create decentralised websites using that polygon domain name.
The service is going to be available to run 180 million users and 40 000 services across the entire polygon ecosystem, and the polygon domains are going to be compatible with about 750 applications, games, and metaverse platforms in other polygons. Software-as-a-Service giant SalesForce has launched a new NFT management platform called Salesforce Web 3.
The platform will help clients to create token-based loyalty programs, most of which are going to use ethereum and our buddy polygon, the launch comes off the back of a pilot program of 257000 transactions with Salesforce clients such as, Barbie Hot Wheels with a whiskey brand Crown Royal and the clothing brand scotch and soda.
Now the general manager of web3 over at Salesforce has said, the power is in the digital wallet, the crypto wallet becomes really powerful. So I can directly engage with a customer and have access to that first party data lot of Our Brands want to pay the gas fees for the end consumer.
They don’t want the consumer to even understand that there are gas fees involved or need to know, what that is this shows that the key to onboarding new users into web 3, is basically by making it, so seamless that they don’t even realize they reusing blockchain technology and when you’re using a network like polygon where, the fees are fractional of ascent that’s possible.
Now the big fed news, the fed this week has injected 300 billion freaking dollars of liquidity into the financial system to avoid, of course a major crisis and big contagion across the banking sector this is effectively erased half of their year-long tightening efforts in just one week and as Gert points out,
Here this massive move by the FED feels very reminiscent of the post-covid money flood and that money flood, if you were here if you remember kicked off an insane rally for risk assets like, tech stocks and cryptocurrencies.
I’m not saying, history is going to repeat but, that sure is a note worthy comparison isn’t it remember markets rise on increasing liquidity and right now, almost every major economy is injecting money China Japan the USA Switzerland and others it’s QE Infinity.
The recent developments in the United States banking system have brought to the fore the criticality of banking sector regulation and supervision. These developments in the United States, especially, over the last week and thereafter, drive home the importance of ensuring prudent asset liability management.
They also point out that cryptocurrencies, assets, and the like can be a real danger to banks. whether directly or indirectly, developments in the United States banking system have brought to the fore the criticality of banking sector regulation and supervision.
These are areas that have a significant bearing on maintaining any country’s financial stability, and particularly these developments in the US, particularly over the past week. and thereafter drive home the importance of ensuring prudent asset liability management, robust risk management, sustainably able growth in liabilities and assets, undertaking periodic stress tests, and building up critical buffers for any unanticipated future stress.
Now, more specifically, these developments in the banking system of the United States drive home the importance of ensuring, number one, prudent asset liability management, robust risk management, and sustainable growth in liabilities in assets, which means sustainable growth of deposits as well as sustainable growth of credit. Second point: undertaking periodic stress tests and building of capital buffers or any unanticipated stress. They also bring out that cryptocurrencies, assets, and the like can be a real danger to banks, whether directly or indirectly.
Global investors were just starting to get their bearings following the collapse of two banks in the United States, but now they have something more to worry about as one of Europe’s major banks is in trouble. Yoko Fukushima has the details.
The Central Bank of Switzerland is extending major funding to credit Swiss, the country’s second-largest bank, has calmed immediate concerns about its finances, but it’s got traders worried about the stability of the global financial system. Credit Suisse announced on Wednesday that it would borrow up to 50 billion Swiss francs from the Swiss National Bank, or about 54 billion dollars.
It says it’s taking this decisive action to strengthen its liquidity. The director, the direct trigger, seemed to be the Saudi National Bank saying, it would provide no more money. The Saudi Bank agreed last year to invest 1.6 billion dollars to help turn the firm around it’s 10 stake made it.
Critic swiss’s largest investor, shares of Credit Suisse were dumped, falling as much as 30 percent to a record low the stock exchange had to halt trading of the shares at one point. This was authorities pledge the liquidity Lifeline, following the melt down, an unprecedented move the financial regulator and the Central Bank released a joint statement saying.
Credit Swiss meets the capital and liquidity requirements imposed on systemically important Banks stock indexes and Europes lumped on Wednesday, the 30 in London was down almost four percent. The Dax in Frankfurt fell more than three percent banking stocks weighed heavily on the indexes and the negative sediments spilled into Asia as well investors were worried about how the financial systemin the US and Europe will impact the many Traders avoided taking risks.
The Nikki and Tokyo slipped a tenth of a percent and the Hansen and Hong Kong lost 1.7 percent. The critics’ turmoil affected the currency market, and the yen strengthened against the dollar. Some bought as they saw the Japanese currency as a safe-haven asset.
Swiss has a history of problems, from trading losses to repeated executive shake-ups. The latest slide in its shares was nothing new in early 2021; the bank’s involvement with collapsed green cells Capital left its risk management and compliance in doubt, the bank lost billions when the private fund defaulted in the same year, there were several changes in management over the years, and traders were not convinced of the bank’s business.
As Bank Economist Caraca Mandiska says, there’s no clear reason behind the latest turmoil, as Credit Suisse’s finances were sound based on recent stress tests. He says there’s a low probability of this leading to a financial crisis, but it cannot be rolled out. Investors that sold Credit Suisse were watching what was happening across the Atlantic; they thought banks in Europe may have problems.
This vague concern led to the trouble at Credit Suisse. I don’t think we need to worry about the spreading, but financial crises tend to happen through a domino effect. For instance, if investors find out a major financial institution has big exposure to credit, they may think that bank could collapse, and so on.
Here’s how some of the European indexes started trading on Thursday, and it seems traders will relieve the Swiss Central Bank. It stepped in to help the troubled bank’s credit Swiss stocks are coming back, the tax in Germany is up about three tenths of a percent and footsie, and Britain has gained about seven tenths of a percent from Wednesday.
Now the biggest focus for investors is the monetary policy meetings of the European Central Bank and the U.S. Federal Reserve. The ECB meeting is coming up later in the day. It has already said it would raise interest rates by half a percentage point, but Karakama says it might have to rethink that.
It may be difficult for the ECB to raise rates by 0.5 percentage points because Credit Suisse is a major European bank. It will be difficult to cancel the rate kite. since board members have already announced the 0.5 percentage point hike. Europeans like to choose something in the middle, so they will most likely decide to raise rates by a quarter percentage point.
As for the FED, he says many economists expect no rate hike at its meeting next week to calm markets after the Silicon Valley Bank fallout, but he says there are other scenarios: before the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, there was talk the FED may raise its key rate by 0.5 percentage points, the inflation situation has not changed, and there may be other events ahead of its meeting.
I’d say there’s a 50/50 chance of a 0.25 percentage point hike and a 50/50 chance the FED will do nothing. The monitoring authorities are in a tricky position, and for sure with markets on edge, their decisions could sit off another round of nervous selling in the financial sector.
Chat GPt4 just launched, and AI coins are pumping in response. Chat GPt4 is a major upgrade from its predecessor. I mean, you can put directions on a napkin, upload it, and it will create a website for you, and every time we see a big AI announcement, we see AI coins pumped, so what’s the connection?
Well, at the moment, very little. Andre Cronier, the king of D5, the creator of urine finance, previously tweeted that AI and blockchains don’t mix: blockchains are slow, transparent, and secure High throughput opaque Black Box In addition, Delphi Digital’s VP stated that most AI tokens are grips, with very few projects in the space trying thoughtfully to integrate AI into crypto.
So, most AI coins really have nothing to do with AI, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t making money. When it comes to crypto, let’s be real, narratives and speculation are very big every time.
We see a big announcement from a big company, and if there is a token that fits that narrative, usually it pumps. So in the case of open AI chat GPT and securing AI crypto gains, what do we have to do? It’s pretty obvious we need to know that information before everyone else.
Well, how do you do it? It’s not as difficult as you might think. The way you get information before the mainstream is through Twitter, where information moves very fast. When it comes to mainstream media, it takes time.
Articles needing approval may happen three to four days after the actual event. For example, right here on Twitter, this is from March 13th, two days ago, and chat GPS 4 will be rolling out next week. Here’s another tweet from March 11th: chat gpt4 launches next week with over a trillion machine learning metrics.
Twitter is one of the fastest ways to find out information early, and it’s very important to know that because these aren’t official announcements on Twitter sometimes they’re just speculation and they may not be true, so that’s something to consider, but that’s part of the game, and I do believe we will see more big AI announcements in the future from companies such as Google’s deep mind meta AI and Amazon, if you’re able to find that information before the mainstream.
You have a major advantage, and another one specifically I’m looking forward to is Apple’s VR headset. We know they are set to release this headset sometime this year, and I’m hoping to find out around when that release date will be before it hits the mainstream because I believe when that announcement comes out we may see a pump in the metaverse and gaming sectors of crypto.
So, right now, in terms of making money with AI and crypto, it’s mostly a narrative, but this doesn’t mean that AI is useless for crypto. The director of Coinbase but entered a live Ethereum contract into chat GPT4 and it highlighted a number of security vulnerabilities, so AI will help the crypto space advance and this article here States chat GPT can be utilised for crypto trading, utilising real-time market and price data to make decisions.
This currently is not true because, chat gpt4 has limitations like its predecessor chat gpt4 isn’t to hot at reasoning on current events given that it was trained on data that existed before 2021. So, using AI to make predictions or trade crypto could be very dangerous, but one of the simpler things we can do is look for new uses of big announcements before they hit the mainstream. AI is really cool, but as cool as it is, it also could be very dangerous. There’s a rise in deep fake scams, and it’s pretty scary.
The banking situation has gotten more serious and crypto has dipped some today but, the major questionat the end is, will people come over from the financial sector to the crypto sector, now this time it’s not an American Bank it’s credit sues.
It is a kind of like a Swiss bank, but this one’s big it has over 1.6 trillion dollars in annual revenue and over 50 000 employees, it’s one of the big boys and they said, they had found material weaknesses in both their 2021 and 2022 Financial reports and people are basically selling them that that’s not surprising.
Since smaller Banks like svb had actually gone under so people are expecting that credit sues is going to have trouble their biggest backer The Saudi National Bank because of regulations can’t provide any more assistance and I think the fears are because.
It’s stock have plummeted to an all-time low I think, of two Swiss Francs would I buy it now probably not I mean, it is a good time to pick it up at a very low price and eventually like if it gets too bad I think, the government will step in and provide assistance.
But, right now they themselves are saying they are not looking at government assistance saying, they can probably get out of it themselves I don’t know, what material weaknesses means but it couldn’t mean that they are destroyed I’m not sure and that’s actually what’s causing the stock market to actually dump today over 600 points crypto has also dropped.
Basically since last night I streamed about 600 points as well, but crypto is generally a little bit more volatile and this does shake up financial confidence but, if more money actually started to flow into the crypto sector from the financial sector later, alts are taking a real beating, all down double digits.
That’s really not that surprising because, alts pretty much always go down more than Bitcoin, but at twenty-four thousand dollars, honestly, like a lot of these alts should be higher than what people think Bitcoin is faring better than the rest of all, BNB is definitely more stable than pretty much anything else for some odd reason.
I don’t really know why, but the thing is this could be a big collapse, if it actually did collapse. I don’t know how much financial trouble this bank is in; they should actually have money to backstop it, and I’m not really sure like how many people are trying to withdraw, and there is significant turmoil for our European lenders.
Other bigger banks like Society General Banco Sabadel and Commerce Bank might also have some trouble because they actually lent money to credit. Other banks including Uni Credit and other Italian Banks might have some trouble as well.
So this might be getting serious, especially in Europe. J.P. Morgan Bank of America does not seem to have much trouble right now, but these European Banks definitely are causing turmoil in the market. Basically, oil, which I think is also getting much, much cheaper, is good for inflation, and if that’s the way the FED wants to basically bring down inflation,
I suppose they’re going to achieve their goal but I’m not really sure what the FED is actually going to do next week because, right now things do not look good the Dow’s down over 700 points now 100 more points than what I just checked oil is down in the sixty dollars realistically oil should be like under two dollars right now at this particular price.
Hopefully it comes down really really fast and I do actually think you’re starting to see a little bit of deflation at this point and I do think that the FED is basically destroyed everything in order to bring down inflation and inflation is basically being brought down but the hard way the landing is going to be hard, don’t think it’s going to be a catastrophic collapse.
But the sell-off is gaining Steam and the thing is like you know, what I think crypto is going to fare better than the overall market for some reason but that’s just my opinion yes it’s going to be hurt but maybe some people will lose faith in the financial industry and then come over to crypto even, if crypto is volatile and maybe the financial regulations are going to start to favour it as more people come over.
