What Happened in Crypto Today: Bitcoin Is Experiencing Scarcity Already
03/01/2024 17:51
From Solana hitting its 22-month high to Bitcoin experiencing scarcity already, here is a 2-minute breakdown of everything important that happened in crypto today.
According to recent data, Bitcoins gobbled up by ETFs on Feb 28 are almost 10X higher than what miners produced. This kind of demand shock has set the stage for major FOMO.
Here's the deal: Bitcoin ETFs just traded a record $7.6B volume the other day. Compare that to the average daily mint rate of about 900 Bitcoins from miners securing the network. And the gap keeps widening.
In other words, institutional flows into crypto ETFs are completely overwhelming supply right now. No wonder BTC blasted through $60K this week.
The bottom line is Wall Street can't get enough crypto - setting up a bullish backdrop as Bitcoin knocks on the door of a new all-time high.
Now, let's quickly recap today's top stories:
And with that, let's dive into the details!
Solana Hits 22-Month High
While Bitcoin was doing its thing this week, Solana decided to throw its own parade.
SOL jumped 11% in 24 hours to hit $136 – its highest price since April 2022. Pretty big for a token that dipped below $10 just a few months ago thanks to FTX fallout. Talk about a comeback!
And SOL’s rally boosted other projects in its orbit. Like Dogwifhat – a doggo meme coin on Solana – doubled in a week. Plus that popular memecoin called Bonk spiked over 50%.
The crazy part is BTC’s only up 19% this past week while SOL clocked 33% gains. So what’s fueling this Solana space race exactly? Read the full story!
Worldcoin Is Making Big Moves
Worldcoin – the project that signs up its users with iris scans – just acquired a wallet maker called Ottr Finance.
Ottr builds Solana wallets with perks like connecting your bank account. So teaming up seems like a smooth move to get Worldcoin’s 3.9 million users set up with private keys.
Considering Worldcoin launched less than a year ago, locking in almost 4 million humans for iris verification is pretty wild.
So the Worldcoin project is all set to go now? Are we finally entering that Black Mirror episode where all our passports and IDs will be digital? Read the full story!
Blast Goes Live
Blast – a scaling network created by Blur – just went live yesterday. And there’s already over $1.9B locked up on the network.
Here’s the tea... Blast was giving out rewards to users who deposited funds early. So people flooded in.
But when it launched, some got cold feet because their funds had to be locked up for a while. So people started withdrawing their funds.
The big Q remains...
Can Blast compete with established L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism with early investors questioning its strategies? Read the full story!
PORTAL’s Trading Is Live
A new gaming token called PORTAL just went live and is making waves across Polygon, Solana and other chains.
This new gaming token is currently trading around $2.30 with a ~$400M market cap.
If you participated in Portal’s farming last year, you can claim your tokens now. But some are complaining about issues based on geographical restrictions.
The launch hype even attracted a whopping $9B worth of staked assets on Binance trying to score a piece of the 50M PORTAL token prize pool.
So what is this game about? And does it reward users in tokens? Read the full story!
StarkWare Cooks Up New ZK Super helper
StarkWare just launched its newest tool to aid its scaling efforts - meet open-source tool called Stwo!
Stwo is an efficient zero-knowledge proof generator aimed at cranking out privacy proofs quickly. We're talking about faster processing and lower costs for StarkNet users.
At its core, Stwo uses next-gen STARK efficiency to securely verify users and data without exposing the deets.
And the best part? StarkWare is releasing this proof-making code master into the open-source wilderness for anyone to play with.
Will this tool help StarkWare become the top scaling solution? What do experts think? Read the full story!
And that wraps up the latest and greatest in crypto. Stay tuned for more stories!