The Crypto market has completed its first quarter in 2023, and we have a lot of tea to spill about it. From cryptos breaking their usual price range to some groundbreaking upgrades, the Crypto market is having quite an interesting time. That means lots of hidden profit-earning opportunities for crypto investors.
So, let’s discover the most happening crypto events from this quarter and discover the upcoming profit opportunities.
Latest Crypto News & Updates from the World
Bitcoin Got NFTs
The first big news from crypto in the first quarter of this year is that the Bitcoin blockchain got a new protocol for storing digital artefacts. A Bitcoin developer, Casey Rodarmor, launched a new Bitcoin project on January 21, 2023, giving a feasible way to store NFTs in the Bitcoin Blockchain. The project brings a new protocol to the Bitcoin blockchain through which each satoshi (smallest unit of Bitcoin) in Bitcoin gets a unique ordinal number. Bitcoin users can link an ordinal number with any digital art of up to 4 MB and store it in the blockchain. These Bitcoin NFTs gained immense popularity instantly and crossed the million mark in April 2023. Many Bitcoiners are raising concerns about the Bitcoin NFTs due to their possibility of slowing down the Bitcoin network; most are also considering Bitcoin NFTs as the new superpower of the Bitcoin network.
If you want to know more about Bitcoin Ordinals, click here.
Shibarium Coming Soon
Shiba Inu has been in the news for a few months due to its most anticipated Project, Shibarium. Being a layer-2 blockchain solution for Shiba Inu, Shibarium aims to reduce the time and fee involved in Shiba Inu-related transactions. It will also integrate a burn portal into the Shibarium ecosystem that will keep removing SHIB tokens from circulation to maintain its supply.
Initially, Shibarium was rumoured to launch in the third quarter of 2022, but it got rescheduled. Then Shiba developers planned the launch of Shibarium for February 2023, but the network builders needed some more time to work on the upgrade. However, the lead developer of Shiba, Shytoshi Kusama, launched a ‘join’ portal in February for crypto investors who wish to contribute to the testing and final documentation of Shibarium. The Shiba army took this news as a sign of Shibarium coming soon in 2023.
Saylor Did Bitcoin Shopping Again
There are hardly any bigger Bitcoin maximalists than MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, who once again proved his love for the first blockchain-based currency. MicroStrategy recently purchased 1045 Bitcoins worth $29.3 million at an average value of $28,016. After this purchase, MicroStrategy now owns 1,40,000 Bitcoins worth $4.17 billion at an average price of $29,803 per Bitcoin.
It is worth noting that Michael Saylor started buying Bitcoin in 2020 as a hedge against inflation after the COVID struck businesses. Since then, Saylor has been accepting Bitcoin in bulk as a part of his dollar-cost-averaging strategy.
Polygon Got Yet Another Upgrade
In our last part of the top 10 latest crypto news & upgrades, we told you that Polygon network completed its new hard fork upgrade on January 17, 2023, to reduce the spikes in its gas fees and reorg frequency of its blockchain. It is not even a quarter past this upgrade, and Polygon completed yet another significant upgrade on 27th March 2023. This upgrade introduced zkEVM (Zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine) in the polygon blockchain. zkEVM integrates zk rollup functionality into the programming infrastructure of Ethereum, for which Polygon acts as the scaling solution. By doing that, there would be no need to design ZK rollups in EVM for every case individually. The zkEVM made it possible for EVM to interpret a standard form of zk rollup for every case.
Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, made the first transaction on the newly launched zkEVM on 27th March 2023 by sending 0.005 ETH to a random address. He also sent a message, ‘A few million constraints for man, unconstrained scalability for mankind’ with the transaction.
Dogecoin Became Twitter Logo
Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, loves meme coins. This time he took his love for Dogecoin to a new level by setting the Dogecoin symbol as the Twitter logo. The reason behind this action by Elon Musk comes from an old tweet of a Twitter user asking Musk to buy Twitter and change the bird logo to Doge. Since Musk is a Dogecoin enthusiast, he fulfilled this request by changing the website logo of Twitter from bird to Doge. The bird logo remained unchanged on the mobile application of Twitter.
As an immediate effect of this move by Musk, the DOGE coin price surged from $0.077 to $0.10 in less than an hour, registering a hike of 30%. However, the coin quickly fell 9% when Musk reset the Bird logo on Twitter after a few days.
Solana Smartphone Launched
The Next latest crypto update we have is of Solana.
Last June, Solana announced the development of the first Web3 android Smartphone, Saga. After ten months, the Solana Saga smartphones are not finally about to be delivered to users who pre-ordered them. The phone will also go for public sale from May 8, 2023, for new orders. The Saga smartphone is a web3-centric device with 16 dApps related to NFTs, DAOs, Staking, etc. It also includes an app store having the seamless distribution of web3-based applications. This app store will be free from limitations and commission fees, unlike mainstream web2 app marketplaces. One key highlight of Solana Sage mobile is that once its user successfully sets up the device, the user can claim a unique Saga genesis token NFT, exclusively integrated with the device. This NFT claim is part of Saga’s reward program that offers exciting incentives to its users. If someone wants to order this $1000 Android, they can place a new order from May 8th to get the Sage smartphones in the subsequent weeks.
Bitcoin Touched $31k Again
A series of events this year together gave Bitcoin the most awaited price break of $31,000 after ten months.
Bitcoin was hovering at around $20,000 when the news of Silicon Valley Bank surfaced. The news started an upward rally for Bitcoin as a domino effect of people losing trust in Banks, to which Bitcoin acts as a better alternative. Furthermore, the news of more traditional banking institutions like Signature Bank and Credit Suisse facing bank runs and being on the verge of bankruptcy accelerated the upward rally of Bitcoin. With MicroStrategy buying more bitcoins and CPI Data showing inflation slowing down, Bitcoin finally saw some big bullish candles taking its price to $31,000 after ten bearish months.
Shapella Upgrade Completes Successfully
The next big crypto event this quarter is the Shapella upgrade of Ethereum, completed on April 13, 3:57 PM IST. Shapella upgrade allowed the withdrawal of staked ETH from the Ethereum PoS blockchain for their depositors. Before the Merge upgrade launch of Ethereum, some ETH holders willingly staked their ETH on the Ethereum 2.0 network. The Shapella upgrade (a combination of two upgrades, Shanghai and Capella upgrade) finally allowed the depositors to withdraw their staked ETH partially or fully.
Investors expected that the upgrade would increase the supply of ETH in the market because people would withdraw their ETH from the Ethereum blockchain, but it did not happen. Instead, ETH registered an upward rally of over 12% post the Shapella upgrade.
US Government Sold Seized Bitcoins
The US government sold 9,861 bitcoins on March 14, earning $215 million. These bitcoins were part of approx. 51,351 Bitcoins that the US government seized in November after arresting James Zhong, who manipulated transactions of the dark web market Silk Road in 2012. With his arrest in November 2022, the US government made its largest cryptocurrency seizure of 50,000 BTC.
After selling 9,861 bitcoins, the US government still has 41,490 bitcoins that it plans to sell in batches throughout 2023. Back in 2014 too, the US authorities dumped 30,000 BTC that were also associated with Silk Road and a venture capitalist, Tim Draper.
Bitcoin Whitepaper Hidden in Mac
The last update in this part of the latest crypto news is about Bitcoin Whitepaper, which has been hidden in plain sight on the Apple operating system MacOS for years. A Twitter user revealed that when trying to fix his printer, he discovered a PDF of Bitcoin White paper on his Apple MacOS under the file name simpledoc.pdf. He then asked over a dozen of his Mac-using friends to confirm that the Bitcoin whitepaper copy was pre-stored in all their MacOS. Another Twitter user, Joshua Dickens, a former Apple product designer, also shared the same information in 2020, but his tweets got little attention. MacOS users can find the Bitcoin whitepaper PDF by entering the following command into Terminal:
open/System/Library/Image\Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
With this upgrade, part 9 of the latest crypto news and updates ends here. We will meet you soon with our next blog on trending crypto news.
Till then,
Happy Trading!
