This week has been eventful. The long-awaited launch of Aavetgotches took place, Bitfarms signed a contract for the purchase of 48,000 mining rigs, and a “cryptocurrency” section appeared on the Google Finance platform. Elon Musk is again teasing the crypto community with tweets about DOGE and the possible “landing” of a coin on the moon with the SpaceX Starship team. Read about these and other events in our weekly review.
Welcome, Aavegotchis!For gamers and crypto enthusiasts, the long-awaited “X-Day” has arrived with the launch of Aavegotchis, a DeFi-enabled NFT crypto collectible on March, 2nd. The Tamagotchi-inspired project (a popular portable toy from the early 2000s) is an experiment in tying digital collectibles to real value.
Aavegotchis are very sweet pixel ghosts, each one unique in its way. The value of a ghost is determined by a set of characteristics, such as appearance traits, equipment (for example, sword, glasses, Bob Marley’s shirt – and there is such a thing:), the number of tokens (aToken) that it collaterals.
To get Aavegotchi, you need to purchase a portal. But not everything is so simple: in each portal, there are 10 ghosts, of which the user can revive only one. On Tuesday, 10,000 portals were sold in less than 1 minute for 100 GHST. At the time of the sale, this token was trading for about $1.70. On this day, the site was have visited by more than 25 000 unique users. As a result, many NFT fans did not have time to buy their “ghost kit” and are now urging the development team to open the sale of additional portals.
Bitfarms goes to add 48,000 rigs to its mining parkBitfarms, one of the largest Bitcoin mining companies, announced that it has signed a contract to buy 48,000 new mining rigs by 2022. As before, MicroBT will become the equipment supplier for Bitfarms.
Bitfarms’ decision to buy as many installs as possible was driven by several reasons. First, the company intends to significantly increase the overall hashing power (EH). Today Bitfarms has a capacity of 1 EH. Thanks to the purchase of equipment, by the end of 2021 the company plans to increase this figure to 3.0 EH, by the end of 2022 – to 8 EH.
The second reason is the global shortage of semi-conductor chips, which are an extremely important component in the production of mining rigs. Due to the growing demand, there is a shortage of these chips, which, in turn, has already provoked a serious rise in the price of mining equipment.
Dogecoin will go to the moon?Elon Musk continues to tease the crypto community with new tweets about Dogecoin. He has hinted repeatedly that Dogecoin could be the first cryptocurrency to go to the moon… literally.
None of the 12 astronauts who reached the lunar surface had no money. Of course, why do you need money in space? But Elon Musk can break this “tradition” and still send his “favorite cryptocurrency” to the moon. So far, the CEO of SpaceX is doing it in the DOGE pump format. Over the past 30 days, the DOGE price has risen more than 60% to hit 0.0508 at the time of writing.
On March 4, millions of SpaceX fans were able to watch a flight test of the Starship SN10 prototype spacecraft. As always, the launch of the ship was enchanting. Starship SN10 successfully climbed 10 km. But the landing was not as soft as planned – after landing on the surface of the earth, the spacecraft exploded.
BlockFi clients receive over $35M in interest paymentsCryptocurrency loans are gaining momentum, and those who decided to join this game have already received good dividends. About it, said Zach Prince, CEO of crypto-lending company BlockFi.
In February, BlockFi customers received over $35 million in interest payments. According to Zach Prince, the interest payments consisted of 450 BTC, 5,000 ETH, and $6 million in stablecoins. According to the report, BlockFi’s annual percentage return on assets is 8.6%.
Earlier, the startup received a fairly serious amount of $30 million from investors. Significant crypto players such as Morgan Creek Digital, Winklevoss Capital, and Arrington XRP Capital have invested in the company. With this solid backing, BlockFi is considering going public within the next 2 years.
The company has a $1.5 billion cryptocurrency on its balance sheet. Zach Prince does not hide that BlockFi has ambitious plans for the future: back in December 2020, the company announced the start of cooperation with Visa to launch a credit card cryptocurrency on the market. The main feature of this card will be the ability to earn BTC for purchases, and not for airline miles or cash. It is assumed that cardholders will be able to receive a cashback of 1.5% of the purchase amount back in BTC.
Ethereum and DeFi are key drivers for the development of smart contract platformsThis week, a study was presented that once again confirmed the colossal role of DeFi and Ethereum in scaling smart contract platforms.
We have witnessed unprecedented growth in 2020 DeFi, the birth of countless new tokens, and a surge in profitable farming. Previously, for many members of the crypto community, DeFi was associated with a bubble, but multi-billion-dollar investments, the sustainability of projects made skeptics doubt their initial conclusions.
Google Finance added a section “crypto”A new section has been added to the Google Finance financial market data platform – “cryptocurrency”. Previously, only 4 categories were represented here: USA, Asia, Europe, and “currencies”. The fifth section “cryptocurrency” fits perfectly into this series.
Users can now monitor the price of cryptocurrencies and compare data with stock and foreign exchange markets in real-time. So far, the “cryptocurrency” section contains information about only 4 assets: Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). But, as they say, the beginning has already been made.
Crypto enthusiasts were delighted with this news. Given that Google used to be critical of cryptocurrency, this initiative once again confirmed the growing demand for digital assets as a financial instrument. You don’t need to look far for an example: in 2018, Google found itself at the center of a scandal due to blocking ads related to digital assets, crypto wallets, and exchanges.
Many Twitter users saw the initiative as a sign of Google’s interest in buying cryptocurrency. Of course, so far these are only bold assumptions, but, as experience with Tesla, MicroStrategy, Square shows, everything is possible.
