Week in Review: Bitcoin tops $61,000, Beeple NFT sells for $69.3 million, and other events

Christie’s auction house sold Beeple’s NFT for $69.3 million, Bitcoin price rose above $61,000, Ethereum miners announced a protest, and other events from the past week.

Bitcoin price rose above $61,000

On Saturday, March 13, the leading cryptocurrency hit a new all-time high above the $60,000 mark. It then continued to rise, surpassing the $61,000 level.

The price spike was accompanied by a surge in trading volume.

At the time of writing, quotes had retreated to around $60,000.

Hourly BTC/USD chart on Bitstamp. Source: TradingView.

However, over the week the flagship cryptocurrency rose more than 20% (per CoinGecko).

The rally in digital-gold quotes pushed the entire market, whose capitalization rose above $1.8 trillion with the Bitcoin dominance index at 60.7%.

Data: CoinGecko.

Chiliz joins top-30 by market cap; 7-day rise 520%

In the top-30 by market cap, Chiliz’s blockchain token surged into the list. Over seven days the asset gained 520%. The project involves issuing fan tokens for leading European football clubs.

Data: CoinGecko.

Beeple NFT sells at Christie’s for $69.3 million

Christie’s, the British auction house, sold the non-fungible token (NFT) “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” by Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple. A total of 353 bids were submitted. The final bid stood at $60.3 million, and with fees the buyer paid $69.3 million.

The lot was purchased by the founder of the NFT fund Metapurse under the pseudonym Metakovan; his real identity remains undisclosed.

Among other deals in the rapidly growing sector:

• NFT of a Banksy painting titled “Morons” went under the hammer for 228.69 ETH.
• The 24×24 CryptoPunk 7804 pixel image cost the buyer 4200 ETH — $7.5 million at the time of the deal. The NFT’s uniqueness lies in its limited supply — there are only nine alien punks.
• The creator of the “Bad Luck Brian” meme, Ian Davis, and the person depicted, Kyle Craven resold the original photo as a collectible token for 20 ETH.

Roskomnadzor slowed Twitter in Russia

Since March 10, Roskomnadzor began throttling Twitter in Russia over the platform’s refusal to remove content deemed unlawful.

On the same day, several government sites experienced outages—the pages of Roskomnadzor itself, the Kremlin, the State Duma, the government and the prime minister stopped loading.

Experts also found that throttling affected all domains containing the string “t.co.” The issue was subsequently fixed.

ForkLog spoke with experts and lawyers about the rationale and implications of such policy.

CFTC investigates Binance, per reports

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is examining Binance for potential access by U.S. residents to trading crypto derivatives without proper licensing.

Recently a former senator who joined the company as regulatory affairs adviser, Max Bocus, stated that the regulator is not accusing the exchange of any violations. According to him, the CFTC is trying to get to grips with the rapidly growing industry, and its interest in Binance is part of these efforts.

Ethereum miners to protest EIP-1559

On 1 April, miners in the Ethereum network will pool their hash rate in the Ethermine pool, opposing the introduction of the EIP-1559 proposal. The action will last 51 hours.

EIP-1559 involves burning part of transaction fees and is expected to reduce gas-price volatility, which would substantially reduce miners’ revenues.

The proposal will be part of the London hard fork planned for July.

This week developers announced the date for the Berlin upgrade — it is tentatively set for around 14 April.

Blockchain.com users lose wallet access temporarily due to fire

On 9 March, a failure in Blockchain.com wallets caused users of the mobile and web versions not to be able to log in to their accounts for eight hours.

According to the company, the cause was a fire in one of its data centers.

Bank of Russia to test digital ruble in 2022

The Bank of Russia plans to present a prototype of a platform for the digital ruble by the end of the year, and next year after refining the prototype — to begin “testing rounds,” said First Deputy Governor Alexei Zabotkin.

Bank of Russia head Elvira Nabiullina did not rule out that C2B payments in digital rubles would be subject to fees. However, within a single bank and for transfers between users, the introduction of fees is not expected.

Weibo blocks accounts of BTC exchanges Huobi, OKEx and Binance

The Chinese microblog Weibo blocked accounts of the region’s largest trading platforms over policy violations. Which violations, is not known.

MicroStrategy buys another $15 million in Bitcoin

The company purchased 262 BTC for $15 million. The average purchase price was $57,146.

In total, MicroStrategy holds 91,326 BTC, into which it invested $2.2 billion. At the time of writing, the assets are worth around $5.5 billion.

SEC asks court to dismiss XRP holders’ claim; questions executives’ personal finances

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a motion to dismiss the XRP holders’ claim against Ripple.

In January 2021, a group of investors urged the regulator to amend the Ripple lawsuit and stop labeling the token a security. They said the SEC had “intentionally and knowingly” caused XRP holders “multibillion-dollar” losses.

Also this week the Commission charged the company with attempting to avoid liability for an unregistered securities offering, distracting the court with defense arguments about ambiguous legal norms.

As part of the case, the regulator requested from six financial institutions data on the personal financial transactions of Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen and CEO Brad Garlinghouse over the past eight years.

Lawyers for Ripple’s top executives asked a federal judge to block the regulator’s subpoenas. They argued the requests are “completely improper overreach” in a case not related to alleged fraud.

Against this backdrop, Garlinghouse said that he and the company settled with YouTube over the 2020 lawsuit against the video hosting service.

Plaintiffs alleged Google’s subsidiary failed to take action against scammers promoting fake XRP token giveaways in their name.

The parties agreed to jointly combat fraud, but did not disclose details of the collaboration.

Gary Gensler nomination approved; $1.9 trillion stimulus

The Senate Banking Committee voted in favour of Gary Gensler’s nomination as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The final decision rests with the Senate. A date for the vote has not been set.

This week the Senate approved a $1.9 trillion stimulus package aimed at addressing the pandemic’s effects. On Thursday it was signed into law by President Joe Biden.

BlockFi raises $350 million at a $3 billion valuation

The crypto-lending platform BlockFi closed a Series D funding round of $350 million.

Joining the round were Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures and Pomp Investments. Investors valued BlockFi at $3 billion.

Tiger Global also participated in financing the institutional Bitcoin exchange FalconX. The joint investment with B Capital Group totaled $50 million. Reports indicate FalconX’s valuation reached $675 million.

Another institutional-focused platform, New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG), raised $200 million. Morgan Stanley, MassMutual, Soros Fund Management and others participated.

Custodial service Komainu closed a Series A round for $25 million. It was led by British billionaire Alan Howard; other participants included Galaxy Digital, NOIA Capital and Nomura Research Institute.

ForkLog also wrote:

• PayPal confirmed plans to acquire cryptocurrency custodian Curv.
• Bill Gates saw Bitcoin as a climate issue for the world.
• Peter Schiff noted that his son moved all his investments into Bitcoin. He says he thinks he was brainwashed.
• Elon Musk discovered a “link” between Bitcoin and his own The Boring Company.
• At Bitmain the terms of selling Bitcoin miners were named.

What else to read and watch

The market for non-fungible tokens is undergoing rapid development, supported by entrepreneurs, politicians and the creative elite.

Yet experts disagree — some believe in a short-term hype and call it nothing more than “games of the smart with the rich,” while others are confident in forthcoming qualitative changes in the sector and its continued growth.

ForkLog spoke with representatives on both sides.

In traditional roundups we have gathered the main latest events from the fields of:

• cybersecurity;
• decentralised finance (DeFi);
• artificial intelligence.

On Monday, March 8, a guest on ForkLog’s YouTube live stream was trader Tone Vays. They discussed the market, Bitcoin and answered community questions.

A video titled “Elon Musk and Bitcoin: To The Mars!” about Tesla’s investments in Bitcoin was released.

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