Weekly Roundup: Bitcoin crashes to $30k region, Ethereum’s move to staking to ramp up efficiency, hackers steal millions from DeFi projects

Bitcoin

• Bitcoin continued to drop over the last week, eventually crashing to the $30k region. Amid the crash, leading car manufacturer Tesla appears to have lost most of its BTC profits. Bitcoin and the entire crypto market lost over $350 billion of its market cap.
• MicroStrategy bought the dip by adding $10 million worth of Bitcoin to its stash.
• Prime Experiences, a luxury yacht firm, has joined the league of companies accepting Bitcoin payments.
• A study by Galaxy Digital compared the energy consumption of Bitcoin with the banking and gold mining industries. According to the report, Bitcoin’s power consumption rate is lesser than both industries.
• Several crypto heavyweights have turned against Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk for badmouthing Bitcoin.
• The BTC PEERS team took a deep dive into Bitcoin’s latest crash, considering some of the factors that may have fueled the event.
• Reports have it that China plans to restrict crypto mining activities. And speaking of Bitcoin mining, a power outage in China may have contributed to the recent crypto market crash.

Ethereum

• Recent research suggests that Ethereum’s move to a proof-of-stake algorithm could make the network 99.95 percent more energy efficient.
• Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin aired his views on the current state of the crypto industry. According to him, “crypto isn’t just a toy anymore.” Private equity titan David Rubenstein agrees with Buterin. In his case, he asserted that crypto “is not going away, just like gold is not going away.”

Other News

• Moving forward, U.S. residents will have to report crypto transactions that are more than $10k to the country’s Internal Revenue Service.
• Spherium Finance, a one-stop platform that ties the best of DeFi together in one neat package, has raised $3.3 million in seed and private sale rounds.
• The first Crypto AM DeFi & Digital Inclusion Online Summit happened on May 20, 2021.
• Chinese officials have allegedly ban institutions from conducting crypto-related activities.
• FinNexus, a DeFi project, was hacked over the past week, leaving the attackers with $7.6 million. Meanwhile, attackers stole $200 million from PancakeBunny in a flash loan exploit.
• Plutus, a leading DeFi start-up, has received $5 million in funding from a prominent crypto fund, Alphabit. Interestingly, the value of the PLU token rose by over 100% following the funding.
• Fantom has inked a partnership deal with Chainlink to give developers on-chain randomness.
• Watch Skins is taking the NFT mania to a whole new level. The blockchain project recently announced the release of the first-ever wearable NFT, in the form of an NFT watch face