Weekly Market Roundup: Bitcoin surpasses $60k, NFT craze continues, Ethereum moves close to scaling solution
It has been a rather interesting week (Mar 7 to Mar 13) for the cryptocurrency industry; from Bitcoin breaking the $60,000 mark to Ethereum developers shedding light on the upcoming gas-saving protocol.
Bitcoin
The week kicked off with several crypto purchases from institutional players. Chinese tech giant Meitu announced a $40 million investment in Bitcoin and Ethereum on March 7. Norwegian oil giant Aker ASA also launched a business unit dedicated to Bitcoin investment with a purse of $58.6 million.
Amid the influx of retail and institutional investors, several experts opined that Bitcoin was becoming a preferred investment vehicle over gold.
Bitcoin is also gaining ground in government settings. A French lawmaker is seriously pushing for Bitcoin adoption. The official signed recently signed a petition urging the country’s government to allow the Bank of France to buy Bitcoin and other digital assets.
NFTs
Speaking of non-fungible tokens, aka NFTs, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey tokenized the first-ever tweet. The highest bid for the NFT currently sits at $2.5 million. Dorsey revealed that the proceeds from the sales will be given to charity.
Other interesting highlights in the NFT space include the sale of a pipe-smoking alien CryptoPunk NFT for $7.56 million. Another artist, Beeple sold his “First 5,000 Days” collection as an NFT for more than $69 million. In even weirder NFT-related news, a pro tennis player has offered to sell a part of her upper arm as an NFT. The winning bidder has the freedom to either leave the part in question blank, advertise on it, or crest a tattoo. Overall, the NFT industry is seriously booming, with search queries surpassing DeFi entries by over 300%.
Ethereum
Ethereum developers are working hard behind the scenes to solve the network’s congestion and high gas fee woes. Co-founder Vitalik Buterin disclosed that the network could scale up to 100x in the coming weeks following the implementation of rollups. But while devs are eager to tackle the scalability concerns, disgruntled miners are threatening to stage of protest by redirecting their hash power to an anti-1559 pool, Ethermine.
