News

Weekly Market Roundup: Bitcoin surpasses $60k, NFT craze continues, Ethereum moves close to scaling solution

BTC Peers Reporter

Mar 14, 2021 — 2 min read

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.

Kadena Announces Annelise Osborne as Chief Business Officer

New York, New York, April 25th, 2024, Chainwire Kadena, the only scalable Layer-1 Proof-of-Work blockchain, expands its leadership team by onboarding Annelise Osborne as Kadena’s new Chief Business Officer (CBO). With an illustrious career spanning over 20 years in finance, credit, real estate, and digital assets, Annelise will be

Proof of Pitch: Revolutionizing the Pitch Competition Landscape with AI-Driven Insights and Top Web3 VC

Paris, France, April 25th, 2024, Chainwire * Prize pool of over 1M€ value including media grant from Cointelegraph * Proof of Pitch is part of Proof of Talk, where All Global Leaders in Web3 Meet * 10-11 June 2024, Museum of Decorative Arts (MAD), Louvre Palace, Paris In a ground-breaking shift from traditional

Nigeria and UAE Markets Surge Towards Bitcoin Overtaking Traditional Payment Methods

One-in-five Nigerian (20%) consumers are using Bitcoin to conduct transactions ‘at least once a day’, while 67% would have more trust in Bitcoin to project their life savings than traditional services such as banks, local Governments and, even, cash, according to new research published by Web3 infrastructure specialists, Elastos. The

Top 3 best online casinos that are worth trying in 2024

All the gambling community admits that the iGaming sector is undergoing a significant expansion, with projections showing its market value will boom in the coming years. This rapid growth underscores the heightened attraction of online casinos and betting platforms, drawing interest from players and investors eager to engage with this