[Daily] Bitcoin is on steroids

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Moon. It has been a while since we heard about FTX. It seems Australian regulators were investigating the company and SBF before the crash. The country had issued three notices in the eight months leading up to the collapse. We were warned. We didn’t listen.

As of Monday, 8PM IST

The markets were shaky. Bitcoin was at $23,200 levels and Ethereum was below $1,600. Nasdaq fell in early trade. Back home, Sensex and Nifty ended higher on a recovery in IT and oil stocks.

BTC’s Rising Till…

Bitcoin has had a dream run in January. It’s up over 42% since the start of the year. That’s on the back of hopes that the US Fed and other central banks slow down on rate hikes. But if that doesn’t happen, BTC will be in trouble.

What does it look like?The king crypto was on a downward spiral ever since the FTX collapse in November. It even slipped below $16,000. Now it seems like a new beginning of sorts. The token has rallied for the past four weeks and holds steady above $23,000. There are two reasons for it:

1. Inflation is down in the US, UK, and developing economies such as India. Lower inflation means more money to spend.

2. Interest rate hikes by central banks may be lower than earlier. Which means, again, more cash to spend.

But it’s not as simple as it looks.

Go on, spill the beansA lot of BTC’s rally hinges on hopes of lukewarm rate hikes. If the situation alters, the market will be in trouble. The US has hit its debt ceiling, meaning that it cannot borrow any more capital. Unless the Congress raises the limit from the current ~$31.4 trillion, there is a risk of default. Then there are murmurs of a possible recession in 2023. So while BTC’s found favour with the bulls, it’s too early to celebrate.

MATIC’s Back In Top 10

Solana is out and Polygon is back in. After a brief exit, Polygon’s MATIC has taken back its spot among the top 10 crypto tokens. What’s created the buzz is its upcoming zkEVM mainnet launch.

The z factorPolygon is about to launch its zkEVM update. zkEVM is basically an Ethereum scaling solution. Once this mainnet is launched, multiple transactions can be validated on a single protocol. This means cheaper and faster transactions. That’s the reason why MATIC rose ~11% over the past seven days. There is also a drop in the MATIC reserves on exchanges, another indicator that investors want to HODL.

Then, the whale factorMATIC worth $56 million was transferred to a whale address on January 25, which led to another nudge for the rally.

While we are on whales, a MATIC trader booked a 50X return on their holdings. The holder bought MATIC for $84,000 in 2020 and sold it for $4.5 million. Neat.

Amazon Makes The Web3 Plunge

Amazon is going to be wading into web3 with NFTs, gaming, and a marketplace. And that’s all we know about it. No, really, the details are vague and not much is known so far.

NFT is a messMost large companies avoid NFTs for one simple reason: who does the copyright lie with? You can buy the art but the royalties go back to the original owner. The scale of Amazon may make this much more difficult. There will be the little thing of fees to facilitate sales if it plays its marketplace role.

There is a Security questionAnd a deeper question: is NFT a security? That answer is still to be determined by the courts that will define what comes next.

GamingBut gaming is probably where Amazon’s ambitions truly lie. The ability to use original content created by Prime Video and then create games on the basis of it, which can issue and trade NFTs. That’s where the money is.

The Crypto Queen Returns?

OneCoin owner, Ruja Ignatova, may be back. Kind of. A plush penthouse belonging to her was placed on the market late last week and speculation is that she may be back.

So she can be traced and arrestedNo. Unfortunately not. It seems the apartment may have been put on the market by the German authorities in their quest to recover the money she had stolen from hundreds of people across the world, including Germany.

ICYMI: Ruja Ignatova ran a fake crypto company called OneCoin and when she realised that police from across the world were investigating her, she disappeared. She hasn’t been seen since 2017 and is on top of the FBI’s top 10 most wanted.

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