Price movement the last week

Bitcoin breached USD50,000 on Sunday but it is now trading around USD47,000 on Monday night (New York time) according to Coin Metrics.

1. Crypto industry executives testified before Congress

On the 7th December 2021, crypto industry executives testified before the House Financial Services Committee and the hearing was called by committee leader Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif (American politician serving the US representative and chairs the House Financial Services Committee). The Financial Services Committee oversees the work of Federal Reserve and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Cryptocurrency is a digital asset which has been highly trading in the market and are fundamentally different from traditional financial markets. As a result, Alesia Haas Coinbase CFO informed that existing regulatory regimes often do not accommodate this new technology. To conclude, the overall discussion went positive according to Jeremy Allaire the CEO of Circle (a large P2P payment technology company).

2. Kickstarter is moving to the blockchain

Kickstarter is a global crowdfunding platform focusing on creativity projects. Since 2019 they achieved up to USD 6 billion crowdfunding value and funded up to 200,000 creative projects. It has driven a USD 13.5 billion in additional economic impact by creating 750,000 part time jobs, 80,000 full-time jobs and 20,000 companies and Non profit organizations. On 9 Dec, 21 Kickstarter has announced that they will be more open and collaborate with the decentralized future. For a start they will be creating a decentralized version of Kickstarter’s core function. Thereafter to collaborate with independent contributors and competitors from all over the world to build and develop the decentralized protocol. They believe it will open up more exciting new opportunities for creative projects that will come to life in the decentralized world. They have seen how the world evolve in the past 10 years and they are now entering a new phase in the decentralized world. To the executive of Kickstarter, Blockchain technology is a powerful tool to create and align decentralized and distributed networks of people.

3. Arrow Glacier upgrade to Ethereum went live

9 December 2021, Arrow Glacier, an upgrade to the Ethereum network has been activated. The upgrade was to push back the difficult and costly mining process for Ethereum “difficult bomb”. Delaying the “bomb” gave developers more time to work on Ethereum 2.0, Eth2, before the shift.

4. ConstitutionDAO shut down in November but its token hits all time high

ConstitutionDAO was a new formed blockchain-based community. It was launched on Nov 11, 21 by a group of crypto enthusiasts to raise fund via DAO to buy the first printed version of the US Constitution, on auction by Sotheby’s. If successful, it will transfer the ownership to the community within the ConstitutionDAO. They would then decide by voting on what to do with the constitution. By Nov 19, 21, ConstitutionDAO raised 11,000 ETH on JuiceBox which is about USD 45 million. The success of raising 8 digit in such short time frame within the digital community is fascinating to the public. Despite the closure of ConstitutioinDAO, the token has increased to all time high of 17 cents on Sunday.

5. 90% of total bitcoin supply has been mined

As of Monday morning, 90% of the total bitcoin supply of 21 million has been mined, according to Blockchain.com. However the remainders are not expected to be mined until February 2140. Hence, the miners can continue to earn bitcoins. For Bitcoin, it operates as a proof-of-work model, where miners of Bitcoin must complete and solve complex math problems to validate transactions. The math problem is complicated that reaching the 90% milestone took 12 years.