Terra's Luna Sets All-Time High
Terra’s native cryptocurrency Luna iead a broader crypto market recovery with an increase of 10% in the last week of March, 2022, reaching an all-time high of $106.14, according to CoinMarketCap.
The spike made Luna the eighth largest cryptocurrency in the industry, with over $36.8 billion in market capitalization. Another cryptocurrency from the Terra ecosystem, the stablecoin UST, has a market cap of $16 billion.
Luna’s latest price action appeared related to the news that Luna Foundation Guard (LFG), a Singapore-based non-profit organization supporting the Terra network, recently purchased $135 million worth of Bitcoin to back the UST stablecoin.
Bloomberg reported that the CEO of LFG and founder and CEO of Terraform Labs, Do Kwon, purchased over $500 million worth of BTC since the end of January 2022. On 30 March 2022, LFG held approximately 27784.9 BTC worth $1.2 billion.
Axie Infinity's Ronin Exploited for $625M
Ronin, the Ethereum sidechain built for the popular blockchain game Axie Infninty, suffered a massive exploit resulting in the loss of $625 million.
Game developer Sky Mavis reported that the hacker used compromised private keys to execute the attack.
The hacker reportedly embezzled the Ronin bridge for 173,600 Wrapped Ethereum worth $597 million and 25.5 million of the USDC stablecoin ($25 million). These funds are still in the hacker’s wallet. The attacker took control of five out of nine Ronin validator nodes, which is the threshold required to sign transactions on the network.
The security report released by Ronin states, “The validator key scheme is set up to be decentralized to limit an attack vector like this. However, the hacker found a backdoor through our RPC gas node, which they abused to get the signature for the AxieDAO validator.”
OpenSea to List Solana NFTs
On 29 March, 2022 leading crypto art marketplace OpenSea announced the listing of Solana-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on its platform through a short video teaser on its official Twitter handle.
OpenSea previously only hosted Ethereum NFTs. However, Solana has the second biggest NFT ecosystem in the industry after Ethereum. The popularity of collections like Degenerate Ape Academy, Aurory, and Monkey Business has propelled the total market capitalization of Solana NFTs to over $1.5 billion.
Despite the apparent dominance of Ethereum NFTs in the market, Solana is quickly gaining the favor of developers and collectors alike. Transactions on Solana are significantly cheaper, faster, and more energy-efficient than Ethereum, which may enable developers to create more affordable user experiences. It has however experienced two network outages in the first few months of 2022 as it struggles to cope with its growing popularity.
MicroStrategy Raises $205M To Buy More BTC
In March 2022, MicroStrategy announced that one of its newly formed subsidiaries had raised $205 million from Silvergate Bank to buy more Bitcoins for the firm.
The software company has reportedly put up $820 million worth of Bitcoin as collateral for the loan. The company’s new subsidiary, given the clever name of MacroStrategy, will use the funds to purchase additional BTC and pay interest and expenses related to its previous loans. Michael Saylor, Microstrategy’s founder, says, “Using the capital from the loan, we’ve effectively turned our Bitcoin into productive capital, which allows us to execute our business strategy further.”
The company acquired its first BTC back in August 2020, and since then, has accumulated over 125,051 Bitcoins worth nearly $6.1 billion. MicroStrategy’s play on BTC has been a largely successful endeavor as the total cost price of its BTC holding has been only $3.2 billion as of 29 March 2022.
ZEBEDEE Releases BTC-Donations Tool
Bitcoin-centric gaming startup ZEBEDEE has released a new tool that enables online streamers to accept Lightning Payments seamlessly across multiple platforms.
Zebedee’s “ZBD streamer” is platform-agnostic, which means that creators would be able use it to get BTC donations for their content on sites like Youtube, Twitch and Facebook Live.
ZEBEDEE’s primary focus is building an interoperable donations tool that is accessible and that works with every streaming platform. Fans who wish to donate bitcoins to their favorite content creators would need to scan a QR code using a Bitcoin lightning wallet. After a user sends a tip, ZEBEDEE displays a custom animation with customizable fonts and colors in the live stream so that name of the contributor and the donated amount appears on the creator’s screen. Streamers can customize the highest and lowest amount for their channel, and ZEBEDEE collects no fees, meaning that every Satoshi donated by the fans goes straight to the creator.
