In the cryptoweek behind us: as the Bitcoin mining difficulty broke its longest gain streak since 2018, Vitalik Buterin proposed a new EIP to tackle Ethereum’s sky-high gas fees, an Ethereum developer called for the community to help testing the Merge, and many claimed that the ethereum/bitcoin chart looked primed for a sharp move higher, but some were betting on an opposite outcome. The first atomic swap between monero and ethereum occurred on L2 solution Arbitrum, and Binance resumed DOGE withdrawals stating that ‘no shade was intended’. Also, Binance boss CZ is reportedly the richest ethnic Chinese person alive. Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht launched his NFT auction. Around USD 31m was stolen from DeFi platform MonoX, and over USD 100m from Badger DAO.
Grayscale launched a new solana-backed regulated investment product in the US, MicroStrategy made its fourth-largest investment in BTC and increased its stash to BTC 121,044, and Crypto.com plans to acquire two exchanges for USD 216m. Jack Dorsey confirmed he’s stepping down from his role as Twitter CEO, while Meta lost its crypto chief as the head of the Novi wallet David Marcus decided to step aside. Speaking of Dorsey, Square is now Block and Square Crypto is Spiral, and speaking of Facebook – no, it didn’t revere its crypto ad ban.
South Koreans will be able to trade crypto without having to pay tax for at least another year, crypto exchanges in the UK will be forced to pay a recently created tech tax, the Russian governor who was blasting crypto miners now offered to help them set up shop in the region, and the Chinese central bank said that NFT and metaverse projects ‘could become money-laundering tools’. In El Salvador, mainstream analysts criticized the 2022 budget plans and the bitcoin bond ambitions. The SBI Holdings CEO said that China is currently leading the CBDC race ahead of the US and Europe, while a report found that…
![Anticipation for Ethereum [ETH] 2.0 rises as metric reaches all-time high](https://crypto.newswireservice.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/ethereum-wale-1000x600-350x250.jpg)
