Has a long-term quarterly turnaround been initiated?

Digital Asset News

Bitcoin attempted to recapture the $21,000 mark during the last weekend of October, while also carrying the week’s momentum into the weekend.
As data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows, the bitcoin price has soared to an interim high of $21,078, marking a new six-week high.
The subsequent retracement did not go below the psychologically important 20,000 US dollar mark at any point, before another upswing followed.
The strong end to the week on Wall Street may have had a favorable effect on BTC, as the American stock market was able to close positively on yesterday, October 28, with the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite Index rising by 2.5% and 2.9%, respectively.
But there is no reason for exuberant euphoria (yet): “Let’s wait and see if we get a green dot above the track line,” the analyst said, referring to the U.S. Dollar Index (DXY). “If it does, that would be a bad omen in combination with the central bank’s upcoming rate hike on Nov. 2.” This would subsequently weigh on the markets again.

By renaming Facebook Group Meta, Mark Zuckerberg – hoping his company can become a leader on the Web3 – has made a big bet on the metaverse. A year after the name change, FTX chief Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is now speaking out about the plans.
Zuckerberg’s $100 billion venture has come under particular fire recently when the meta-chief unveiled his personal avatar in a presentation on the company’s own Horizon Worlds metaverse (see below). However, the digital figure quickly became the laughing stock of the entire Internet due to poor graphics.
Bankman-Fried goes on to point out that the “vague thrust of Meta” now has little persuasive power with the company’s investors and shareholders, which is why Zuckerberg’s hands are now all the more tied and he apparently has to bet everything on the Metaverse.
In conclusion, however, SBF points out that Facebook, as the largest social network, has already established a status that can be built upon. Hence his recommendation for action, “Start building social media 3.0.” Whether (Facebook) Meta will manage to turn itself around with the Metaverse remains questionable.

Now it’s official: The major upgrade in September drastically reduced Ethereum’s power consumption. The Merge, the largest upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain to date, almost immediately reduced the network’s power consumption by a whopping 99.9%.
On September 15, the Ethereum network accordingly switched from Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus, among other things, the move was intended to ensure greater environmental sustainability. A goal that has already been achieved in view of the dramatically shrunken power consumption. Before the merge, consumption initially averaged between 46.31 to 93.98 terawatt hours (TWh) per year in 2022. The lowest electricity consumption ever was previously recorded on December 26, 2019, at a projected 4.75 TWh per year.
Converted to individual Ethereum transactions, this means that electricity consumption is down to 0.03 kilowatt hours (kWh) and the carbon footprint is down to 0.01 kgCO2. According to Digiconomist’s calculations, this energy consumption would be equivalent to two hours of YouTube usage.
So while there are clear benefits from moving to PoS, some community members criticize that it has made Ethereum significantly more centralized and will likely be subject to stricter oversight.
The extent of the centralization was already apparent immediately after the merge, as 46.15% of the nodes responsible for processing transactions and adding new blocks could be traced back to just two addresses.