Dear Teroxx Community,

This week we saw a digital asset market that could not make any big moves on a weekly basis.

Weekly overview

As usual, we are also providing detailed videos for those who want to delve deeper into the subject.

Latest crypto news

Bitcoin with successful softfork! The upgrade introduces Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST), which drastically improve programmability and privacy of the network.
Bitcoin’s (BTC) blockchain network has successfully implemented the Taproot softfork, with 90% of miners and mining pools giving the appropriate consensus between blocks 709,488 and 709,632. This gives Bitcoin its biggest upgrade since 2017, when the Layer Two network Lightning and the Segregated Witness (SegWit) mechanism were introduced. In this context, Bitcoin developer Hampus Sjöberg explains on his Taproot website:
“MAST equips smart contracts with more efficiency and data protection, because only the really relevant parts of a smart contract are revealed during a payment transaction.”

USDC publisher Circle supports stablecoin regulation at the federal level: “This is a real recognition that stablecoins could soon spread as fast as the internet,” according to Circle’s CEO. This emerges from the reaction of Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire to the corresponding proposal of the Biden administration. In fact, he welcomes the planned regulation, because if stablecoin issuers were to be regulated just like banks at the federal level, i.e. at the highest regulatory level, this would mean a massive step forward for the crypto industry, in his opinion. “This is a real recognition that stablecoins could soon spread as fast as the internet,” Allaire says.

Can NFTs establish themselves on the market in the long term?
The Coinbase CEO has a bold but optimistic opinion: NFTs could become “bigger” than the entire crypto market!
Already, ten times as many users have signed up for Coinbase’s NFT platform as market leader OpenSea recorded last month. “We’re super excited about the launch of NFTs, they’re going to be a huge part of the crypto market in the future, they actually already are,” Armstrong said in the press conference, according to Bloomberg. To this he explicitly adds that the NFT business could become “just as big or bigger” than Coinbase’s crypto business.
The crypto exchange had announced in mid-October that it would launch its own NFT platform. On this, crypto users can create, buy and trade NFTs based on Ethereum. The service is to be structured similarly to a social network.

Technical term of the week

Softfork: In blockchain technology, a softfork is a change to the software protocol that only invalidates previously valid transaction blocks. Since old nodes recognise the new blocks as valid, a soft fork is backwards compatible. With this type of fork, only a majority of miners need to upgrade to enforce the new rules, unlike a hardfork where “all” nodes need to upgrade and agree on the new version.

Crypto Market

Last week we saw market moves that kept the market at the levels of the last few weeks.After the SEC issued a rejection (for the next few months) of physical bitcoin ETFs, the market experienced some selling pressure, testing the support zone at ~$62,000. This came just days after bitcoin hit another all-time high, which is now at ~$69,200! This meant a sell-off of more than 10% within a few days. However, the market was able to hold the levels and enter a positive consolidation. At the end of the weekend / start of the week, the market reacted positively to this bullish sideways movement, which allowed a positive trend to start. Thus, Bitcoin is once again within striking distance of the all-time high and seems to confirm the overriding trend, which is positive.

BTC/USDT, 60

Bullish outlook: $70,000 as the new bitcoin price could make the whole market bullish and support the run all the more.

Bearish outlook: A reversal from the bullish trend before reaching the all-time high could end the trend and send the market running towards support levels.