✅ Bitcoin had two attempts to return to the $100k level in the past week but both were unsuccessful, with net outflows from spot BTC ETFs sending the price down to $94k 📉

Weekly news digest:

💎 Crypto

🔸 In 2024, nearly $15 billion was distributed through crypto airdrops

🔸 North Korean hackers stole $1,3 billion worth of crypto this year alone

🔸 MicroStrategy calls shareholders meeting to fund more Bitcoin purchases

🔸 Cancer lab to receive over $1 million in donations after charity memecoin MIRA was launched

🔸 Solana DEX aggregator Jupiter has announced details of the second JUP airdrop

🏦 Crypto Exchanges

🔸 MoonPay is looking to acquire Helio Pay for around $150 million

🔸 Coinbase report says crypto stablecoins could grow to $3 trillion over the next five years

🔸 FTX Digital Markets co-CEO Ryan Salame’s prison sentence was reduced by one year

💵 Finances and Economy

🔸 Scandinavian countries disclose tax records and addresses of crypto holders, providing criminals with a list of potential targets

🔸 Russia says it is using Bitcoin for international payments

🔸 Stablecoin issuer Tether made its first crypto venture capital fund investment into Arcanum Capital

🔸 Strive, an asset manager founded by Vivek Ramaswamy, has filed SEC for ‘Bitcoin Bond’ ETF

⚖️ Law and Order

🔸 IRS says crypto staking is taxable

🔸 The new IRS rules classifying DEXs as brokers

🔸 South Korea sanctioned 15 North Korean IT organization members for crypto heists and cyber theft

🔸 Russia announced a 6-year ban on crypto mining in 10 regions, citing energy shortages

🔸 Terra Luna Founder Do Kwon to be extradited to the United States (this time for sure)

🔸 Texas Department of Banking has granted MoonPay a Money Transmitter License

 🗣 Personalities

🔸 Robinhood CEO says no plans to invest in bitcoin

🔸  Putin claims he wants to end war in Ukraine

🚀 Best performers of the week:

ai16z - $1.28 (↑114.7%)
TKX - $30.21 (↑53.4%)
BGB - $6.21 (↑51.7%)

The market is trolling everyone today, high volatility has led to the liquidation of $280 million in leveraged positions of both bulls and bears 🕯🫡

✅ Today the market fooled everyone, first Bitcoin went to $95k and immediately after collapsed to $92k liquidating a hundred thousand traders 📉

Daily Digest:

🔸 USDT stablecoin issuer Tether added 7,629 BTC worth $700 million to its Bitcoin reserves

🔸 Hacker transferred 51k ETH coins to his multi-signature address 🔍

🔸 MicroStrategy acquired 2,138 BTC for $209 million

🔸 Hong Kong legislator proposed adding Bitcoin to national reserves

🔸 Crypto scammers found a new way to hack their victims using a webpage that looks like Zoom 😈

🔸 Bitcoin mining pool Foundry USA Pool returned a transaction fee of 8.18 BTC that was paid by a user by mistake

🔸 US Treasury says China hacked its workstations in a cyberattack

🔹 Prices:

🥇 Bitcoin - $92,022(↓1.8%)
✨ Ethereum - $3,318 (↓2.9%)
🧪 S&P 500 - 5,906 (↓1.07%)
🕗 DXY - 108.01 (↓0.12%)
🌉 Gold - 2,610 (↑0.17%)

Join our chat 🗯

Nobody:

Market as soon as you buy: 🙃

Someone sold NFTs worth $370k for $175 😱

Pudgy Penguins is an NFT collection with a floor price of 22 ETH ($74k) but this guy, has sold 5 NFTs for 35 USDC each.

There are two explanations:

1. The owner mistakenly accepted bids thinking 35 USDC was 35 ETH.

2. We are witnessing an attempt at tax evasion (this option is the most likely).

💰 Imagine you have to pay thousands of $ in taxes after selling NFT for big profit, by selling it to your other wallet for cheap you are able to save a lot of money.

What do you think happened? 👇

Happy New Year 2025! 🎉🎉

This time last year, we wished for Bitcoin to hit $100,000 mark, that was once just a dream, and guess what? We got it! As we wrap up an incredible year, let’s take a quick look at what went down ☺️⤵️

• Bitcoin soared by 157% this year, surging past our $100k milestone

• The stock market made a strong move, up 23%

• Institutional adoption ramped up, regulations became clearer, and more people than ever joined the crypto space

• Billions of dollars were invested in crypto thanks to spot BTC and ETH ETFs

All these achievements prove once again that having a long-term vision pays off 💰

Whether you’ve been here since the early days or just hopped on board, we want to thank you for being part of this journey 🏀

Here’s to an even brighter year ahead—stay focused on your goals, keep learning, and never lose sight of the bigger picture.

We love you guys! 🥳🤍🖤

We are already very close to a future in which it will be difficult to distinguish not only a bot from a real Internet user, but also a robot from a living person 😨

AI Captures Crypto Like Wildfire 🤖

More than 57% of crypto mindshare is now dominated by AI-related projects.

This niche is already worth billions and if the bull market continues it could become the largest in crypto 🧪

Here's a selection of AI tokens that can't be ignored 👇

⚙️ AI infrastructure:

1. $VIRTUAL
2. $TAO
3. $FET

🤖 AI Agents:

1. $ai16z
2. $FAI
3. $AIXBT
4. $ELIZA

🤖 AI Memes:

1. $FARTCOIN
2. $ZEREBRO
3. $GOAT
4. $TURBO

Stock Market Fear vs. Crypto Greed 📈

😱 The stock market is approaching extreme fear, which means many investors are feeling anxious and selling or staying on the sidelines.

💰 At the same time, crypto market is showing strong greed, with traders feeling optimistic and even euphoric about some local trends like AI and memes.

📊 Historically, such sentiment gaps can close quickly as risk perceptions shift. Watch economic indicators closely and manage position sizes with discipline.

We could see a situation where the pivot from crypto to stocks could be a good mid-term trade in hindsight

#FAQ

The most important advice for those on their first cycle ☝️

If you don't have a plan for when to sell during this bull market cycle - make one. In crypto, maintaining wealth is harder than getting rich, so here is some advice 👇

Many people watch their paper profits shrink to nothing because they never decide when to actually sell, so it is crucial to set clear rules that tell you exactly when to take profits ⌚️

Maybe that means selling a small percentage every two weeks, or maybe it means cashing out as soon as your coin hits a target price.

But you need to set these rules long before the market gets wild. Emotions can ruin even the best intentions if you are not prepared.

😨 If you ignore this advice, you risk the dreaded roundtrip, where you ride a coin up, brag about your unrealized profits, and then watch it plummet back down to where you started.

It hurts to see a big number on the screen disappear, and it is a story that many people have experienced. Profits only matter if you realize and protect them 💸

What you see is a statistic with the returns of some of the biggest hedge funds in the U.S. for 2024 💰

📊 It is telling that only 4 of them managed to outperform the S&P 500 index, which rose 23.3% last year.

Imagine having hundreds of analysts and traders earning six-figure salaries, all so your fund can underperform a simple strategy of investing in the US 500 index 🤦

History shows that every four years when there is a Bitcoin halving and the US presidential election, Q1 is incredibly bullish for Ethereum 📈

So far in 2024 we have seen ETH underperform BTC and many new altcoins, will we see an epic comeback early this year? 🤨

Are you holding $ETH? Vote:

Yes — 👍

No — 🫡

If you had copied former U.S. House of Representatives member Nancy Pelosi's stock trades, which she likely made using classified information not available to the public (definitely not insider trading 😄), you would have outperformed the S&P 500 by more than double!

Or you could simply reverse publicly available Jim Cramer's recommendations. He is known for always being wrong and recently called to buy BTC when it reaches $90k again 🤔

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Predicts AGI by 2025 🤖

OpenAI CEO has announced that the company is confident in its ability to develop and release Artificial General Intelligence by 2025. AGI refers to AI systems capable of performing tasks across a wide range of domains at a level comparable to or exceeding human abilities 🤖

He says they’ll roll it out step by step, so we can all adjust without freaking out. But let’s be real—this is like going from a flip phone to a smartphone overnight. It’s gonna change everything.

Jobs? Industries? Everyday life? All about to get flipped. And don't worry, Sam says they’ll be careful. Fingers crossed the robots don’t take over... yet 😨