Crypto Daily — DeFi, NFT, Web3

💰 The American regulator OFAC imposed new sanctions against several Russian digital companies and related individuals — the restrictions affected entities associated with AEZA Group and Media Land. The US stated that the measures are aimed at preventing the use of digital infrastructure to circumvent sanctions and strengthening control over cross-border IT networks.

💎 During the downturn last week, altcoins showed unusual relative strength compared to BTC, most sectors actually outperforming the leading cryptocurrency — Glassnode.

😀 After 14 years in the Bitcoin mining industry, Bitfury has decided to change direction and is launching an investment fund worth $1 billion — the funds will go to support startups in the fields of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies.

🚬 Michael Saylor stated that he is not worried about a further drop in BTC — the company Strategy can withstand an 80–90% decline in the first cryptocurrency and continue operating.

👻 Vitalik Buterin at the Devconnect conference warned that quantum computers could break modern cryptography even before the 2028 US presidential election — he urged the Ethereum community to transition to quantum-resistant protection methods within the next four years. Buterin also noted that further innovations should be moved to second-layer solutions (L2), as well as to wallets and privacy tools, instead of complicating the base Ethereum protocol.

🗽 The state of New Hampshire approved the issuance of the world's first municipal bond worth $100 million, secured by BTC — a new financial instrument where Bitcoin is used as overcollateralization.

🇺🇸 The US banking regulator announced that banks can now hold cryptocurrency specifically to pay network fees on blockchains. This is not about investments, but a technical necessity — so that banks can work with transactions in digital networks. This is the first step towards traditional financial institutions being able to integrate with crypto infrastructure at a basic level.

💰 Revolut has chosen Polygon as the main crypto infrastructure for payments, trading, and staking.

🧬 Ethereum Foundation has introduced the concept of the Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) — a unified compatibility layer that will combine all Layer2 networks into a single ecosystem. Thanks to this, users will be able to perform transactions between different L2s directly from their wallet, without bridges or third-party relayers. Essentially, this is a step towards making all L2s operate as one common Ethereum blockchain.

🇧🇷 Brazil wants to introduce a tax on crypto transactions for cross-border payments.

💰 Miners have mined 95% of the total Bitcoin supply — yesterday the volume of mined coins exceeded 19.95 million BTC out of the 21 million limit programmed by Satoshi Nakamoto. Emission slows down with each halving: after April 2024, the block reward decreased from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC, and now miners produce about 450 BTC per day instead of the previous 900. Although the majority of coins are already in circulation, the last 5% will be mined slowly — until 2140, and Bitcoin is gradually transitioning to an economy where user fees play a key role in supporting the hashrate and network security, with mining difficulty at a historic high of 152.27 T.

💳 Mastercard has chosen Polygon to create a system that will allow sending cryptocurrency not to long wallet addresses, but directly to the username.

🚫 The internet worldwide went down due to a major outage at Cloudflare — a company that provides a significant part of the global internet infrastructure (CDN, DNS, traffic protection and routing). Social networks, online games, and various services are massively unavailable — from Twitter and Spotify to OpenAI and AWS.

💰 A large investor sold 31,005 ETH for $92 million, losing $18.8 million in just two weeks. He bought Ether during the dip in early November at an average price of $3,581, investing over $110 million, but the market continued to decline, and the whale realized a loss.

🤖 Jeff Bezos has created the AI startup Project Prometheus and personally invested in it, with the total amount of funding raised reaching $6.2 billion — the company's co-founder is scientist Vik Bajaj, a former member of Google's research division Google X, and the team has already hired about a hundred specialists from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta. The startup intends to use AI for development and manufacturing in the aerospace, automotive, and computer industries, although its location and exact launch date have not yet been disclosed. For Bezos, this is the first leadership project after stepping down as CEO of Amazon, and he sees AI as a field that can simultaneously cause an investment bubble and bring significant benefits to society.

👻 Extreme fear reigns in the market — The Fear and Greed Index has dropped to 11.

🍿 Arthur Hayes in a new essay stated that the fall of BTC is not due to fundamental problems, but due to a reduction in liquidity — flows into ETFs and DAT have noticeably weakened. In his assessment, Bitcoin could drop to $80,000, but with the return of liquidity and the recovery of the US stock market, it is capable of rising to $250,000 by the end of the year.

💰 The company Forward Industries, which was actively buying Solana, at night transferred 1,887,962 SOL ($253 million) to Coinbase Prime. Into the order book?

🗽 Donald Trump stated that tariff dividends of $2000 will be sent to Americans by mid-2026. Bear market for another six months?

🇸🇻 Bitcoin crashed below $90,000 — the government of El Salvador took advantage of the correction and bought an additional 1090 BTC ($100 million), in addition to daily purchases of 1 BTC.