☕️The Morning Cup: Dogecoin Twitter takeover(?) and UK banks turning away crypto companies
Good morning, good day, and good evening. Welcome back to The Morning Cup. It’s your weekly recap of the latest in crypto news and your start to the week, no matter where you are. Don’t worry, we’ve selected just what you need to stay up-to-date, so you won’t spend time pouring through the news you don’t need, only the news you care about.
🧰New Feature
We are excited to announce that we have launched our new reward center! Complete tasks to get rewarded for it, up to 1,000 USDT. We will continually update the reward center with new tasks, so make sure to check back and see what we have in store for you😎
📈📉 Market Watch!
BTC touches above $29K before slumping back under $28K
The trend line for the last week is again rather sideways as failures from crypto-friendly banks Silvergate and Silicon Valley Bank continue to make themselves felt across the industry. The price of the largest crypto by market cap muscled above $29K on March 29 for just some moments before coming back down, as many wrestle with macroeconomic conditions, even as Bitcoin has outperformed them as of recent.
The top gainers for the last 24 hours on Poloniex are LOGT/USDT, DOGE/USDT, RDNT/USDT, ODOGE/USDT, and SXP/USDT.
🗞️ So, what happened?
Poloniex partners with Mercuryo to make buying crypto easier
We are thrilled to partner with payment infrastructure and fiat onramp provider Mercuryo to make it easier for our customers to buy crypto. Right now, our users will be able to use Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, Google Pay and bank transfers to buy crypto directly. That means buying more than 20 supported tokens like BTC, ETH, and USDT with just a credit card. We currently support various fiat currencies such as EUR, GBP, and BRL. With this new partnership, we want to affirm our dedication to being the premier connection to crypto for our customers all over the world!
For more information, check out the full announcement here.
So Doge. Much blue bird. Very wow.
If you logged on to Twitter today, you may have noticed a rather conspicuous Shiba Inu looking at you from the top left corner of your computer screen (or top of your phone screen) where the blue Twitter bird usually is. Your eyes did not deceive you. Still up at the time of writing, the social media platform is donning the Shiba Inu commonly associated with memecoin project Dogecoin.
Although the dog’s presence came unannounced, it comes as no surprise given the current Twitter owner’s habit of promoting the project. Elon Musk, in what could be surmised to be a late April Fool’s Day prank, acknowledged his hand in the joke in a tweet about the change. However, this also came as Elon Musk recently petitioned the dismissal of a US lawsuit against him by Dogecoin investors. The lawsuit alleges that Musk used his influence to promote the token so that he could then profit from its trading. Quite ironically but not at all unexpectedly, this latest gag caused DOGE to surge by 16.5%.
AI and Web3 collide in FIFAs new mobile game
In the latest example of an industry titan dipping its toes into the Web3 world, FIFA has announced the arrival of a new mobile football game. In “AI League”, players of the game will act as coaches of a team of 4 fictional, AI-controlled footballers. Games will be 4 on 4 and PvP, and each character will come with its own unique strengths and traits. Eventually, each character will become an NFT that can be bought, sold and traded on a FIFA-owned NFT marketplace.
As the coach, players will be able to customize their teams down to what their players wear and the added skills they bring to the game. During certain moments of the game, players will also be able to influence certain conditions as they “coach” their AI footballers.
This news comes after the international governing body of association football has officially separated from video game company Electronic Arts, commonly referred to acronymically as EA. It also comes after an announcement by FIFA leading up to the 2022 Qatar world cup that it planned to release a slew of Web3 games.
Cointelegraph, The Verge, FIFA
UK banks turn the cold shoulder to crypto
And the crypto winter winds keep blowing🥶 Likely due to the recent US bank failures of Silvergate and Silicon Valley Bank, both of which were described as crypto friendly, crypto companies have reported recent difficulties such as having accounts frozen or applications being rejected. Major British banks like HSBC and NatWest have reportedly put limits on how much money can be moved from their accounts to crypto exchanges. All of this sudden restriction has made it more difficult for companies to operate due to the fact that they still rely on traditional banking institutions for “fiat on and off ramps”.
This is in stark contrast to current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s stated goal of making the UK into a hub for blockchain technology. The landscape, as indicated above, is becoming less habitable. As in the US, a lot of venture capital in the UK has dried up. Looking over to the EU, where the regulatory environment is much clearer and receptive to the burgeoning blockchain technology, venture capital has remained steadfast despite global economic conditions.
🔍 DYOR before trading
Polopedia
Balancer, the DEX AMM featuring pools with up to 8 tokens🤯 is the subject of our new article for this week!
We also re-released a special report about the upcoming Shanghai upgrade and a deep dive into what it means in the context of Ethereum’s history. A special thanks to our co-authors at Hong Kong University🤝
Crypto Glossary
Sharding refers to the process of splitting a dataset across different databases. In the case of blockchain networks, sharding is when the verification of transactions of a chain are split and handled by shardchains in order to reduce network stress and enable the Mainnet to increase its throughput. This will work in concert with Layer 2 rollups, which are themselves a scalability solution. This is widely expected to be the next major upgrade to Ethereum.
What’s happening here at Poloniex?
This is what Poloniex’s week looked like
Highlights for the week
Campaigns
Our recap of ongoing campaigns that YOU can get involved in!
The community megaphone📢
Highlights from the community
And that about covers it for this week! Curious about our campaigns or upcoming events? Give us a shout in our Telegram channel- https://t.me/PoloniexEnglish
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Thanks for spending some time with us as we went over what’s going on. And wherever you are, from the team here at Poloniex, good morning, good day, and good evening!
