An altcoin more profitable than BTC and ETH: top 3 crypto news analyzed

GM friend,

And welcome to the month of love! 🥰 Vanessa from the buidlbee team here! Your one-stop crypto convenience shop, giving you all the news, tips, analyses, guides, and everything else you may need to stack up your Web3 supplies!

Here's what's in your shopping cart today:

• Some Binance accounts are getting blocked 🔒

• A box of SAND for Valentine 💝

• Why you should stop sleeping on LTC 🚀

Over 1000 Binance accounts have been blocked

The Department of Justice (DoJ) has said "not on our watch" to over a thousand Russian-owned Binance accounts in the wake of the Bitzlato case. Bitzlato is a crypto exchange that was recently accused of conducting money laundering crimes and having account users that finance terrorist operations, and are tied to the Russian darknet store — Hydra. At the time of the arrest of one of Bitzlato's co-founders, Anatoly Legkodymov, Binance got caught in the crosshairs as the Feds discovered they were one of the top receivers of BTC from the exchange.

On January 18 some Russian users of Binance reported their blocked accounts and created a support group of some sort on Telegram to get to the bottom of it. Eventually realizing their common denominator, a lot of tattle-telling followed suit, and friend, it's not exactly pretty.

Numerous members of the chat exposed themselves for utilizing Bitzlato, also dragging Binance through the mud by revealing intricate suspicious details of transactions between their Bitzlato and Binance accounts. However, Binance has gone on to confirm the locked accounts being tied with the Bitzlato case, as well as confirming over 90% of said accounts have been unblocked. Trust me to keep you in the loop of any updates 😎

SAND is up by 90% following a token unlock announcement

Token unlocks can easily be a double-edged sword in the world of crypto. On the one hand, it increases coins in circulation, which decreases overall value, and on the other hand, anticipations of such unlocks can cause mass buys which increases its value.

The latter is currently the case with SandBox. The metaverse company will be unleashing love in the form of ~$267M worth of SAND tokens on Valentine's Day! This equates to 12.4% of the total supply and ~373M tokens. Pending the unlock, SAND is up by 90% since the start of the year, currently trading at $0.713, but is still 90% below its 2021 ATH of $8.

So is the future looking beachy? In previous SAND token unlocks, the value of the altcoin always suffers right after as investors rush to cash out from the temporary high. An analyst from Kaiko Research, Conor Ryder, warns holders of serious headwinds in the future as unlocks are scheduled every six months until 2025.

LTC is one of the best investment coins of 2022

The "light" version of BTC, Litecoin, came out as one of the most profitable crypto assets of last quarter, outperforming BTC and ETH in terms of ROI. A casual chart-topper, LTC is consistently in the top 10 global cryptocurrencies (excluding stablecoins) and has risen in value over the last three months. 🥳

LTC's growth so far has been organic, which is better for long-term investment. Here are some reasons why the coin has been doing so well:

• A new hashrate record.

• Upcoming halving in August.

• Successful implementation of the privacy protocol in March 2022 — MimbleWimble.

Since the start of the year, LTC has gained 50%, having its market cap close to $7B. Its ROI was 28.8% higher than that of BTC investors and 24.9% higher than that of ETH investors. Furthermore, in the harsh storm of the Crypto Winter, the altcoin still outperformed DeFi tokens with an impressive 79% margin in 2022.

There will also be the beginning of the production of specialized miners — ASIC miners — for LTC mining, as reported by BIT Mining. This means the demand for mining the coin is on the rise as these types of miners require heavy investment in specialized hardware. So, friend, if you've been sleeping on LTC, I suggest you wake up and update your portfolio! 🚀

That's my daily rundown for you! Have an awesome hump day, and don't forget to stay subscribed to receive more daily tips to make your crypto dreams come true!