🚨 A new token shook the market: Top crypto news analyzed

GM, friend!

It's finally Friday, and it's Vanessa, representing your Web3 and crypto BFFs — buidlbee! I'm on a mission to bring you all the supplies you need to have a weekend full of investment opportunities 🔥

Don't leave these out of your cart...

• The market is greener than ever and this is why 🤑

• A newly-launched token you shouldn't miss out on 🚀

• To sell or to stake? That, is the question 🤔

Yesterday, all currencies were in the green! Bitcoin itself got to $25K very briefly, rising by over 11% in 24 hours. Although, now the price sits below $24K. In any case, I'm here to tell you why we were seeing green yesterday and if we could expect a consistent surge soon.

• US inflation decline — The Feds report from last month showed a decrease in inflation from 7.1% to 6.5% This month, they raised the key rate [i.e., bank lending interest rate] from 4.5% to 4.75%, which ironically led to a pump in the crypto market as it was kinda predicted. The increased rate also led to a fall in inflation by 0.1% and an increase in CPI from 0.1% last month to 0.5%, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

• Ordinals are gaining traction — Last week, I quickly updated you on the new NFT boom — Ordinals (Bitcoin NFTs). If you didn't read that letter, that's on you, friend. These NFTs, permanently created on the Bitcoin blockchain, have been gaining much attention. So much so, there are now Ordinals crypto punks (Ordinal Punk NFT), one of which was sold for a whopping 9.5 BTC!

• Increase in hashrate — Bitcoin's hashrate has been on a rise recently, and when it experienced a short drop between January 29-30, its price also dropped from $23.689 to $22.737. The hashrate has, however, now increased by 36.65%, so I'm sure you see where I'm going with this.

• Funds from institutions — Lookonchain noticed that since February 10, there have been several hefty transactions between wallets from Circle and other exchanges. Several institutions performed three withdrawals from wallets in Circle to pour into exchanges when the market was down. There was ~1.6B USDC withdrawn and ~0.2B invested.

• Celebrity influence — No press is bad press, right? Keanu Reaves from the Matrix recently gassed the crypto market, calling cryptocurrencies a great tool for distributing resources!

Do you think these reasons could have caused the surge? Leave a comment to let me know. There is also reason to believe the rally will continue, even Dan Morehead, the head of Pantera Capital hedge fund, is feeling bullish with a $200K prediction 🚀

NFT marketplace, Blur, launched its native BLUR token on Valentine's Day and has been steadily breaking records ever since. Its first listing, on OKX Exchange, skyrocketed the token to $8.36, with over 50% of the airdrop being claimed within the first hour! Its price has, however, dropped to $0.8961, with a market cap of $322,502,654 and $842,658,194 in trading volume.

What's all the hype about? Here are some interesting facts about BLUR:

• Taiwanese singer, Jeffrey Huang, notorious for issuing a large number of ICOs, received 1.847 million BLUR tokens under the address "machibigbrother.eth."

• Arthur Hayes, BitMEX founder, also copped himself a bag-load of over 500,000 BLUR tokens. To put that into perspective, Arthur is known for investing in double-digit-making assets.

• This month so far, Blur has had almost daily higher bid volumes than OpenSea.

• Blur's bidding pools have reached a new ATH of 69.94 million BLUR TVL, which means there are more deposits on and interest in the network.

• Blur has big plans to become a unicorn [unicorn companies are startups with more than a billion dollars in capitalization for up to 10 years]!

• Blur is also insistent on providing royalties for NFT creators. Founder, Pacman, recently took a jab at OpenSea by comparing royalty rewards offered by both platforms.

• South Korea's largest exchanges — Upbit and Bithumb — listed BLUR, joining the list of other notable exchanges — KuCoin, Coinbase, Kraken, Uniswap (V3), SushiSwap, Bybit, Huobi, and Gate.io.

BLUR's future looks very promising and could compete with known marketplaces like OpenSea in the long run. Maybe, even a listing on Binance in the future. In any case, do your research and invest at your own risk 😉

A week ago, SEC zeroed in on Kraken and its staking services, immediately putting a stop to it. Staking providers like Kraken, accept ETH from customers and bundle them into portions of 32 ETH. When providers receive income for staking, they divide this revenue amongst all investors in that staking pool according to their contributed percentages.

To put it simply, the SEC considers staking a security because investors expect returns, and now that Kraken is down, it's only logical to watch out for the next moves by other major players. The largest of them are Lido and Coinbase, which are even bigger than Kraken.

Let's start with decentralized Lido. All decisions on the DAO are made through community voting. On Tuesday, Lido launched four proposals concerning ETH (of which Lido owns 20,304) staking on whether to sell or stake $30M worth of Ethereum. This move pushed its native token — LDO — up by 10%, adding to its 30% rally in the past month. The results of the proposal, however, cannot take effect until the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade is launched in spring.

On the other hand, Coinbase is an easier target for SEC, because, unlike Lido, it isn't a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). The company experienced a sharp drop in stocks by 30% after the Kraken announcement, but the market is now warming up and the share price is up by 10%. Coinbase has affirmed its position through the following:

• A recently-published detailed blog explaining its staking services as non-securities ✅ 

• Co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, posted a Twitter thread explaining why they aren't moved by SEC's recent doings ✅ 

• Brian, again, refers to a very thorough legal breakdown of a document — "Ethereum’s New ‘Staking’ Model Does Not Make ETH A Security." ✅

So it seems like Coinbase is very confident about its position, while Lido is leaving it up to the community to decide in the coming weeks.

That's all I have for you this Friday, friend. Make sure you share with friends while you have a fantastic weekend, and I'll be busy recuperating from this hectic crypto week. See you on Monday with more tips to help you make it with crypto! 🔥