Daily Digest 12/13

Insight on the biggest stories of the day.

One of the biggest if not the biggest competition to Ethereum right now is Cardanos ADA because of the high amount of research and development that the team puts into it. Cardano will not release anything without it being first rigorously peer reviewed and tested.
Similarly to Ethereum though they are slightly more centralized at the moment than they would like us to believe. Especially since the main thing is they are trying to accomplish is full decentralization and shift the way finance and business is done.
Data reported by Finbold shows that currently the top 10% of ADA holders own 31 billion + of the 33.43 billion coins in circulation. This number has been steadily increasing all year and those top wallets have also accumulated 1 billion more tokens in that same time frame.
The two ways to look at this are that whales are continuing to accumulate and not sell showing strong faith in the network. The other being that Proof-of-Stake may be effective in terms of transaction speed and costs but it is also easy for whales to come in and control and manipulate the prices and to some degree the decisions made on the network.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is arguably the most influential NFT project in the short time that NFTs have been around. They have recently been featured in a Adidas commercial just last week as well as many celebrities including Jimmy Fallon and Steph Curry.
A major concern in the NFT space is money laundering and wash trading where people are avoiding taxes and artificially inflating the price. One BAYC holder says that he “fat fingered” and accidentally sold his ape that was valued at 75 ETH for .75 ETH or $3,000 instead of $300,000.
“I list a lot of items every day and just wasn’t paying attention properly. I instantly saw the error as my finger clicked the mouse but a bot sent a transaction with over 8 ETH of gas fees so it was instantly sniped before I could click cancel, and just like that, $250,000 was gone.” Said Max, the owner of the bored ape.
Whether it was an accident or if he is trying to save himself in terms of taxes or anything remains to be seen but it is important to know that this is not uncommon tactic.

China is not the only country trying to impose stricter rules on the cryptocurrency space. Last week we heard a lot about them cracking down on what they considered “private” cryptocurrencies. Today Russia published an official statement on regulating mutual funds in the country.
The part that stood out from the statement was that fund managers would not be to buy cryptocurrencies or any “financial instruments whose value depends on prices of digital assets.”
While cryptocurrencies may be banned from mutual funds that is not the only way for the citizens of Russia to get exposure to crypto. At the moment Sber, the largest bank in Russia is planning on launching an ETF focused on the blockchain sector and will be available for retail investors.

Last week Solana experienced another Ddos issue causing the network to get congested and the transactions per second was slowed by almost 50%. This being the second time this year that has happened on Solana but the first time the network was shut down for almost a day. This time they did not have to shut down.
In the days since the attack happened there has been a large spike in development activity on the network. This shows that developers are actively working to make sure that this doesn’t happen again because it would not be a good sign if the blockchain has more periods of down time.

DOGE Spikes 27% on Elon Musk Tweet