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Bitcoin recovers from a $40,000 dip, Solana experiences an outage that leads to losses for DeFi users, and OpenSea experiences a bug on its platform that leads to a discount on NFTs.

It was a pretty emotional week for crypto enthusiasts as bitcoin dipped dangerously close to $30,000 before it began its recovery rally. While the crypto space recovers from the rollercoaster of emotions, on this week's episode of the crypto scoop, we will be reviewing:

Bitcoin's recovery from its dip below $40,000
Apple CEO's announcement that Apple is investing in the metaverse
Musk and McDonald’s’ Crypto Bants on Twitter
Solana's network outage
OpenSea's bug that leads to losses on NFTs and much more.

Bitcoin Recovers From Its Dip Below $40,000 as El Salvador Buys The Dip

Bitcoin has been on a bearish trend for the majority of the year and has recently plummeted below $40K, dangerously near to $30,000. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has subsequently recovered and is now trading above $36k, nearing $40,000.

Despite the fact that the price dip has forced numerous weak hands to dump their bitcoin holdings for fear of a further drop, El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, has embraced the dip. El Salvador has made another purchase of 410 bitcoin worth roughly $15 million dollars, he stated in a tweet. El Salvador currently has 1500 bitcoins in its custody holdings.

While El Salvador acquires more bitcoin, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has advised the country to stop embracing bitcoin as a legal tender. This is because it jeopardizes the country's financial stability, integrity, and consumer protection.

The Russian central bank had in the previous week recommended a total ban of cryptocurrency in Russia. Telegram founder, Pavel Durov spoke against this noting that no developed nation would ban cryptocurrency. He emphasized that the ban would stifle tech development and discourage blockchain specialists.

Apple CEO, Tim Cook Announces That Apple is Investing In The Metaverse

Apple CEO, Cook announced during the company’s Q1 2022 earnings call that Metaverse has a lot of potential. He noted that Apple was investing in AR developments on its device and also investing in Metaverse accordingly.

Goldman Sachs analyst, Eric Sheridan also noted that Metaverse had a lot of potentials and could be an $8 trillion opportunity.

Speaking on Metaverse, Yurii Filipchuk, CEO of the virtual party platform, Party Space proposed that the focus should be on Microverse, not Metaverse. Yurii argued that the Microverse experience will be the future of the Metaverse. He noted that the focus should be on exploring the best war to interact online with online communities.

The online community would each builds its own Microverse and connected to a shared network to form a Metaverse. Doge Temple is one of Party Space’s Microverse initiatives a virtual space for fans of Dogecoin to socialize.

Elon Musk Pointing Towards DOGE (Source: Futurism)

Tesla and McDonald’s’ Crypto Bants on Twitter

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, began a friendly bant with MC Donald. He tweeted that if McDonald's accepts the meme coin, DOGE, he will eat a happy meal on television. Musk has been dubbed the "Father of Dogecoin" for consistently promoting the meme coin.

Tesla had lately begun to accept Doge as a form of payment for Tesla merchandise. The price of Doge jumped 10% to $0.1496 after the tweet on Tuesday.

In response to Musk, the official McDonald's Twitter account tweeted "Only if Tesla accepts grimacecoin." "Grimace Coin" isn't a real cryptocurrency; it's a made-up catchphrase inspired by Grimace, a character from McDonald's commercials.

While the rest of the world enjoyed the friendly bants between Musk and McDonald, Crypto.com has predicted that global crypto owners will surpass 1 Billion this year.

According to Crypto.com, “Nations can no longer afford to ignore the growing push to crypto by the public. We may in many cases expect a friendlier stance towards the crypto industry,”

Solana (Source: Crypto News)

Solana Experiences an Outage That Leaves Users Liquidated

Solana experienced an outage that had its Network going offline for over 24 hours. This was the second outage this year and it resulted in major losses for its users. On January 21, the SOL network team revealed that the network was suffering an outage and reported that it was caused by bots performing “excessive duplicate transactions.”

DeFi users of the blockchain suffered losses as a result of the downtime. Due to their inability to repay loans or provide liquidity to their portfolios, users of Solend, a decentralized system for borrowing and lending on the Solana blockchain, had their trades liquidated.

Given its network issues, the recent outage has prompted questions about whether Solana can truly become a credible rival to Ethereum.

OpenSea Suffered A Bug That Had NFTs Being Sold For Less

Popular NFT marketplace, OpenSea had a bug on its platform that allowed some hackers secure massive discounts on several NFTs. The bug was discovered December 31 2021 and allowed the hackers to buy NFTs at the older lower prices and resell them for hefty profits.

Analyst firm, Elliptic explained in a blog post that one of the attackers, jpegdegenlove paid a total of $133,000 for seven NFTs and sold them later for $934,000 in ether. The funds were then sent throygh Tornado Cash, a mixing service that makes it difficult to track funds. Jpegdegenlove later refunded two of his victims a total of $75,000.

According to Elliptic the market value of estimated NFTs affect is over $1 million. The bug has prompted several users to move their listed assets to other wallets while avoiding the delisting fee. However, although the items may appear to be off the OpenSea front end, they are still accessible on OpenSea APIs and Rarible, another popular NFT marketplace.

While OpenSea users are still stinging from the loss, famous actor Johnny Depp tweeted that he will soon release a collection of NFTs that feature his friends and heroes. The collection contains 11,111 tokens which Depp had personally created and calls “Never Fear Truth.”

Fantom (Source: Fantom Foundation)

Fantom Becomes Third Largest Blockchain in DeFi

Fantom has overtaken Binace Smart Chain (BSC) as the third-largest blockchain in Decentralised finance (DeFi). The position of a blockchain is measured by the total value locked (TVL). Fantom’s TVL soared about 60% over the past week to about $12.2 billion.

BSC used to control about 20% of US$200 billion DeFi activities but after the launch of PamcakeSwap, decentralised exchange it has dropped to 6.05% According to DeFiLlama, Fantom the open source smart contract now hosts 6.15% of the US$200 billion DeFi activities.

Over the last week, all other major blockchains, including TVL leader Ethereum and number two Terra, have has also experienced significant dips. Ethereum's TVL plummeted nearly 20% resulting in a record low dominance of 58 percent, down from 94 percent in last January.

Youtube, Reddit, and Google’s Crypto Initiatives

YouTube has joined the ranks of other social media heavyweights in dipping its toes into the field of NFTs. NFT features will be added to YouTube shortly, according to Susan Wojcicki, the platform's CEO, in an annual letter to creators. "We're always focused on expanding the YouTube ecosystem to help creators capitalize on emerging technologies, such as NFTs, while continuing to deepen and enhance the experiences creators and fans enjoy on YouTube," she noted.

Reddit has also announced that it is following in Twitter’s lead and will soon roll out NFT profile pic feature. According to Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt, the functionality would allow Redditors to utilize non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as avatars as reported by TechCrunch.

As part of its Labs department, Google is reportedly developing a new blockchain section. Shivakumar Venkataraman, a Google engineering vice president, will lead the blockchain division. According to an email received by Bloomberg, the division will work on "blockchain and other next-gen distributed computing and data storage technologies."

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Crypto Scoop: Bitcoin Recovers From Its Dip Below $40,000 As El Salvador Buys The Dip