August 19, 2021

Welcome to this week’s edition of Netcoins news.

This week’s edition features all kinds of bullish news even though crypto prices themselves are cooling off a little bit. Solana is the star of the week for many different reasons, but it’s not the only superstar in crypto. Britney Spears has apparently got into the crypto game seven years ago.

Get to know a little bit about all of that and more in this week’s edition of the news.

Solana Enters the Top 10 by Market Cap After 125% Gain Over the Past Month

Solana is gaining ground on the rest of the crypto world and doing so in a hurry. The most obvious reason for this is the fact that Solana and its SOL token represent a faster and cheaper Layer 1 alternative to Ethereum.

But there is another big reason for the huge pump over the past month. That’s the total value of tokens locked (TVL) in by users. It has climbed almost as quickly as SOL’s token price. Analyst Jeff Dorman points out that since the start of August, Solana has locked in over $700 million USD into DeFi projects. That represents a 60% increase.

Solanaproject.com shows that overall, over $2 billion USD in assets are locked into the Solana blockchain. The project reached that milestone in just 18 months. If you compare that to Ethereum which took five years, it’s obvious that Solana is arriving at a time where more people are accepting of DeFi and where the project itself is offering a value proposition that investors love.

Publicly Traded Companies Now Own More Than 1% of the Bitcoin Supply

At the time of this writing, publicly traded companies now own about 1.032% of all bitcoin in existence. That’s a huge number considering that MicroStrategy Inc. kicked off an institutional buying spree just one year ago.

Crossing that 1% mark comes as the market capitalization of the broader crypto market reaches over $2.5 trillion Canadian for the first time in nearly 3 months. Institutional investment in Bitcoin is one reason for that. So is the rise of Ethereum thanks to its London upgrade.

Over the last couple of days, prices have been floating at a point of resistance, but many experts believe a bull run might just continue for the rest of the year.

Britney Spears Allegedly Used Bitcoin to Hide Money from Her Dad and Evade His Conservatorship Authority

Britney Spears allegedly used Bitcoin to hide money from her dad in 2014, according to Tess Barker and Barbara Gray, the host of a podcast called Toxic. The podcast hosts noticed strange activity on Spears’ Instagram account years ago and discovered that her dad had gained legal control over her finances and career through a principal in the United States known as conservatorship.

Conservatorship arrangements are normally made for people who can no longer take care of their own affairs, similar to Power of Attorney here in Canada. A film released earlier this year called Framing Britney Spears details the whole story.

Fans and legal experts have rallied around her to help Spears get her freedom back. Clearly, she wasn’t just sitting around waiting, and the fact that she was able to be her own bank and dabble in Bitcoin in 2014 speaks to the power of the blockchain. At least if you believe the rumour.

Cryptocurrency Adoption Rises 881% Over the Past Year

According to crypto research firm Chainalysis, global crypto adoption is up 881% of the last 12 months. Isn’t that insane?

Digging deeper into the numbers reveals that in the Western world, the increase in adoption is driven by professional investors and institutions. That should come as no surprise. In developing countries, it’s driven by savers trying to preserve their wealth.

The top countries in terms of accelerating adoption include Vietnam, Ukraine, Pakistan, and India.

A lot of that adoption is thanks to peer-to-peer platforms that are making it easier for people to exchange crypto with one another. Another big driver of it is the DeFi space and the opportunity to earn interest that banks and traditional financial institutions can offer to individual savers especially.

In the past week or two, Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban says that banks need to be scared of DeFi because of what DeFi platforms can offer. According to the research above, it looks like the world is ready to cash in on that realization.

That’s it for your dose of the weekly news. 

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