For years, Bitcoin traders have speculated that the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization may act as an efficient inflation hedge. That’s why they’ll be paying close attention to Wednesday when the U.S. Labor Department releases its Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for December.

The closely watched CPI, which is set to be released at 8:30 a.m. ET (13:30 UTC), is likely to indicate an increase in inflation from the previous month, which is already at its highest point in 39 years.

A sharper rise in prices than predicted might prompt the Federal Reserve to tighten monetary policy forcefully in the coming months. As a result, risky assets such as equities, bitcoin (BTC), and other cryptocurrencies may face more negative pressure. We should now look at what will effectively ignite the cryptoverse.

Related article | Bitcoin & Ethereum Market Overview: 10 January 2022

Cardano Foundation Completes Funding To Plant 1 Million Trees

The #CardanoForest project is aimed at planting trees to combat deforestation and restore land and local ecosystems. Partnering with blockchain startup Vertiree, which uses blockchain technology to aid tree-planting efforts across the globe. The funds for the 1 million trees project were sourced from the Cardano community. For each ADA donated, one tree will be planted, and at the time of this writing, 1,001,000 have been funded through this initiative. #CardanoForest will focus on Mombasa, Kenya, to support land restoration and local ecosystem development activities. This is in an effort to combat the effects of crypto mining on the climate.

Stellar Development Foundation Launches New Account Model, How Users Will Benefit

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has announced a new account model called Muxed. A muxed account is one that combines the GABC and 64-bit integer ID to create a “virtual” account under a traditional address. The SDF has called on “products and services built on Stellar” to check if they are compatible with this new model. The Stellar Foundation (SBF) has revealed that muxed accounts were implemented in the Protocol 13 update in 2020. This update was introduced in 2020, but muxes accounts remained hidden until January 10th, 2022. Muxes are a first-class abstraction that can be used anywhere a normal account ID can be.

Yearn Finance Creator To Launch New AMM, What It’s All About?

Andre Cronje, inventor of Yearn Finance and other DeFi protocols, will launch a new platform. Called ve(3,3) it has been designed as an Automated Market Maker (AMM) to operate with a “protocol for protocols” architecture. This new AMM will be easy to integrate with other platforms to incentivize their own liquidity. Cronje’s protocol for protocols will let other platforms support delegation, increase “holdings proportional to emission”, and conduct locks with capital efficiency. The platform will take a snapshot to determine the projects that will receive a percentage of the 2,000,000 ve(3,3) tokens.

Wizardia – The Magic of a Play-to-Earn Metaverse

Wizardia introduces users to a fantasy world that has been overrun and distorted by a hostile fog. The player-character must take on the role of one of many unique wizards to fight in order to survive. Wizardia employs NFT (non-fungible token) technology to act as the foundation of the game’s economy. Wizardia is building an independent economy in the manner of such broad-scale games as Eve-Online. Native utility token – $WZRD – will act as the in-game currency and will be tradeable on popular DEXs and CEXs. Wizardia is giving away $15,000 worth of prizes to its community throughout early January.

ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood On What Will Drive Bitcoin Correction

Cathie Wood, CEO of ARK Invest shares her thoughts on the market correction and what will drive it. She argues that there has been a strike against technology, growth, and innovation in the equity markets. The spillover of this strike is what brought down prices across the crypto market. Cathie Wood is the CEO of investment fund Bridgewater Associates and has been vocal about her support for bitcoin. Bitcoin hit its all-time high of $69K last year but has since lost over 30% of its value. Wood attributes this to institutional investors finally moving at least 5% of their portfolios into the digital asset.

OpenSea Transaction Volume Shows That NFTs Are Not Slowing, Here Are Some Projects To Consider

Opensea Sales Increased 646x In 2021, Cruises Into 2022. The company made $170 million on January 1 and $124 million on December 31. OpenSea is on the verge of surpassing $2 billion in traded NFTs. Since the beginning of 2022, they have generated over $1.9 billion in trade activity. The Mekaverse is a collection of 8,888 generative Mekas inspired by Japan’s Mecha worlds.

The Moon Boyz are a group of 11,111 distinct characters that exist on the Ethereum blockchain. The NFT watch collection was revealed, with a total of 1,234 NFTs.

Is The Bitcoin Hashrate Recovering From Kazakhstan’s Crisis? Fear Abides

Kazakhstan has been the second-largest Bitcoin mining spot (after the U.S.) with 18% of the global BTC hashrate ever since China’s miners were forced to find new locations with cheap energy costs. The government claims the country’s power services are stabilizing, thus the Bitcoin hashrate could be on its way to recovery. Analysts from mining pool BTC.com alleged that the lost Bitcoin hashrate of top mining pools had been nearly recovered, narrowing the loss to 2.2%. Others report that the protests enter week 2.

Bitcoin Discount? Peter Brandt On Why You Shouldn’t Buy The Dip

Bitcoin has been dropping consistently for the past week and the crypto market has lost over $500 billion following this dip. Veteran trader Peter Brandt has addressed these calls of ‘buy the dip’, explaining why investors should not follow it. The veteran trader compared the current movement of bitcoin to the Silver $SI_F of 1980. Peter Brandt compared it to gold, pointing out that the precious metal’s price stayed low for more than two decades.

Soldex, Solana-built Decentralized Exchange Partners with Larix Protocol

Soldex is the fastest, easiest, and most user-friendly third-generation DEX being built on Solana. It aims to resolve the issues faced by order-matching centralized exchanges and trustless custody within current decentralized exchanges. Soldex would be able to solve the problems of slow transaction time and high gas fees. The Soldex protocol aims to eliminate this risk by offering users AI-powered algorithms (created by other experienced traders). Users would be able to design or choose their trading bots according to their individual criteria.

Soldex would level the playing ground between experienced traders and newbies by offering educational tools to users. Solana boasts of 65,000 transactions per second (TPS), these numbers make Ether’s meager 15 TPS look non-existent. The average rate of $0.00001 per transaction is negligible compared to the high gas fees of the Ethereum blockchain. Soldex recently partnered with Larix, the first borrowing and lending protocol on the Solana ecosystem.

Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz Says Bitcoin Has Hit The Bottom

Bitcoin has been on a downward streak since the last quarter of 2021. This has sent bitcoin’s price down to the dreaded $40,000 price range. Mike Novogratz predicted where the bottom of the current bitcoin downtrend will be. The billionaire CEO believes that inflation rates will begin to come down.

From McDonald’s Burger-flipper To Crypto Billionaire, Binance CEO Ranks 11th Among World’s Richest

Changpeng Zhao is the CEO of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. His net worth is comparable to that of top tech tycoons such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and others. Zhao’s personal crypto assets include Bitcoin and his company’s own token, Binance Coin. Binance is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, with daily cryptocurrency trade volumes exceeding $100 billion on the majority of days in 2021. The US Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service are looking into whether Binance Holdings Ltd. is being used for money laundering and tax evasion.

Melania Trump Congratulates Bitcoin On 13th Anniversary Of Bitcoin Genesis Block

Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin investors spread to almost every sector and among different personalities. The former US first lady, Melania Trump, just gave her congratulatory message to Bitcoin on its 13th birthday. Her tweet has received over 8,000 retweets and 30,000 likes in the press. The former first lady of the US, Melania Trump, has announced her nonfungible token (NFT) sale for December 2021. She also laid down her foremost digital collectible known as Melania’s Vision. Comments from her husband, former US President Donald Trump, lashed out at Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Is Norton 360 Mining Ethereum In Your Computer? If It Is, They’ll Take a 15% Cut

Norton’s antivirus, Norton 360, made a miner out of everyone. The Internet recently found out about it and traditional Norton customers are livid. This is a commercial program that you have to pay for, so it’s only logical that people are not ok with that. Norton antivirus now mines the cryptocurrency by default. Security expert Brian Krebs says that Norton customers were “horrified” at the prospect of their antivirus installing coin-mining software, regardless of whether it was turned off by default or not. The mining service can be disabled by deleting NCrypt.exe from your computer.

Top Dog Or A Meme Joke: Shiba Inu Slumps 5% As Whales Buy More

Shiba Inu, like other meme coins, is entertaining to trade and has made some people quite wealthy in a short period of time. Increased activity may be followed by greater selling activity, based on the token’s price behavior on the market. The dog-inspired coin has lost almost 15% of its value in the last four days, according to TradingView statistics. The meme coin market is brimming with opportunities. 

The SEC Files A Strike Against Ripple’s Defense. Could It Drown XRP?

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) made a surprise attack on the Ripple case. The regulator filed a letter of supplemental authority to strike Ripple’s “fair notice” defense. Simultaneously, the token XRP is down 2.33% in the last 24 hours to $0.7 following the market’s downtrend. XRP is down 2.33% in the last 24 hours to $0,7634 as it shows in the next chart. After the SEC filed the lawsuit against Ripple in December 2002, the XRP price plunged dramatically from $0.60-$0.1748. It recovered throughout 2021 and reached highs of $1.34 on November 10, 2021.

Game Giant Konami Joins NFT Race, To Launch With Castlevania Video Game Franchise

Konami is launching an NFT auction to commemorate the “Castlevania” franchise. The collection will be auctioned off on the NFT marketplace Opensea. Unlike other non-fungible tokens from gaming firms, these NFTs will not have any in-game utility.