Mastercard and Paxos help banks offer crypto, Jack Dorsey describes the new social platform and Tesla hodls BTC: Hodler's Digest, May 16-22 October

Led by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, a new social media platform dubbed Bluesky Social has entered its private beta after years of anticipation. The platform is based on a protocol known as Authenticated Transfer Protocol (formerly ADX). The protocol essentially removes the walls around user data, allowing users to move their accounts from platform to platform rather than locking their profiles and information on a single platform.

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After selling 75% of its Bitcoin holdings in Q2, Tesla decided to keep its remaining BTC in Q3, according to the company's latest earnings report. Q3 earnings report details Tesla's balance sheet with $218 million in digital assets. Notably, in February 2021, Tesla announced it was holding $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin, but sold most of its holdings the following year due to China-related concerns related to COVID-19.

Despite Hong Kong being a special administrative region of China, Hong Kong is reportedly trying to relax its crypto regulations to favor the industry. China has taken regulatory steps to curb crypto industry activity in the past. Crypto trading in Hong Kong itself is largely restricted to professional investors thanks to Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission (SFC). However, the SFC is now taking steps to enable retail crypto trading as well as other crypto-friendly activities.

Aptos, a blockchain constructed using a programming language once destined for Meta's Diem project, launched its mainnet on October 17. Created by Aptos Labs, the well-funded blockchain claims a processing capacity of 160,000 transactions per second (TPS). However, at the time of Cointelegraph’s Oct. 18 reporting, only 4 TPS were observed. The initially low numbers were expected, according to Aptos on Twitter. October 20th coverage revealed that the numbers for the blockchain had increased to 16 TPS.

Winner and Loser

“Now is the time to tell your friends and explain the benefits of crypto because when they are FOMOing at $70,000 [per Bitcoin] You should tell them not to enter the market.

“Right now, hacking is certainly the biggest problem we are thinking about happening in the industry and posing a real security threat.

"We believe everything [in museums] will be an NFT, just like a serial number, there will be an NFT for every product.”

“PoW was a dead end for Ethereum.

“Price manipulation is a cousin of misrepresentation, and in many jurisdictions, misleading and deceptive conduct is unlawful and grounds for legal claims.

forecast of the week

According to Cointelegraph’s BTC price index, Bitcoin’s price has been trading relatively sideways again for most of this week.

Equity Management Associates founder Larry Lepard envisions Bitcoin hitting $2 million per coin in the next five or six years, he said in a Quoth the Raven podcast episode released Oct. 16. “Bitcoin could go to zero, but I personally believe bitcoin will increase by 100x,” Lepard said. However, he also pointed to the possibility that Bitcoin could drop to $14,000 by then.

FUD of the week

Cross-chain bridges are the weakest security point in decentralized finance (DeFi), according to a Token Terminal report. The crypto data provider explained that cross-chain bridge exploits, mainly on Ethereum Virtual Machine blockchains, were responsible for about $2.5 billion in lost funds over the past two years. Cross-chain bridge exploits make up about half of all DeFi hacks during this period.

Most Salvadorans are not happy with their government's bitcoin spending, according to residents surveyed as part of a study by El Salvador's José Simeón Cañas Central American University. The country made bitcoin legal tender in September 2021, although only 24.4% of Salvadorans polled in September 2022 have used bitcoin for payments since then, according to surveys. Additionally, less than 40% of respondents supported El Salvador's decision to make Bitcoin legal tender.

The UST Restitution Group (URG), formerly organized to initiate lawsuits from Terra investors, has now shifted to finding Terra boss Do Kwon. The URG Discord group has 4,400 participants discussing and searching for Kwon as a result of the Terra Project collapse in early 2022. The authorities have taken various measures to find the co-founder of Terraform Labs. According to an interview published this week by journalist Laura Shin, Kwon said security precautions prompted him to leave Singapore.

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"The Terra Luna Protocol was created by someone with an IQ of 50 or 150. And to be honest, I can't say which one."

“Returns based on marketing dollars are bogus. It's like the dot-com boom, paying customers to buy a product.”

It should come as no surprise to anyone when regulators start asking node validators to impose KYC and AML requirements on users using Ether.

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editorial staff

Cointelegraph Magazine writers and reporters contributed to this article.