This Week in Crypto – 10/24/22

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In RockItCoin’s effort to empower individuals in the cryptocurrency space, we have extracted top industry stories for your Weekly Digest. Cryptocurrency continues to dominate the news and here are some key happenings you should know.

Bitcoin & NFTs Appear for First Time in 2023 Guinness World Records
Crypto received some long-awaited recognition in the 2023 edition of Guinness World Records, under a new category called “Cryptomania”. The dominance of crypto and NFTs in popular culture likely played a big part in getting the crypto space into the well-known series. Some of the included records are “most valuable cryptocurrency”, which went to Bitcoin, and “most expensive NFT collectible”, which went to CryptoPunk #5822. In terms of crypto adoption, El Salvador was mentioned as the “first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender”. It’s fun to see what cryptos and projects made it into the book and will be exciting to see if it’s a recurring category!

Fidelity Investments announces ETH Trading
Fidelity Investments has announced that they will be offering Ethereum trading services to its users through Fidelity Digital Assets, including the ability to buy, sell, and transfer Ethereum. According to an email sent to users, \”With the Ethereum Merge completed, many investors are looking at Ethereum through a new lens,” showing that Ethereum\’s recent innovations are making it more attractive to even traditional investors. Fidelity has been one of the most crypto-friendly traditional investment companies, already offering crypto and metaverse ETFs.

Bitcoin and Ethereum Balances Drop on Exchanges throughout Crypto Winter
Research from blockchain analytics company Glassnode shows that the number of Bitcoin held on exchanges has hit its lowest point in 4 years- about 2.4 million BTC. This indicates that investors are pulling their crypto into their own wallets and holding throughout the crypto winter. Over the course of the crypto winter, over 300,000 Bitcoins have left exchange wallets and now approximately 12% of available Bitcoin reside on exchanges.

BTC-Exchange-Balance

Interestingly, Ethereum hasn’t had as much of a drop. The figure below shows the amount of Ethereum on exchanges for the entire year of 2022. The balance dropped drastically once the crypto winter set in, but saw a large spike due to the Merge in late September and now sits around 21.3 million ETH.