Last week was a highly eventful one for the crypto market.
The week's events were filled with everything from a blockchain inscription critic being proven right to Bitwise's 2024 crypto predictions, to a single hacker group being responsible for about 20% of the crypto hacks in 2022.
In this article, we will be summarizing all of the juiciest stories from the entire week in bite-sized and easy-to-read sections.
Without wasting further time, here's what we have:
Remember the incident, a few weeks ago, where a Bitcoin core developer took to Twitter to explain that Ordinals and Bitcoin Inscriptions (also known as Bitcoin NFTs) were a "bug", and that they were slowing down the entire network?
Well, he may have been right.
This week, Arbitrum, one of the most popular L2 scaling solutions for Ethereum crashed terribly, following an inscription-related incident.
According to reports, Arbitrum was "overwhelmed" by a large number of transactions that contained inscriptions.
These transactions were much larger and heavier than normal, causing Arbitrum's sequencer to freeze up under all that weight.
In essence, Arbitrum is officially the first chain to crash under the weight of blockchain inscriptions (all systems are back to normal at the time of writing, by the way).
Just a week after VanEck released a list of 15 crypto predictions for 2024, Bitwise released theirs with some slight similarities with the former.
To summarize things, Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto market are about to explode.
However, here are some deeper details.
According to Bitwise, bitcoin will trade above $80,000 in 2024, setting a new all-time high. The asset manager speculated that the key driving factors of this rally will be the next halving, as well as the approval of a new Bitcoin ETF in the US.
When it comes to Ethereum, Btwise predicts that ETH will almost double in revenue to $5 billion in 2024. Ethereum's fees are also expected to crash by 90% when the EIP-4844 upgrade comes in.
This will make Ethereum both secure, scalable and very, very cheap.
Bitwise also speculates that Coinbase will likely beat Binance as the largest exchange by volume, and Stablecoins will overshadow Visa as a payment system, in terms of market cap.
Ledger is one of the biggest producers of hardware wallets: Little flash drive-like devices that can store crypto indefinitely, off the internet and as safe as their owner can keep them.
However, last week, the idea of "safety" became challenged head-on, when Ledger suffered a hack on Thursday.
According to Ledger, the breach occurred at 10:29 UTC on Thursday, when a hacker inserted a script into the code of Ledger's Connect Kit, that redirected users to a phishing website, where they were asked to enter their 24-word recovery phrase.
We all know what would have happened from here.
The attacker targeted users who were trying to access dapps that use the Connect Kit, such as Zapper, SushiSwap, Phantom, Balancer, and Revoke.cash and at the end of the day, anything between $150,000 and $500,000 was stolen.
The Saga smartphone was launched in April 2023 by Solana Labs.
This smartphone was initially priced at $999, and remained largely unsold, despite being built with a hardware wallet that was powered by the Solana network.
Sales were so bad, that the phone's price was reduced to $599 in August. However, this changed dramatically last week, when BONK's popularity and price exploded.
Solana Labs announced in October, that Saga smartphone owners would be eligible to claim an airdrop of 30 million BONK tokens, as a way to reward them for supporting the Solana ecosystem. At the time, 30 million BONK tokens were worth less than $10, and the airdrop did not generate much interest or excitement.
However, as BONK's price soared in December, the value of the airdrop also increased exponentially. Solana fans realized that buying a Saga smartphone for $599 would allow them to claim 30 million BONK tokens, which were worth more than the price of the phone itself.
Because of this, sales of the Saga phone have risen 10x so far, and Solana Labs is even considering limiting sales to "one per household"
According to Fortune Mag, the notorious Lazarus Group, linked to the North Korean regime, has stolen over $300 million from crypto platforms and users in 2023, accounting for nearly 20% of the year's total losses.
If you didn't know, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, North Korean hackers have stolen more than $3 billion from crypto platforms and users since 2017, and have used the funds to finance about 50% of the country's ballistic missile program.
This report also highlights that considering that the overall amount of money stolen in crypto hacks fell by over 50% this year, these hackers were responsible for exploiting known protocols like Ronin in March, CoinEx in September, Atomic in October and stake.com in November.
Disclaimer: Voice of Crypto aims to deliver accurate and up-to-date information, but it will not be responsible for any missing facts or inaccurate information. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile financial assets, so research and make your own financial decisions.