Crypto Weekly Roundup: London Fork Goes Live; US Senate Goes Irrelevant

Welcome to today’s crypto weekly roundup, and let’s get deep into Ethereum!

Ethereum London Fork Is Here

Yes, it finally happened!

The London hard fork is now live. As of writing, around 90% of the nodes have upgraded to the current version.

This is a huge moment and probably the biggest crypto news of the year. The most significant change is the implementation of the EIP-1559, which should theoretically make gas fees more manageable. I say “theoretically” because it seems that the gas fees are actually rising as of now.

Will be interesting to see how this flattens out later.

Regardless, Ethereum managed to rise and cross the $3,500 CAD for the first time since May 26. As of now, the price has corrected to around $3,400.

When it comes to holder behavior, we have some strange stats. Check out this inflow volume chart. As you can see, aside from a slight slump on August 2, this metric has been on the rise.

This tells us that users are sending their ETH to the exchanges to sell them off. First, however, let’s check out the outflow metric.

Well, well, well. So what do we have here?

It seems like ETH is leaving the exchanges at a faster rate than flowing into the exchanges. The overall sentiment in this respect is still bullish.

Here is another interesting metric to check.

The chart above shows whale behavior. In this case, we are counting whales as addresses that hold at least 10,000 ETH. As you can see, immediately before the hard fork, these addresses have started accumulating significantly.

Finally, let’s check the social volume. As you can see, there is a huge spike towards the end around the hard fork. This makes sense since the hype surrounding the fork and ETH crossing $3,500 increased the overall social media mentions.

US Senate….Get Your S — — Together

Ok, USA, what the hell have you been up to?

As things stand, the “infrastructure bill” is nothing more than a shadow BTC ban. For those not in the know, the US Senate is looking to fund a $1 trillion infrastructure bill by taxing digital assets. The way they are going to do that is by requiring crypto “brokers” to report specific details about their transactions, such as — at what price points did users buy in or sell from them, etc. All this information will be relayed to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The problem here (among many) is that the bill doesn’t define what “crypto brokers” mean. So, if tomorrow you decide to create a new protocol and issue tokens, you could be a broker by definition. Likewise, if you mine blocks, then you can also be a “broker.”

Without a clear definition, this bill will slow down crypto innovation in the US by a significant amount.

As things stand, senators Ron Wyden, Pat Toomey, and Cynthia Lummis are looking to amend the language used in the bill. The amendment excludes the following users from the definition of “crypto brokers”:

• Those who validate distributed ledger transactions.
• Those who build and sell crypto wallets.
• Those who are creating new protocols and issuing new tokens.

Anyway, this is something that we all need to keep an eye out for over the weekend. Let’s hope that the Senate sees sense during their decision-making.

In Closing

Well, that’s pretty much it.

Two major things happened this week which could shape the crypto world for years to come. Be on the lookout for the Senate’s decision.

Oh, and before I go, do you like free Bitcoin? I sure do.

Why don’t you take our GetSmart Quizzes? Successfully answer the questions and win some SATs (satoshis)! After that, spread the love and send the quizzes to your friends and family. Let’s all earn some free SATs!

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