Ethereum price climbs as Binance and FTX expands operations into UAE
Prominent cryptocurrency exchanges Binance and FTX have been given the regulatory nod by UAE authorities over the past week.
- Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is currently doing an airdrop, allowing its NFT owners to accrue up to 10,000 APE tokens each (worth approximately $68,000).
- Former Diem tech leads Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching have raised $200 million for a new project called Aptos.
- The number of ETH stored across various centralized trading platforms has dropped to its lowest levels since June 2020.
Ethereum (ETH) has been flirting with the all-important $3,000 psychological barrier over the last 72 hours, suggesting that the altcoin may be gearing up for a breakout soon. That said, the digital asset’s price has been closely tracking the crypto market at large, especially Bitcoin. A sudden decoupling appears to be highly unlikely. At press time, ETH is trading at $3,009.
The surge comes at a time when Binance, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, revealed that it had secured a license — referred to as the Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) license. It allows the firm to establish offices in the region and provide local businesses with a range of crypto-related offerings.
Trading platform FTX, led by Sam Bankman-Fried, also announced earlier this week that it had received the regulatory green light from UAE authorities to start its crypto operations in Dubai.
Another reason why ETH could be on the rise is Bored Ape Yacht Club’s (BAYC) announcement this week that owners of its various NFT offerings currently have the chance to earn a solid amount of ApeCoin (APE) — an ERC-20 governance and utility token — as part of an upcoming airdrop. Eligible participants have up to 90 days to claim up to 10,000 APE worth approximately $72,000.
Lastly, Diem, Meta’s now-defunct crypto offering, has seen two of its former divisional heads — Avery Ching and Mo Shaikh — secure a whopping $200 million from Coinbase Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz for a project called Aptos that has been built using Move, Diem’s native programming language.
ETH balances on CeFi exchanges plummet to fresh lows
ETH tokens have been exiting centralized cryptocurrency exchanges at a furious pace. So much so that the total amount of Ethereum across various centralized finance (CeFi) trading platforms currently stands at its lowest levels since September 2018 — showcasing growing long-term investor confidence in the altcoin.
From a numbers standpoint, since the start of 2022, a little over 550,000 ETH (approximately $1.62 billion) has left centralized trading platforms, bringing down the total volume of ETH held by these exchanges to just 21.72 million tokens. This number stood at a whopping 31.68 million ETH just 18 months ago.
NFTs increasingly being used for donation purposes
Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine has induced a high level of economic uncertainty and geopolitical tensions globally, with high-ranking Ukrainian officials even reaching out to sympathizers for immediate financial relief. Non-fungible tokens (NFT) have helped raise funds for the East European nation.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, digital artist Trippy Labs and artist collective PleasrDAO (via the use of Ukraine DAO) have sold more than 10,000 NFTs and raised approximately $7 million to help support Ukraine’s military.
Interested in cryptocurrency? Learn more about the basics with our beginner’s guide to Bitcoin, dive deeper by learning about Ethereum and see what blockchain can do with our simple guide to DeFi.
Disclosure: The author owns a range of cryptocurrencies at the time of writing.
