The Past Week in Crypto News (October 13th to 20th): BTC All Time High and More

Welcome to the latest edition of “The Past Week in Crypto News," a weekly recap of companies, institutions, organizations and individuals who are beginning to adopt crypto as a payment/work platform. With the crypto industry becoming more and more dynamic, this weekly report is meant to help you stay in the loop. The last few days saw crypto becoming more mainstream, implemented by some of the world’s most prominent organizations across different industries.

Bitcoin has reached a new all-time high, shooting past $66,000. The yearly gains now stand at 130% for the world’s biggest cryptocurrency. This comes days after the first US-based Bitcoin ETF, ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF, was approved and launched. 

The ETF represents a new major step for cryptocurrencies due to the fact that the United States Securities And Exchange Commission (SEC) approval signifies stability for a larger number of investors. This is being seen as the first sign of a bullish Q4.

Facebook has officially launched its ‘Novi” wallet. The coin used will be USDP, a stable coin based on Ethereum-20 tokens. Users will be able to buy USDP through Coinbase and send it through the Novi wallet. This can all be done without fees for both the person who sends the money and the one who receives it. The first pilot market for Novi is Guatemala and most of the US. This product marks another move from Facebook into crypto and decentralized finance. 

One of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase, has reached deals to be the sponsor of the National Basketball Association. The NBA is the world’s premier basketball league, watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world. The deal was announced on social media. This league-wide encompassing deal is a new level of exposure for any crypto company and sets a new standard in terms of what is possible for cryptocurrency to achieve in terms of mainstream adoption and exposure. 

After announcing plans to to hire more than 10,000 people to realize the brand's metaverse ambitions, Facebook is reportedly planning to change its company name. As reported by The Verge, the company is planning to announce this at its annual conference on October 28th. The reason for this name change is the planned pivot towards becoming a metaverse company. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly stated his plans for Facebook to evolve into a company more focused on the metaverse. There are still very few details available around the name change and future plans, but we're sure to learn more next week.

Months after UC Berkeley released the forms of Nobel-winning inventions as NFTs, it seems that more research labs are planning to do so. If you are not familiar with the UC Berkeley release, back in May 2021 UC Berkeley released a collection of NFTs.

Specifically, these were internal forms and correspondence that documented the initial research findings that led to two of the most important biomedical breakthroughs of the 21st century: CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, for which UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel in Chemistry; and cancer immunotherapy, for which James Allison shared the 2018 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine. Now there is buzz on social media that more labs are planning to replicate this plan. This could potentially be very disruptive and create new revenue streams for laboratories that work on new inventions.