Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for decoding
This week has been a rollercoaster for Bitcoin and the broader crypto industry, with most attention focused on the quadrennial Bitcoin halving finally taking place in the early morning hours of Saturday, April 20th. was.
After the weekend's decline, Monday brought an encouraging recovery. As expected, Hong Kong has joined the digital asset ETF party and approved spot ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Tuesday brought news that venture capital and investment firm Andreessen Horowitz has launched a second gaming fund with an eye on Web3 and AI-forward gaming. This comes with a new accelerator program named Speedrun, which injects each cohort member with his $750,000. “It's never too early for us to get involved,” declared a16z general partner Andrew Chen.
The gaming fund is part of a larger $7.2 billion fundraising effort across several sectors.
On the more whimsical side, news broke that another famous meme, a new member of the “guy description” category, will be up for auction. The starting bid is 15 ETH (approximately $47,100), and the auction begins tomorrow.
Hump Day saw the announcement of World Chain by the Worldcoin Foundation. It is an Ethereum layer 2 based on optimism that uses ETH as the native token and Worldcoin (WLD) for gas fees. “Verified humans, including over 5 million verified World ID holders, will receive priority block space over bots and gas allowances for casual transactions,” the foundation said.
On the same day, the tangled saga comes to an end when discredited Bitcoin creator Craig Wright drops his lawsuit against more than a dozen Bitcoin developers following a decisive defeat in the UK High Court. It looked like a crab.
The news came a week after Wright quit another legal battle In Norway.
In crypto hardware news, a newcomer announced a new smartphone. This is a Google Pixel 7a running ethOS, and yes, it comes with an NFT.
The second half of the week was dominated by half-hearted expectations, including whether or not we'd actually get to Meme Day. (At least it was in UTC.)
A significant constituency within Crypto Twitter was more invested in the launch of Runes, which was scheduled to take place at the same time. Ahead of the remaining half-hour, Bitcoin mining fees have skyrocketed, something some believe is due to runes. Their takeaway? The reduction in Bitcoin mining rewards could be offset by network activity generated by new alternative token protocols.
Bitcoin halving took place on Saturday morning night, and crypto Twitter celebrated it.
At least temporarily.
When the all-important Bitcoin block was minted, miners received a surprise bonus.
As for runes, the race to mint the first batch was on. Within minutes, the winner was revealed.
Casey Rodamor, Bitcoin developer and creator of the Rune Protocol, has planned for the future and set up Rune to come true during the next halving four years from now.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
