The most important crypto news of the last week

Questionable Omicron token, Twitter off for Jack Dorsey, ETP offensive and IOTA’s Metaverse plans: these were the most important news of the week.

Another exciting week in the crypto space is drawing to a close. The most important events around BTC and Co. in a compact overview.

Questionable Omicron token and its price growth

November 26th announced the World Health Organization (WHO) that the new variant of the coronavirus Omicron (B.1.1.529) should be classified as worrying. But in addition to the global concerns that the mutation triggered, the naming of the new variant caused a hype about the cryptocurrency of the same name. A trend was triggered that enabled the price of the token to record a three-digit growth rate on a weekly basis.

Jack Dorsey: Twitter off and Square becomes Block

A report of the American media company CNBC announced on November 29th that Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of social media giant Twitter, is stepping down from his position as Twitter boss. In the crypto space, there was wild speculation as to where the tech entrepreneur might end up. The rise in the price of Stacks (STX) then even led some Twitter users to assume that Dorsey would join the project – its steep rise and Dorsey’s Twitter shutdown could not be a coincidence after all.

Now one thing is certain: Jack Dorsey is concentrating on his second mainstay, Square, in order to develop the financial services provider into a blockchain company. Because square is being renamed, the two-dimensional square is preprogrammed into a three-dimensional “block” – a signal effect in the direction of the blockchain community. But there is more to the renaming than pure symbolism.

ETP offensive: Invesco and WisdomTree go live

The cryptocurrencies asset class is getting new investment opportunities: Invesco is launching one, WisdomTree three ETPs.

Invesco and Wisdom Tree now focused on providing Exchange Traded Products (ETP). Both companies cite the reasons for their product development that the crypto market has grown rapidly since 2009 and is currently trading at a market capitalization of around 2.6 trillion US dollars – so far, so true. That’s why Invesco and WisdomTree want to offer their investors an “easy” way to invest in this asset class without having to deal with technology and custody – for different fees, of course.

Another thing the two providers have in common is that they both provide “physically secured” ETPs. This means that the currencies are (almost) 1: 1 hedged. So that, for example, every BTC that is bought under this ETP must also be bought and stored by the institution.

IOTA joins Metaverse hype

Since Meta-CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced the prestigious “Metaverse” project in the media, there has been a real hype about the virtual parallel world. Since then, more and more players from a wide variety of economic sectors have followed suit and have pushed their own steps into the digital space. This also includes IOTA, which is launching a new, decentralized Layer 1 network for smart contracts with its own token (ASMB) with its latest “Assembly” project. 70 percent of the token supply should go to developers, creators and early contributors. What happens to the remaining 30 percent is not yet known. Distribution will begin “shortly”.

The new ecosystem will be “completely controlled and designed by the community,” it says in one Press release. The network comes with a sharding function as well as support for virtual machines and also offers the option of completely waiving fees. According to IOTA, developers can set the “transaction fees” themselves in the smart contracts and adapt them to their needs.