Last Week in Review: Bitcoin breaches $23,000, and fine South African wines for sale as NFTs

by Team Luno
· 2 minute read
Bitcoin

The highlights from last week’s headline grabbers. All the important news, numbers and events from the crypto industry in easy-to-read, digestible news bites. 

News from the block

🟠  The Bitcoin price battle for $23,000  

  • Bitcoin breached $23,000 for the first time this year and has been dipping above and below this level ever since. 
  • The Bitcoin price rose to levels last seen in August 2022, before events in the crypto industry fueled investor uncertainty, leading to a drawdown that lasted months. 
  • Analysts say that investors are opening up to riskier assets such as stocks and cryptocurrencies as indicators show inflation coming down. 

🔌 Cardano recovers following outage affecting half its nodes

  • On 22 January, an unknown glitch in the Cardano network caused 50% of nodes in the network to disconnect and restart.  
  • The network recovered without intervention, as it was designed to, according to Cardano engineers. 
  • Apart from minor delays, the impact was minimal. 

🚘 Porsche NFT collection revs up the crypto community 

  • Porsche recently drew the ire of the crypto community following the launch of its pricey new NFT collection, with each NFT costing 0.911, about $1,500, to mint. 
  • The collection features 7,500 customisable vehicles of the Porsche 911, hence the floor price of 0.911 Eth. Collectors can create their own unique version of the 911 and mint it at the above price. 
  • NFTs in the collection seems to have stalled after only 1,345 had been minted at the time, according to CryptoSlate. 

🍷 Fine wines as NFTs   

  • Turns out NFTs are more than nice-looking apes and actually have real-world utility. Vaulted Wine, a company in South Africa has made it possible for collectors to buy and own wines without having to actually transport and store their collectibles.  
  • Tokenised versions of the wines can be bought and traded as NFTs on marketplaces like OpenSea. Each NFT represents a specific case, wine, or a rare bottle. Collectors can purchase and trade the NFTs without removing wine from the vault. Wines can only be redeemed by the NFT owner. 
  • The technology powering the new enterprise was built by Fanfire, a web3 solutions company that is part of the South African Alphawave Group. 

TL;Did read

What is Solana? 

Hailed as one of the fastest cryptocurrency networks, Solana is one of the next-gen crypto platforms challenging Ethereum’s dominance in the space. READ HERE why. 

Crunching the numbers

50% – The Cardano network lost half of its nodes during a brief outage last week, before self-healing and continuing as normal. 

$1,500 – The floor price for minting a Porsche NFT. 

39% – At the time of writing, the price of Bitcoin was up by almost 40% in the last month.

10 – Ethereum was deflationary for 10 consecutive days in January last week. 

The crypto time capsule

This is happening, like, now. 

Crypto trivia

Know your crypto exchanges from your investment firms? Connect the dots as we plot the crypto landscape and the companies that keep it ticking. READ HERE. 

Worth a watch

Bitcoin miners running on volcanic energy. Epic. 

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