Last Week in Review: ETFs vs. MicroStrategy, and Ethereum’s next chapter

The highlights from last week’s headline grabbers. All the important news, numbers and events from the world of crypto in three bullet points or less.
News from the block
Solana experienced a 5-hour network outage
- Solana, deemed to be one of the fastest blockchains among its peers, experienced a 5-hour outage last week that required the network to be restarted.
- “Engineers from across the ecosystem are readying a new validator software release, which includes a patch to address an issue which caused the cluster to halt. Validator operators should prepare for an upgrade and restart of the network,” read a status update from Solana on X.
- The price of SOL dipped 3% following news of the outage but quickly recouped 2% of its losses . The Solana network has a chequered history with outages, but, up until now, has been running without incident for more than a year.
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Ethereum co-founder has some ideas to scale the network
- Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, has proposed five new ideas that could help the network scale in future.
- Increasing the gas limit is among the key suggestions, which would allow network users to pay more fees to get their transactions in front of the queue. Imagine you’re driving a car on a road trip. The gas limit is like the size of your gas tank. It determines how much fuel you can carry for your journey. With Ethereum, when you want to execute transactions or smart contracts you need to pay for it using a unit called “gas.” The gas limit is the maximum amount of gas that you’re allowed to use for a particular transaction or operation.
- This would make room for more data to be processed in each block in the future, helping Ethereum scale efficiently.
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Bitcoin ETFs now hold more than Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy
- “The bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) through Wednesday held a combined 192,255 bitcoin, more than 2,000 above that of MicroStrategy, the largest publicly traded holder of the cryptocurrency,” CoinDesk reported last week.
- The funds have already attracted billions of dollars from investors. “On Wednesday alone, there were over $1 billion in inflows into the ETFs, according to data from Bloomberg Intelligence,” the crypto publication noted.
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Largest public crypto miner in US looks to Africa
- “We are looking at Africa,” said Charlie Schumacher, vice president of corporate communications at Marathon Digital. “We believe that bitcoin mining is, among other things, a technology solution for the energy sector, and Africa may be a great place to prove out this thesis.”
- Marathon Digital operates out of Texas in the US, and last year expanded to the United Arab Emirates.
TL;DID read
THE DAILY BRIEFING, a bite-size, daily market recap with relevant data and news to help inform your investment decisions.
Crunching the numbers
R1.04 million – The all-time high of Bitcoin against the South African rand on the Luno exchange.
R999,000 – The 24-hour high, at the time of writing.
*This information should not be construed as a solicitation to trade. All opinions, news, research, analysis, prices or other information is provided as general market commentary for information purposes only and is not investment advice or recommendation. Luno always advises you to obtain your own independent financial advice before investing or trading in cryptocurrency.