Last Week in Review: “Smart money” is saving its bitcoin, and Sam Altman has a new crypto idea

The highlights from last week’s headline grabbers. All the important news, numbers and events from the world of crypto in one place.
News from the block
🫰 A lesson in long-term investing, brought to you by Bitcoin and pizza
- This story falls slightly out of this week’s purview but we had to include a nod to Bitcoin Pizza Day.
- On 22 May, 13 years ago, Floridian developer and early bitcoin investor Laszlo Hanyecz famously bought two Papa John’s pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin, worth about $40 at the time.
- Laszlo’s BTC would be worth roughly $280 million today had he kept his bag and bought pizza with good ol’ paper money.
🧠 “Smart money” is saving its bitcoin
- There’s been a marked increase of long-term investors holding their BTC for more than five months without spending it, according to data by Glassnode, an on-chain analytics company.
- The “long-term holder supply” has been growing steadily over the last 12 months.
- “A good rule of thumb is to look at what smart money is doing before making your own investment decisions,” explains Glassnode. The company uses its ‘Total Bitcoin Supply Held by Long-Term Holders’ chart to gauge the moves of high-conviction investors.
- “Long-term, high-conviction investors are holding tightly to their coins despite market volatility,” Glassnode says.
💎 Eth staked on Ethereum exceeds 20 million
- The amount of Eth staked on Ethereum surpassed 20 million last week, up from around 18 million one month ago.
- The amount has continued to climb since the Shanghai upgrade was completed in March.
- The upgrade allowed investors to withdraw their staked Ether (ETH) from the network.
🕸️ OpenAI’s CEO has a new crypto idea
- Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is launching a company that uses eyeball-scanning tech to create a global identification system. The protocol will have its own cryptocurrency called Worldcoin.
- The coins will serve as an incentive for users to scan their irises to a database and be rewarded with crypto for doing so.
- “You can use it to prove your personhood online with World ID, claim your Worldcoin tokens, and send digital money globally for free,” the company tweeted.
- The idea might sound strange, but big-time investors like Andreessen Horowitz are among those who participated in a $100 million funding round, believing that there’s big business in being able to prove your human ID on the web in the near future.
TL;DID read
Scroll through an illustrated timeline of Bitcoin’s biggest events and how these events impacted the price, HERE.
Crunching the numbers
📈 20 million – The current amount of Eth staked on Ethereum, up from about 18 million one month ago.
⚖️ 17.6% – The staked share of Eth supply. Analysts expect this percentage to rise in line with other proof of stake networks.
🌅 68% – Cardano’s (ADA) staking ratio.
💸 6.5% – Probable 1-year return on NFT royalties from a Rihanna song. In February, investors could buy rights to streaming royalties to some of Rihanna’s music in the form of fractionalised NFTs.
💰 $280 million – How much 10,000 BTC would be worth today.
The crypto time capsule
Crypto trivia
What is the Bitcoin halving and why does it happen?
It’s quite simple, really. READ HERE how and why the amount of new bitcoin issued is cut in half every four years.