The latest cryptocurrency news and analysis from the week gone by.

The world global reserve asset to hedge against inflation, Bitcoin reaches a new, all-time high (ATH), going above $60,000! Bitcoin’s exact new all-time high is $61,712.00.

Cryptocurrency markets are gaining more adoption, exposure, and improvements. Happenings in the market show that the Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) market is overtaking Defi. Non-fungible Tokens are not of much use to participants in the market. To an average person, NFTs do not have attributes (utilities) beyond being a collectible.

They are an excellent way to tokenize or convert an asset, collectible or specific item into a digital asset.
Market participants are moving with the trend on NFTs by investing and trading. It’s imperative to note some of the setbacks and current innovations on NFTs and why there is a pump on NFTs.

Displaying a digital masterpiece has a limited scope, and plenty of non-official copies are also made available on the internet and they are often enjoyed by non-owners to the same extent as the owners. NFTs aren’t relatable and useable because there are no attributes (utilities) attached. Companies are therefore exploring the ability to add attributes and make this asset more relatable and useable to participants.

This week centers around NFTs and looking deeper, the NFT value starts to get detached from their uniqueness and gets attached to their usefulness. Combining the uniqueness or rareness aspect to the usefulness of property, assets become expensive. Some examples of NFTs in the market: Origin, Opensea, EtherCards, and Enjin.

The anticipated Ethereum 2.0 may happen sooner than you think. Ethereum’s proof-of-stake may be coming quicker than expected, including Ethereum developers.

Vitalik Buterin released a “quick merge via fork choice change” document – a lighter version of the Executable Beacon Chain for quick deployment. The Executable Beacon Chain is a proposal to attached Ethereum 1.x – which we will now refer to as Ethpow (Proof-of-work Ethereum) onto the currently running proof-of-stake Ethereum: the Beacon Chain. Ethereum 2.0 plan will serve as a notice against any further agitation from Ethereum miners as the merge would allow Ethereum to abandon mining in a rapid fashion.

Buterin writes, “The only change required on the Ethpow side is that the client must have a communication channel with a trusted Beacon node and must change its fork choice rule”.

A big question to consider is, why the rush?

The previous proposal is highly contested by mining parties but has achieved enough support among developers to be included in July’s London hard fork. PoS, of course, would see mining done away with completely. One of the major reasons for the quick transitioning is rising tensions between mining parties and Ethereum developers as EIP 1559 and PoS come into focus.

The New Economy Movement blockchain group (NEM) has launched a new, business-enterprise-facing project called Symbol. Symbol is a proof-of-stake blockchain with its own token (XYM). The NEM Group is a solution enterprise blockchain for fintech, supply chains and everything in between. Symbol is said to support “atomic swaps” to transfer data and coins between different blockchains. Atomic swaps are an old, cryptographic trick that originated from Bitcoin, which allows two blockchains to transfer data (typically, a coin) without the need for an intermediary to escrow the trade.