GeckoPulse: A Happy New Year to Crypto

What a Start to the New Year

It’s only been 5 days but plenty has happened within the crypto space.

Following the United States’ recent operation in Venezuela, the price of Bitcoin has steadily increased to $93K today.

ETH has also followed suit, climbing past the $3,200 mark earlier today and is currently trading around $3,150.

Traditional equity markets are also on the rise, along with commodities such as gold and silver.

Despite the recent pullback, the price of PAXG is currently hovering around $4.4K, with KAG remaining slightly under its recent all-time high at $75.50.

Interestingly, the new year has breathed new life into the memecoin sector, with popular names such as PONKE and BROCCOLI appreciating by 104% and 12% respectively.

The newly released LIT token has also recently broken out of its consolidation phase, surging by 10.7% as of the time of writing.

Flow State Halted

After the Flow blockchain suffered a $4M exploit on 27 December, the team had decided to pause transactions on the network until 29 December.

Now, the temporary freeze has caused several NFT loans on Flow to be equally put on hold, disrupting both repayment and default timelines.

According to the NFT lending platform Flowty, 11 loans had matured during the 2-day pause, and users were unable to transfer tokens or execute transactions.

As such, Flowty has opted to pause all outstanding loans on December 30.

As of Jan 3, the Flow network is now fully operational, and the Flowty team has since announced an upcoming contract upgrade that will re-enable payments for matured loans.

Since the exploit, the price of FLOW has plunged by 45.1% from $0.173 to $0.095.

In Other News

One Attempt Remaining. Netflix is reportedly producing a crypto-themed Romantic-comedy film titled “One Attempt Remaining”, centered around a divorced couple trying to recover a forgotten crypto password worth millions.

Are Memes Back? Memecoins appear to be the greatest gainers during the holiday season, with memecoins like FLOKI, WIF, and FARTCOIN leading the rally.

The End of JUP Buybacks? Jupiter lead Siong posted on X, floating the idea of stopping JUP buybacks and instead rewarding holders in a different way. He mentions that current tactics, spending more than $70M on buybacks, “didn’t move” the price upwards.