Santa Rally Comes to Crypto Town

Put Your Hands Together For The New Showstopper: The Metaverse

Next March, the Polygon-based luxury marketplace UNXD and the blockchain-based metaverse Decentraland plan to host a fashion week with catwalk shows, pop-up shops, and afterparties. Both companies are calling on fashionistas, designers, and brands to make their virtual collections available in the metaverse.

The show treads a path already paved by South Korea’s hugely popular metaverse social media app, Zepeto, where users change their haircut or dress whenever they want. The app is a platform for an alternate reality, offering users a choice of avatars.

UNXD has not been shy about integrating fashion and cryptocurrencies before. The marketplace launched a Dolce & Gabbana collection, Collezione Genesi, which generated $5.65 million in net sales.

A wide range of companies, brands, and projects are participating in the metaverse in one way or another now, with interest elevated in-part by Facebook’s recent Meta rebrand. That’s one reason why companies are running to carve out their own portion of the metaverse, which often refers to virtual worlds and digital experiences. Providing a collaborative virtual experience, it has opened up a range of opportunities for creators, gamers, and artists. There’s no surprise why it’s infatuated with fashion. Some estimates say that the metaverse could rake in more than $1 trillion annually.

Get Loans Against Your CryptoPunk on Kraken

Everybody wants a piece of the non-fungible token. Now Kraken, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, has announced plans to launch a marketplace that allows users to mint, collect, and trade NFTs. 

Rivals Coinbase, Binance, and FTX.US have already created their own marketplaces to compete with on-chain competitors such as OpenSea and SuperRare. However, Kraken hopes to have a big edge over all the contemporary NFT markets.

Jesse Powell, the exchange’s CEO, said in an interview with Bloomberg that digital art collectors might also be able to take out collateralized loans against their collections.

“If you deposit a CryptoPunk on Kraken, we want to be able to reflect the value of that in your account,” Powell said. 

That means CryptoPunks, which are often pointed to as the original NFT collection, could be used as collateral to borrow other cryptocurrencies.

Kraken’s entry into the NFT world could boost its business to a new level, although its most redeeming features might show up late to the party. Last week, Nexo, a crypto lending platform, also announced the launch of an NFT collateralization product. 

That said, Kraken’s plan tells us two things: 1) that NFTs are becoming more mainstream and that 2) the battle of the blockchain networks is heating up.

Money Continues to Pour Into Meta and Meme 

As part of the Santa rally in the crypto market, a lot of token prices surged by double digits. A few tokens have been selected to explain why you should watch them:

1. Zilliqa:  Zilliqa is the latest in a line of cryptocurrencies to look into the metaverse. Earlier this week, the layer-1 DApp (decentralized app) protocol announced the launch of its official metaverse platform, Metapolis. 

The developers call the project an “extended reality (XR)” experience, which is a combination of both virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies. 

Though Metapolis won’t launch until next year, its native token, $ZIL.X, is already seeing growth. Since last week, ZIL has risen over 40%. Today, it was trading at $0.08306, up 10%.

2. Santa Floki: Elon Musk’s tweets and the rise of certain memecoins are no longer news to crypto enthusiasts. In keeping with tradition, Santa Floki ($HOHOHO.X), a meme-based coin, went nuts over Musk’s tweet.

Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk tweeted the picture of his Shiba Inu named Flokiwith the caption “Floki Santa.” This led to the success of a cryptocurrency by the same name.

As a result of his tweet on Dec. 25, $HOHOHO.X has seen incredible growth and is now up by over 6000%. The token has gained 200% in the past 24 hours. Although it appears ridiculous, this is how memecoins work in practice.

3. Monero: Due to the bullish wave sweeping the crypto market, Monero has also risen in price. One of the largest privacy-focused cryptocurrencies in the world, rose by 10% today and by 26% over the last week.

The token ($XMR.X) is known for its privacy features that make it impossible to track transactions. Monero is such a type of token that claims to fulfill the basic demand of the crypto world through the provision of some of the most secure and private crypto transactions.

However, despite its unique feature, the token saw losses earlier this year. That’s why the price is still low, trading at $233, compared to the past three months, according to crypto.com. 

Binance Gets The Green Light From Bahrain

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, has received in-principle approval from Bahrain’s central bank to be a crypto-asset service provider in the kingdom. The in-principle approval is a first for a Binance entity in the Middle East and North Africa region, per the announcement.

The smallest economy in the Middle East, Bahrain, was an early adopter of digital assets. A Bloomberg report cited Abdulla Haji, director for licensing at the country’s central bank, as saying that the kingdom would be the ideal place for the exchange to set up its headquarters in the region.

The crypto exchange may find this to be a huge relief since it has been under scrutiny by various agencies throughout the world. The Cayman Islands, Japan, Thailand and various other countries have announced that Binance Group and Binance Holdings Ltd. are not authorized to operate in their regions. 

The biggest challenge for authorities is Binance’s lack of a defined headquarters. In other words, they can’t determine a defined work structure or where/to whom to file an official complaint.  

CEO Changpeng Zhao once said in an interview that it’s having a “headquarters” is “old school.” He said that Binance, and other companies, don’t need a physical office to operate.

The fact that Bahrain has given Binance the green light should give confidence to crypto investors as well, who have been suffering from a variety of technical difficulties since the beginning of the year. This development also shows Binance’s goal of becoming a fully regulated centralized cryptocurrency exchange.