Crypto week at a glance: Another country adopts BTC as legal tender; Flipkart explores Web 3

This was a major development for Bitcoin as many countries considered El Salvador as an experiment and it seems like the Central African Republic has seen enough to follow the trend setter. It might be a matter of time until the next country makes the announcement.

Flipkart jumps into Web 3
Flipkart surprisingly tweeted on the 28th of April that it is now exploring Web 3.0. The timing of the announcement is interesting as it comes during an extreme uncertainty in the Indian crypto ecosystem. The second reason why it is surprising is that last April they mentioned that they would accept Bitcoin as a method of payment on their platform on April Fool’s Day.

Bitcoin used as a collateral for loan
“Bitcoin is a vehicle for fraudsters” was the warning that Goldman Sachs leadership gave to the general public back in 2017. However, in the month of April, Goldman Sachs made its first ever Bitcoin-backed loan. This represents a significant step forward for institutional Bitcoin acceptance on Wall Street.

Is NFT losing its steam

NFT stands for non-fungible token. Non-fungible means it is unique and can’t be replaced by anything else. For instance, the US dollar is fungible, which means that USD isn’t unique and can be traded for another USD. For example, you borrow a $100 note from your friend. When you have to return his money back, you can repay it with a different $100 bill or in denominations of $10, $20, $50 etc., and not specifically return that same $100 bill that he gave you. While on the other hand, trading cards, art, and collectibles are non-fungible. For instance, a Ronaldo trading card is not the same as a Messi trading card.

The NFT interest based on sales and the number of unique buyers had skyrocketed in January of this year. However the interest has started to drop. Sales have fallen from a high of $4.64 billion (Jan 2022) to $3.13 billion (April 2022) while the unique buyers have dropped from a million (Jan 2022) to 700,000 (April 2022).

An NFT auction is a testimony to the downtrend or lack of interest in NFTs. The first-ever tweet sold was for $2.9 million. Unfortunately, the top bid still sits at only 1 per cent of the purchase price ($28.7K). The owner has mentioned that he will only sell it at a minimum of $50 million.