Weekly crypto roundup: Burry’s crypto crash prediction, rapper Raftaar accepting crypto, crypto mining migration, and more

Most of the cryptocurrencies were flat this week. However, the meme crypto, Dogecoin, plunged by over 8%.

Burry says that casual investors buying cryptocurrencies — and meme stocks like Gamestop, AMC, etc. — are signing up for the “mother of all crashes”.

“When crypto falls from trillions, or meme stocks fall from tens of billions, #MainStreet losses will approach the size of countries,” Burry said in a tweet.

Although cryptocurrencies are a ways from being accepted as legal tender, popular Indian rapper, Raftaar, has announced that he will start accepting cryptocurrencies as a performance fee — and he’s the first Indian artiste to do so.

“Blockchain has the potential to expedite a seamless experience for anyone involved with generating or interacting with music. I'm happy to welcome this new transactional paradigm with my longtime business associate Raftaar who truly is a pioneering voice of this new generation,” he said.

Some other popular artists who accept crypto payments include 50 Cent, Mariah Carey, G-Eazy, Sia, Fall Out Boy, the Backstreet Boys, and Lana Del Rey among others.

...the power-hungry cryptocurrency becomes energy efficient.

“When there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trends, Tesla will resume allowing bitcoin transactions,” Musk said, reacting to Magda Wierzycka’s comments about his tweets on Bitcoin.

Although Indian banks, including the apex Reserve Bank of India, have shown they’re averse to cryptocurrencies, they are now coming together to leverage the underlying tech – blockchain – to power Letters of Credit.

India’s largest public sector bank, the State Bank of India (SBI), along with ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra, Axis Bank, and 11 others have formed a new company called the Indian Banks’ Blockchain Infrastructure Company Private Limited (IBBIC) that will be at the helm of this transformation.

El Salvador announced last week that it will accept Bitcoin as legal tender.

However, the crypto craze was already on the uptrend in the country. The Central American country has reported that Bitcoin transactions have jumped four times in May when compared to the same period last year.

Bank of England’s fintech director, Tom Mutton, urged the country’s eco-conscious citizens not to “throw the blockchain baby out with the bitcoin bathwater.”

Mutton said any UK-developed central bank digital currency (CBDC) will be “tens of thousands” times more energy-efficient than Bitcoin.

Scammers are sending fake replacement devices to Ledger users in a bid to steal their cryptocurrencies.

Ledger makes hardware wallets which store the user’s private keys of cryptocurrencies they have bought. This creates a wall between the user’s cryptocurrency wallet and their smartphones or computers which can be compromised by hackers.

NASCAR driver Landon Cassill will be paid entirely in cryptocurrency by his new sponsor, Voyager Digital.

According to the company, the payment will be done in the form of Litecoin, Voyager token, and Bitcoin.

China’s crackdown on cryptocurrency mining continues to impact Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency’s hash rate hit a 6-month low as Chinese authorities clamped down on miners, according to data from Glassnode.

Hash rate is the computational power used to verify transactions, encrypt them and keep the Bitcoin network secure.

Goldman Sachs, the US-based investment bank, is now planning to offer options and futures trading in Ether, the coin powering the Ethereum network.

This news comes merely a month after the investment banking giant launched its Bitcoin derivatives product. According to a Bloomberg report, Ether options and futures could be launched over the next few months.