Last week the crypto market continued totrade sideways.
This seems to be because there was anequal amount of bullish and bearish newskeeping crypto holders on edge.
at themacro level health authorities aroundthe world began approving productsrelated to the ongoing pandemic likelyleading to fears that restrictions willreturn in the coming months and furthercrush the global economy.
At the same time however companies thathave historically been strict onpandemic restrictions such as GoldmanSachs announced they would begin easingthese suggesting that they could in factbe on their way out across the board.
Another factor that moved the marketswas fears around inflation which hit anall-time high of 9.1 percent in theEurozone.
This likely led to fears that centralbanks will hike interest rates even moreaggressively.
Shortly afterwards however the jobsreport for the United States came inwell below expectations suggesting thatthe economy is starting to weaken.
Believe it or not but this weakening wasbullish for markets because it meanscentral banks may not raise interestrates as aggressively.
At the crypto level meanwhile Iranianauthorities announced that businessesthere can use crypto for internationaltrade.
This is significant because Iran is aheavily sanctioned country and any useof crypto to evade these sanctions couldtherefore result in even more regulatoryscrutiny of the crypto industry.
To make things worse the Russiangovernment reportedly got word of Iran’splans to use crypto for sanctionsevasion and is apparently consideringdoing the same.
Note that Iran had stated some weeks agothat it intends to actively use cryptoto evade sanctions come September whichis of course now upon us.
This relates to another nugget of cryptonews that caught the market off guardand that’s that Micro Strategy chairmanand bitcoin bull Michael Saylor is beingsued by the attorney general ofWashington DC for tax fraud ie failingto pay taxes to the State under falsepretenses.
Although this is unlikely to have anydirect effect on BTCit could invite further regulatoryscrutiny from the US government in therealm of tax evasion usingcryptocurrency something Michael hadspoken about before on podcasts.
They need to make use of all those newIRS agents after all.
In terms of bullish news the biggestcrypto headline was the news that Metahad expanded NFT support on Facebook andInstagram making it possible for NFTholders on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon andFlow to connect their wallets to thesocial media platforms and showcasetheir expensive jpegs.
It’s important to note that this is justone of many steps in Meta’s ongoing NFTintegration which began way back in May.
Now in addition to potentially seeingbillions of users on board it to thefour blockchains in question Meta’songoing NFT integration issimultaneously setting the stage foreven more crypto integrations andpartnerships such as Flow’s recentpartnership with Ticketmaster for NFTtickets.
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