Crypto pistons fire in unison

It's one of those jarring winter mornings when the air seems extra crisp and the biting chill works as an elixir, making anything seem possible.

Crypto knows what we’re talking about.

* Yesterday, Ethereum surpassed $1,600 for the first time, reaching $1,690, a new all-time high.

* Just prior, Grayscale added $76 million worth of ETH to its holdings.

* The Grayscale ether binge coincides with a huge spike in Ethereum prices, which coincides with the boom in total value locked (TVL) in decentralized finance (DeFi) where market participants yesterday alone added $3 billion, an amount nearly five times greater than the entire DeFi market last year at this time.

* Total crypto market cap reached $1.13 trillion, a new record.

The crypto bull market of 2020-2021 suddenly seems impervious to impossible.

Stock traders stung by inaccessibility during extreme volatile? No problem, there’s a fast-morphing suite of protocols built to enable Universal Market Access – and, oh, by the way, the UMA token is up 150% today.

DOGE, launched seven years ago on a lark, is up 500%. This week.

And in Japan, SBI Holdings has said it will allow customers to lend XRP.

Stellar (XLM) has been rallying over the past week, wickedly so, as if it somehow got a hold of one of those sci-fi jetpacks we’ve been promised all these years, although XLM was jerky and losing altitude as of Thursday morning.

Rival network to Ripple, hungry for take-up, the team behind Stellar Lumens just released its “2021 Roadmap” built on three overarching strategic themes: supporting usability, raising public awareness and fostering real-world use cases with staying power.

XLM's price in the high thirty cent range appeared to be more than sustainable only a few days ago. But the 11th largest-by-market-cap digital asset was trading around $0.32 as of this morning at 7 a.m. (EST).

Big tech companies assume most people prefer free services above privacy. But things are changing in the world.

Web users now have a wealth of options in terms of storing their data and in deciding who can access it.

The shimmering rays of the dawn of a new decentralized internet are visible on the horizon.

Jehan Chu is a Hong Kong-based investor in Namebase. It’s a domain registration platform helping to galvanize the creation of “Web3,” a set of protocols, led by blockchain, seeking to rewire the internet from the back-end out.

Among Namebase’s domain registration clients: The Handshake Network. Handshake is a peer-to-peer root naming system that can help wrest domain control from centralized parties.

Chu recently purchased “.nft” for $84,000, a record amount for a top-level Handshake domain name.

Who gets those sub-domains will be crucial to the future growth of the non-fungible token (NFT) industry.

That authority now sits squarely – indeed, centrally – on Chu’s shoulders (Blocknomi).