A Sluggish Start

Chart of the Day

13 years ago today, the Bitcoin Genesis Block was mined by the enigmatic Satoshi Nakamoto. Now, 13 years later, and having just wrapped up an extremely explosive year of gains and losses with regard to price action, BTC is still standing strong. That said, however, BTC does not seem to be kicking off 2022 on a high note. In the early hours of Tuesday, BTC took a plunge after failing to climb above the $48k resistance level, even briefly forming a local low at $45.7k in the process. It has since rebounded to the $46k level, and is currently consolidating its losses there. In the same vein, ETH also saw a sluggish start to the new year, as it is currently down by 4.5% as compared to 7 days ago. Even a few top-performing altcoins of 2021 like SOL and MATIC are in the red too. It's not all bad news for the crypto market in the new year though, as several decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens did manage to post some fresh gains amid the general market slump on the back of strong fundamentals, new buyback programs, as well as new trading-solution models. Convex Finance, for one, crossed the $20 billion mark in total value locked (TVL) last Sunday after only recently becoming the second-largest DeFi protocol by TVL. Not only that, it has also managed to accumulate a staggering 85% of Curve's TVL, thereby emerging as the ultimate winner in the heated "Curve Wars" by dominating voting power on Curve.

Talk of the Town

Electronic giant Samsung announced on Monday that the firm will introduce the world's first television screen-based NFT explorer and marketplace aggregator. This new function, which will allow for users to browse, purchase and display NFTs on their television screens, will be integrated into 3 of Samsung's latest smart TV models that are set to launch this year. With this move, Samsung joins a growing list of large institutional players in entering the crypto-verse.