Weekly Highlights: Bitcoin Surges Past $112,000 While Trustee Plus Halts Registration for Ukrainian Residents

The first cryptocurrency reached a new peak near $112,000, while Russia refined its digital asset regulations, the Trustee Plus wallet stopped registering residents of Ukraine, and several other notable events occurred this week.

Bitcoin started the week with a dip to around $102,000, but on May 21, the coin attempted to break the $109,000 mark. By the evening, it surpassed this level, setting a new high of $109,565 (CoinGecko).

The price of Bitcoin continued to rise the following day, achieving a new all-time high (ATH) of $111,814. On Binance, the price reached $111,980.

The primary catalyst for this increase was a steady influx of institutional capital, reflected in the demand for exchange-traded funds and the growth of Bitcoin reserves.

However, the cryptocurrency was unable to maintain its record price. On May 23, the value dropped by 3% within an hour following US President Donald Trump’s threat to impose a 50% tariff on EU products starting June 1.

Bitcoin ended the week with a 3% increase, trading around $107,500. Among leading altcoins, only BNB managed to stay in the green, rising by 2.8%, while the rest followed a similar trajectory as Bitcoin.

In terms of performance, the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Monero (XMR) exhibited even more impressive growth, with its price rising by over 19%, trading approximately 25% below its all-time high.

The cryptocurrency fear and greed index remained in the positive range throughout the week.

The total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies stood at $3.5 trillion, with Bitcoin’s dominance at 61.1%.

As of May 20, the Trustee Plus wallet halted new user registrations for individuals residing in Ukraine.

“There are many reasons, but the main factor is the lack of legal certainty. We have officially decided to postpone our expansion plans into the Ukrainian market and cease market research there,” stated the project team.

This change does not affect existing users or Ukrainians residing permanently in the EU as they can still access wallet services without restrictions.

The timeframe for when the situation for Ukrainian residents might change has not been specified by the team.

Meanwhile, the Russian Ministry of Justice has developed a draft law that recognizes cryptocurrencies as property for purposes of seizure and confiscation, according to Deputy Minister Vadim Fedorov.

“At the same time, special requirements are proposed to ensure the safekeeping of these assets. Investigators will be able to seize material carriers with access codes or request a court to impose transaction bans based on specific characteristics of each digital currency,” the official noted.

He added that the document is already being prepared for its first reading in the State Duma.

The Russian Ministry of Finance has announced the preparation of a draft law on the tokenization of real-world assets as part of an experimental legal regime, as directed by the government head for 2024.

“This will be a government bill, currently undergoing interdepartmental coordination, allowing for the initiation of tokenization processes within the framework of an experimental legal regime,” clarified Alexey Yakovlev, the ministry’s financial policy department director.

The Cardano Foundation is set to release an audit report on the state of its treasury following accusations of misappropriating $600 million of ADA.

NFT artist Masato Alexander claimed that Cardano’s founder, Charles Hoskinson, used a genesis key to alter the registry and transfer 318 million ADA during the Allegra hard fork in 2021.

To support his claims, he referenced the transaction that triggered the protocol update and a commit on GitHub.

These coins generated 25 million ADA in staking rewards, Alexander added.

Hoskinson announced that an audit report related to the hard fork is underway, emphasizing that he feels “deeply hurt” by the community’s distrust.

Ethereum’s scalability is expected to enhance performance without compromising user-friendliness, according to co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

In a recent essay, he proposed several recommendations for achieving this.

These include implementing:

According to Buterin, the full deployment of EIP-4444 will reduce storage requirements, which are a significant barrier to most node operators. Each node would hold data from the last 36 days regarding state and Merkle tree states.

For a distributed history storage solution, he suggested that each node retains a minor percentage of information older than the designated period. To bolster reliability, the use of erasure coding is recommended.

In the medium term, Buterin believes it’s essential to transition to synchronization without state retention. This would facilitate launching an RPC-supporting node without storing Merkle tree states, effectively halving data storage requirements.

A new concept might involve implementing lightweight nodes that maintain partial states.

We delved into the next massive upgrade of Ethereum, named Fusaka, scheduled for the end of the year.

We’ve completed a series of materials on tokenomics prepared by Web3 researcher Vladimir Menaskop.

We also explained the concept of a token generation event (TGE) in educational cards. In our traditional digest, we gathered the week’s key cybersecurity events.