🤔 Institutional investors sentiments reveal they're more eager to invest in AI

🤔 Institutional investors sentiments reveal they're more eager to invest in AI 💡 DeFi and NFT markets see a surge in January 🦝 Scammer sentenced to over 4 years in prison for stealing $2.6m in crypto

GM, frens.

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Now, for what's been going on in the space lately:

🤔 Institutional investors sentiments reveal they're more eager to invest in AI 

💡 DeFi and NFT markets see a surge in January

🦝 Scammer sentenced to over 4 years in prison for stealing $2.6m in crypto

Institutional investors sentiments reveal they're more eager to invest in AI

JP Morgan just released the much-anticipated seventh edition of their e-Trading Edit report, providing a comprehensive outlook into institutional traders' sentiments and expectations in regards to trading technology, cryptocurrency and AI. With insights from investors worldwide on these topics 2023 promises to be an intriguing year for global markets.

The results show that 53% of the traders believe AI and machine learning are the most influential factors for emerging trends in trading technology. This is followed by a healthy 33% who believe cryptocurrency will be a major player in the near future. Furthermore, nearly 9 out of 10 respondents indicated that they expected to see greater automation of trading processes over the next three years.

This technically means that most institutional investors are ready to invest in AI rather than crypto and other digital assets. This big focus on AI is reflective of the growing demand for algorithmic and automated trading, recent AI hype with the chat bots in the media, and the quick adoption of AI technologies across various industries.

What can this mean for crypto? While it appears as though AI and machine learning are the dominant forces investors are looking to capitalize on, crypto still holds a lot of potential. The markets will regulate themselves, and investors will naturally move towards the tested solutions and solutions with proven returns. But we can only expect that as AI and crypto technologies continue to evolve, investors will continue to be attracted to both in the future.

DeFi and NFT markets see a surge in January

Metrics from DappRadar and cryptoslam.io have revealed a positive uptrend in DeFi volume and NFT sales for the first month of 2023. And it appears that the the total NFT sales value for January was recorded at $997 million, translating to a 41% increase from December.

DeFi in turn witnessed a tremendous surge, with the total volume for January increasing to $74.6 billion, representing a 26% monthly gain. A good example would be the success of Optimism’s learn-to-earn program, which ran for 17 days in January.

The program saw the platform record over 150,000 daily transactions. This pushed Optimism to become one of the top five DeFi platforms with a 57.44% gain by the end of the month. Lido also surpassed MakerDAO to become the largest DeFi pool after the Ethereum PoS upgrade, with over $7.5 billion locked as of Jan 2023. DeFi TVL was also up with Ethereum, Polygon, Binance Smart Chain and Tron being the major contributors.

It looks like people who have invested in DeFi and NFTs have reaped the benefits of their investments and the ones who cried that crypto is *finally* dead for the 20th time now have to eat their own words. It is safe to say that the DeFi and NFT markets are still very much alive and kicking. We look forward to seeing what the rest of 2023 brings.

Scammer sentenced to over 4 years in prison for stealing $2.6m in crypto

A 40 y.o Dutchman, Wybo Wiersma, who studied at St Cross College in Oxford is sentenced to 54 months of prison for stealing a whopping sum of £2,156,000 (over $2.6 million) using a crypto scan scheme.

The detectives found out that 'Norbert van den Berg', which Wiersma used as an alias for his malicious activities, was also a name that he used before to submit his university coursework.

To scam his victims he created a website that generated fake MIOTA seeds. The seeds contained malicious code that gave him access to the users' funds. He then piled up millions of scammed users' funds and tried to use Bitfinex to bridge the funds into Monero (XMR). Unfortunately for him, the platform deemed his activities suspicious and froze his account.

In the end, the CEX called the authorities on him and he is now looking at a 4.5 year jail sentence. The takeaway? Create separate fake identities for your school and criminal activities, or better yet - remember that crime never pays!