Welcome to this week‘s crypto news summary. All the essential news and events in the crypto world from last week (Feb. 13 to Feb. 17) are summarised below, so you‘ll be entirely up to date again before you head into the weekend.

Do you want to know what news there was in the crypto world this week? Then read along quickly!

New bitcoin record: more addresses with BTC balance than ever

With the launch of Ordinals, which allows people to run NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain, issuing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is becoming increasingly popular on the BTC network. It was recently announced that Bitcoin network activity had risen to its highest point in two years due to the advent of the Ordinals. More than 81,468 NFTs have now been created on Bitcoin's network.

The Ordinals project allows images and other data types to be carried directly to individual satoshis, Bitcoin's smallest unit. This is better known as an inscription and gets stored in the signature of a Bitcoin transaction.

Developers are currently testing what can be done on the Bitcoin blockchain and where the limits are. Developers do this by inscribing JPEGs, audio files, videos and even video games.

Southeast Asia's largest bank starts offering crypto in Hong Kong

The adoption of cryptocurrency worldwide is taking another excellent step, this time in Asia. DBS bank, based in Singapore and one of the most crypto-friendly banks in the world, plans to start offering cryptocurrency trading services in Hong Kong.

DBS bank plans to become one of the very first providers of cryptocurrency trading services in Hong Kong. However, the bank does express its continued alertness to risks associated with digital currencies. Hong Kong is becoming an increasingly attractive place for companies looking to get into cryptocurrency.

It has long been known that DBS is pro-crypto; the bank bought a piece of land in the Metaverse last September. This also shows that DBS is familiar with the opportunities presented by cryptocurrency.

Elon Musk causes another price explosion for Dogecoin

CEO of SpaceX, Twitter and Tesla, Elon Musk, is well-known in cryptocurrency as a big fan of Dogecoin (DOGE). This love for DOGE once again showed Elon Musk, but this time during the Superbowl, which took place on Feb. 13. During the Superbowl, he wore a memecoin t-shirt, resulting in a rise of some 5.7% the same day.

While the cryptocurrency market has struggled again for a while, Dogecoin began a slight rebound due to this action by Elon Musk. For the time ahead, it remains to be seen what the market has in store for this popular memecoin.

Polygon launches in March: "the future of Ethereum scalability"

If you are already more familiar with cryptocurrency, you have probably seen the cryptocurrency Polygon (MATIC) passing by. The Polygon project was launched in 2017 under Matic Network as a scalability solution for Ethereum (ETH). Since its launch, the project has become a big industry name. Meanwhile, MATIC is facing a major upgrade scheduled for March.

The launch of zkEVM, a new layer-2 scalability solution from Polygon, is scheduled for March 27, 2023. The first two letters, "zk", stand for zero-knowledge, which is a way to prove certain computations without sharing all the data. This scalability solution makes it possible to save scarce space on the blockchain and operate more efficiently.

"EVM" stands for Ethereum Virtual Machine, meaning the network supports the same code as Ethereum. Supporting the Ethereum network allows developers to launch applications from Ethereum on Polygon's zkEVM network without making significant changes.