Another week is over, and it was one packed with interesting news for the crypto industry. Like almost every other market at the moment, the crypto market is in the throes of the current global economic condition.

Europe is really experiencing an energy crisis right now, which is making life more and more expensive. This is affecting investments, as people have less money to invest and are more likely to withdraw money from their investments.

Yet the numbers this week were not all red. Bitcoin (BTC) fell 5% over the past seven days, but Ethereum (ETH) rose 3.5%.

The macroeconomic situation aside, good news keeps pouring in for the crypto industry. The development and adoption of cryptocurrencies are increasing rapidly, as this week has shown. Below are the most important news items from the past week summarized for you!

Bank of Russia agrees to a proposal to legalize cross-border crypto payments

The Bank of Russia, the country's central bank, has reportedly admitted that cross-border crypto payments are inevitable in the current geopolitical circumstances.

The Russian central bank has reconsidered its approach to regulating crypto and agreed with the Ministry of Finance to legalize crypto for cross-border payments, local news agency TASS reported on Monday.

Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Moiseev reportedly said that the Bank of Russia and the Finance Ministry expects to legalize cross-border payments in crypto soon.

The idea of crypto payments for national trade in Russia surfaced in late 2021. At the time, Russian President Vladimir Putin said it was "still premature" to use crypto for trading in energy resources such as oil and gas.

The situation apparently changed with Western economic sanctions following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In May, the Minister of Industry and Trade stated that Russia would legalize crypto payments "sooner or later." Bank of Russia Governor Elvira Nabiullina also later suggested that crypto could be used for cross-border payments, but only if crypto does not enter Russia's domestic financial system.

According to Moiseev, the central bank has reconsidered its approach to regulating the industry, "considering that the situation has changed." He added that the planned infrastructure is "too rigid" for the use of cryptocurrencies in cross-border settlements. "Which we definitely need to legalize somehow," he concluded.

LG chooses Hedera blockchain for television NFTS

Another consumer electronics company is bringing NFTs to TV screens.

Korea's LG is releasing a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, called LG Art Lab, that connects to the Hedera Network, which LG supports. Television owners with sets updated with LG's latest software will be able to buy, sell and display their Hedera NFTs from their screens.

LG's moves into the NFT space follow Samsung's release of an NFT marketplace on three of its TVs, all supported by Nifty Gateway. LG Art Lab will only be featured on LG TVs. LG's mobile crypto-wallet Wallypto allows users to purchase assets by scanning a QR code to connect their wallet.

Chris Jo, senior vice president and head of Platform Business at LG, said the platform is intended to make NFTs accessible to users who want to get into the space.

The choice of Hedera is not an obvious one for NFT integration. According to data from the past 30 days, the trading volume of Hedera NFT marketplace Hash Axis pales to €36,000 compared to the €330 million trading volume of Ethereum on OpenSea. But it makes more sense for LG: it has been on Hedera's board of directors since 2020.

Ethereum successfully completes Bellatrix merge

Ethereum's long-awaited Bellatrix upgrade was completed Tuesday and the system will move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. The network-wide Bellatrix upgrade will set the stage for the rest of the upgrades. The Merge is expected to go live between September 10 and 20. Ethereum will switch to a new method of validating transactions, ushering in a new era in the crypto sphere.

The Ethereum Merge is broken down into a two-step process. The first is the Bellatrix upgrade.

The next upgrade "Paris" is put into effect and the technical effects of the switch from PoS to PoW are opened. After Paris is put into effect, the Merge is only a few days away from completion. However, the Ethereum Foundation has not given an exact date for the Merge. Their latest blog suggests that the transition could be completed sometime between September 15 and 20.

Moreover, the Merge is the biggest event for the crypto industry this year and is the most anticipated upgrade... In the new proof-of-stake, Ethereum will consume much less energy, 99.95 percent less, according to the foundation's estimates.

Reports also state that gas costs will drop after the Ethereum Merge and that investors will be able to initiate transactions at a nominal fee. However, we will have to wait and watch after the upgrade goes fully live to confirm gas costs on the network.

Cardano's Vasil Upgrade confirmed for September 22nd

Cardano's Vasil hard fork upgrade is now scheduled to take place on its main network (mainnet) on September 22, Input-Output (IOG), the blockchain's development lab, announced in a tweet thread on Friday.

Vasil is a major upgrade designed to increase Cardano's scalability and reduce transaction costs and was originally scheduled for a June release on a test network. A hard fork is a backward change to the software used to validate and produce new blocks.

However, the rollout underwent several delays. But IOG said Friday in its tweets that the upgrade had met its criteria of "the successful completion and extensive testing of all core components, plus confirmed community readiness."

This was all the major crypto news of the past week. Earlier this week, we also wrote about Bitcoin mining and the energy industry. Read more in the article "How Bitcoin mining can transform the energy industry".