Welcome to yet another weekly crypto news digest. All of the most important news from the past week (14 October 2022 to 21 October) is summarised below, so you can go into the weekend completely up-to-date again!

Over the past seven days, the market did not move much. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most other cryptocurrencies rose or fell by a maximum of 1%. Most eyes were on the launch of a new cryptocurrency called Aptos. You can read about that and more below in the weekly crypto news summary.

Aptos, built by former Meta employees, launches blockchain

Layer-1 blockchain Aptos finally went live with its mainnet on 17 October after months of testing.

Aptos confirmed the news via a Medium blog post and said the launch is "step one in a long journey to create universal and fair access to decentralized applications for billions of people through a secure, scalable, and upgradeable blockchain."

Aptos was built over four years by a group of former employees of Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram. According to statements made by this group, Aptos should be the fastest and most scalable layer-1 blockchain in the world. Tests reportedly showed that Aptos can process around 130,000 transactions per second, as opposed to Ethereum's 15 transactions per second, for example.

Aptos (APT) is currently the big attention-getter within the cryptocurrency world. That's why APT can now be traded at Coinmerce too!

Decentraland shares user numbers to avoid confusion

For a while, things seemed to be going wrong for Decentraland (MANA), after DappRadar reported in a blog post that the metaverse project had less than 40 daily users. This is despite the project's total market capitalization being around €1.3 billion.

In retrospect, it turns out that DappRadar calculated the number of daily users incorrectly, and they only looked at blockchain activity. So the number of users performing transactions within the ecosystem is low, but this does not equal the real daily number of users.

Decentraland revealed the actual amounts via Twitter::

In September, it had 57,000 monthly active users, 1,074 using smart contracts, and 6,315 in-game wearables sold, among other things.

So the metaverse platform is still being used. Decentraland's clarification on Twitter was calming for many investors, as the previously reported number of 40 would have been alarmingly low.

Terra developers come up with a new €250 million plan

On Monday, developers of the Terra ecosystem - comprising Luna Classic (LUNC), formerly known as LUNA, TerraUSD Classic (USTC), and Luna 2.0 (LUNA) - proposed a revised expansion program to allocate LUNA95 million (€248 million). According to Terra, the new proposal aims to boost development in the Terra ecosystem and resolve problems in the original proposal.

In the original plan, about 10% of the total LUNA supply, or LUNA 100 million, would be allocated to the ecosystem, with 80% of this amount going to rewards for mining developers. However, Terra staff explained that there are only a handful of projects with a total value set out on the protocol and that such a lack of competition would not lead to the proper distribution of mining revenues.

Under the new proposal, mining rewards for developers would drop from around LUNA 80 million to LUNA 20 million. On the other hand, LUNA 50 million would be redistributed as liquidity rewards for mining to boost the construction of decentralized exchanges in the Terra ecosystem. Another LUNA 20 million would be given as grants for developers, with a maximum amount of LUNA 125,000 per project per year. Finally, LUNA 5 million will be given to users to encourage traction.

Whether this plan will yield results remains to be seen. Confidence in the LUNA ecosystem is gone and the chances of that confidence returning are low. Such an influx of new LUNA tokens for developers and liquidity providers could just as easily result in a commensurate decline in the value of the coin.

75% of US youth want crypto in their portfolio

Bank of America recently conducted an enqûete on cryptocurrencies in the United States which showed that 75% of US youth plan to invest in cryptocurrencies. The enqûete also revealed that young people believe that it is impossible to get great returns from "traditional" investments, such as stocks, these days.

What we already knew is again confirmed: The younger generation is more interested in crypto than the older generation. However, interest among younger people has declined over the past year. According to Bankrate, interest in crypto among younger generations has decreased by 39% since 2021. This will probably be due to the bear market and inflation making life a lot more expensive.

This was again the main news of the week. Earlier this week, we also wrote about the 3 biggest Dutch cryptocurrencies. Read more in the article "The top 3 Dutch crypto projects".