Over the past week, it seemed that Bitcoin (BTC) and altcoins had found their way back up after a minor consolidation, but interest rate fears, among other things, caused a significant drop yesterday (February 17, 2022).

Bitcoin peaked at €39,300 but is at €35,600 at the time of writing. However, the important support at €35,000 has held so far, so there is no question of a new short-term downtrend yet. If this support level falls, things will, unfortunately, look a bit bleaker for Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto market.
Still, we saw a number of interesting, positive news items for the crypto market pass by this week. There hasn't been a whole lot of negative news, but it seems that interest rate fears, or the fear of rising interest rates in the US, are taking over.

Below are the most important news items from the past seven days (February 11 to February 18), which surprisingly were mostly positive.

Super Bowl commercial break full of crypto ads

The biggest American sports event, the Super Bowl, was once again a spectacular show this year. The final of the league for American football is watched all over the world every year and is much more than just a sports finale.

During halftime of the game, there is always an insane show by the most popular artists at the time. For example, this year Snoop Dogg, Eminem, 50 Cent, Mary J. Blige, and more big names performed.

As you can imagine, commercial breaks for this sporting event are extremely expensive. 112 million people were watching the Super Bowl this year, so an advertisement also has a huge reach. This year, the Super Bowl commercials reached a new high in terms of price, as an average of about $6.5 million was paid for a 30-second commercial.

This year it was notable that there were many crypto-related ads. FTX, eToro, Crypto.com, and Coinbase were featured during the Super Bowl commercial breaks. However, the latter had not prepared so well for the massive influx of people to its app, as less than 10 seconds after the commercial started, the app went offline.

Russia plans to legalize Bitcoin mining

Russia is preparing to transfer money to trading partners in "alternative ways" and cryptocurrencies are ideally suited for that.

NATO is threatening to cut Russia off from the international payment system SWIFT, but the Ministry of Finance in Russia already seems to have found a solution to this. They plan to legalize mining and also apply tax credits for mining.

Not even a month ago, there were all sorts of noises coming from Russia that mining and cryptocurrencies should be banned, but due to the current conflict with Ukraine, those plans seem to have been completely swept off the table. Cryptocurrencies may offer Russia a way out of certain sanctions imposed on it if it does not further de-escalate the situation with Ukraine.

Ethereum hacker settles for €1.75M bug bounty

Software engineer Jay Freeman (aka Saurik) found a way to "print" unlimited Ethereum (ETH) earlier this month. He was able to do this by using Optimism (a layer 2 solution for Ethereum) and exploiting a flaw in a smart contract there.

In this way, he could essentially print unlimited ETH on Optimism and sell that ETH for other coins. This would have been a huge blow to the ecosystem, but the hacker decided to settle for a $2 million (converted to €1.75 million) reward from the developer team behind Optimism.

The developer team has since fixed the flaw and the network now seems secure again. Still, this shows again how important error-free code can be in the crypto space.