This Week in Crypto: Ripple Settles with the SEC, GameStop Ventures into Bitcoin, and MicroStrategy Acquires Its 500,000th BTC

This week, the crypto market underwent notable shifts. Ripple settled its lawsuit with the SEC, GameStop ventured into Bitcoin, and MicroStrategy acquired its 500,000th BTC.

This week in crypto, there was some interesting news.

Firstly, U.S. President Donald Trump pardoned three co-founders of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX—Benjamin Delo, Arthur Hayes, and Samuel Reed—as well as a former employee, Gregory Dwyer, and the BitMEX company. In 2022, they pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by not implementing adequate anti-money laundering controls.

The crypto industry is reacting optimistically to the pardons, especially in the context of potential changes to crypto regulations under Trump’s presidency.

Next, cryptocurrency analysts are speculating that an altcoin season could be on the horizon as Bitcoin’s market cap could see a "huge crash."

If the price of BTC increases, investors usually diversify into other digital currencies, which could yield massive profits in the altcoin markets. This would translate to Bitcoin’s market dominance falling to 40%, a level last seen in 2023.

There are several positive and negative implications for Bitcoin if its market dominance were to decrease rapidly. A rapid decline could be triggered by an unexpected event.

In other news, Aave has integrated Chainlink’s Secure Verification Randomness (SVR) on the Ethereum mainnet for Aave’s system.

This move is designed to enhance the safety and security of transactions on Aave by introducing an element of randomness and unpredictability, which is crucial for smart contracts to execute functions in a decentralized and unbiased manner.

Finally, Binance Coin (BNB) is on the verge of a potential breakout toward the $1,000 price level, according to cryptocurrency analysts.

The price of BNB has been performing well lately, and its role in the Binance ecosystem is becoming increasingly integral.

As investors monitor market trends and technical indicators closely, they are eagerly anticipating the confirmation of this anticipated upward movement.

Also, Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade has now successfully launched on the Hoodi testnet.

This marks a significant milestone in Ethereum’s development roadmap, especially after difficulties encountered in previous testnets.

The Pectra Upgrade aims to build upon the earlier testnets, Holesky and Sepolia, which faced issues like flaws in the hot patch and failures in finality.

Moreover, GameStop’s stock price shot up by 15% after the company announced it would invest some of its treasury in Bitcoin.

This move is similar to MicroStrategy’s strategy, which has been making massive investments in BTC as a primary treasury holding.

And lastly, Ripple Labs has officially settled its lawsuit with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but only after the SEC agreed to drop its appeal of a lower court ruling.

The two sides are also planning to resolve the case related to XRP tokens sold on public exchanges through a separate stipulation of dismissal.

This brings to an end a legal battle that spanned over three years and had major implications for the cryptocurrency industry.