SpaceX owns BTC, daily Dogecoin volume surged in Q2, Grayscale eyeing ETF: Hodler’s

Coming every Saturday, Hodler’s Digest will help you track every single important news story that happened this week. The best (and worst) quotes, adoption and regulation highlights, leading coins, predictions and much more — a week on Cointelegraph in one link.

Top Stories This Week

SpaceX owns Bitcoin, Elon Musk and Nic Carter believe BTC is becoming greener

Elon Musk, Dogecoin (DOGE) proponent and fair-weather friend to Bitcoin (BTC), revealed for the first time on July 21 that his aerospace firm SpaceX owns an undisclosed amount of Bitcoin. 

“I do own Bitcoin; Tesla owns Bitcoin; SpaceX owns Bitcoin,” he said.  

Musk was speaking at “The ₿ Word” — a virtual event dedicated to Bitcoin — alongside Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood, and the erratic tech billionaire suggested Tesla was on the verge of accepting the cryptocurrency again following promising signs that the percentage of renewable energy used for mining was increasing.

Tesla’s $1.5 billion foray into Bitcoin earlier this year sparked a major BTC price rally. However, Tesla’s suspension of Bitcoin as a payment method over environmental concerns in May appeared to tank the price of Bitcoin, with BTC crashing around 40% over the past two months.  

Now that there is a diminishing Chinese coal-powered hash rate after the mining ban, it appears that Musk is warming up to digital gold again. Musk has stated that, after he does a bit more “due diligence” on mining sustainability and can confirm it’s backed by 50% renewables or more, Tesla may re-enter the market. 

One wonders what said due diligence this entails, and why he didn’t do it before the $1.5 billion Tesla BTC buy. 

Musk also revealed, for the first time, that he holds Ethereum (ETH), and unsurprisingly reaffirmed his support for the meme-inspired Dogecoin. 

“I do personally own a bit of Ethereum, and Dogecoin of course,” he said.

Daily Dogecoin volume soared to nearly $1B during Q2

Speaking of Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, trading volume for Dogecoin increased by more than 13 times during the second quarter of 2021, nearly tagging $1 billion daily.

According to data compiled by Coinbase and reported by Business Insider, Dogecoin trading volumes soared 1,250% between April and June, with $995 million worth of DOGE changing hands daily on average during the quarter.

By comparison, Dogecoin’s average daily volume for the first quarter of 2021 was $74 million.

While those figures are sure to spark hype among the fiery-eyed Dogecoin community, the subject of the top canine coin may be a touchy one for Coinbase. 

A Coinbase user has filed a class-action lawsuit seeking $5 million in damages because of an allegedly misleading Dogecoin campaign.

According to court documents, plaintiff David Suski said he was deceived into trading $100 of Dogecoin for entry into a $1.2 million sweepstakes offer on Coinbase. The lawsuit asserts that Coinbase failed to communicate that a person could enter the sweepstakes without purchasing $100 of Dogecoin.

Ethereum must innovate beyond just DApps for DeFi degens: Vitalik Buterin

Ethereum co-founder and lead developer Vitalik Buterin has urged the Ethereum community to innovate beyond the confines of decentralized finance, or DeFi.

Buterin was speaking during his keynote at the Ethereum Community Conference in Paris on July 21, and described non-financial utilities as “the most interesting part of the vision of general-purpose blockchains.”

The 27-year-old outlined several non-financial applications for Ethereum, including decentralized social media, identity verification and attestation, and retroactive public goods funding.

The Ethereum co-founder has had a busy week, and after speaking at the Ethereum conference, he also surfaced in Ashton Kutcher’s and Mila Kunis’ living room. He wasn’t trespassing of course, and was there as part of the promotion for Kunis’ NFT project dubbed “Stoner Cats.” 

Buterin launched…