Florida’s Tampa Bay mayor, Jane Castor, has disclosed that she will start receiving her salary in Bitcoin. Castor said this while speaking at a crypto conference held in Florida, according to people who attended the event.

The cryptocurrency and blockchain conference is taking place at Amalie Arena in Tampa Bay. Sources with knowledge of the announcement said that the mayor revealed that the process would involve Celsius Network.

Castor’s announcement attracted comments from notable figures in the BTC ecosystem.  

One of them was Anthony Pompliano, a BTC crusader. Pompliano observed that four mayors in the United States have so far accepted to be paid in BTC either in part or wholly.

The Tampa Bay mayor’s decision comes on the heels of similar revelations by Francis Suarez, Miami’s mayor, and Eric Adams, New York City’s mayor-elect. Notably, Suarez and Adams disclosed they’ll accept their salary in BTC while responding to an earlier tweet by Pompliano.

In the tweet, the BTC crusader said that “it is time” that “American politicians” start accepting their paycheck in the king cryptocurrency.

“In New York We Always Go Big [I’ll Take] First Three Paychecks in Bitcoin,” Adams

Suarez responded to Pomp, noting that he’ll accept his “next paycheck 100% in Bitcoin.” However, Adams told the Miami mayor that in “New York we always go big.”

As such, the NYC mayor-elect said he’ll take his “first three paychecks in Bitcoin.” Apart from accepting being paid in the leading coin, Adams said that he’ll make New York City a crypto and “innovative industries” hub.

Suarez and Adams are known to support cryptocurrency and have expressed their commitments to popularizing the virtual currency ecosystem in their cities.

Suarez has already introduced a cryptocurrency project known as MiamiCoin. 30 percent of revenue from the project goes into funding public undertakings.

Adams acknowledged MiamiCoin saying that it’s “doing very well.” The mayor-elect revealed that he will follow in Miami’s footsteps when he takes office in January 2022.

During his campaigns, Adams promised to bring “the center of life science […], cybersecurity […], self-driving cars, […] drones […], and Bitcoins” to New York City in 12 months after assuming office.

The cryptocurrency community responded positively to news of US mayors accepting their salaries in Bitcoin. Some even suggested that “we need a law” to compel politicians to accept donations in cryptocurrency so as “to keep track of” the funds’ movement.

While quoting Leonardo da Vinci, Microstragy’s CEO, Michael Saylor alluded to more people embracing crypto.

Ted Cruz Pushes Congress to Accept Crypto Payments

Saylor tweeted that “there are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, and those who do not see.” Microstrategy holds roughly 114,042 Bitcoins valued at more than $7 billion at current exchange rates of about $61,500 per coin.

Apart from mayors, US senators are also pushing for the adoption of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. For example, Ted Cruz, a US senator, has introduced a resolution seeking to have Congress embrace crypto payments.

Cruz calls it “ACCEPT Resolution.” ACCEPT is an acronym for Adopting CryptoCurrency as an Exchange of Payment for Transactions Resolution.

In the resolution, the senator suggests that people should be allowed to pay with cryptocurrency at gift shops, restaurants, and other businesses within “Capitol Complex.”

On a different forum, Cruz noted that one way Congress can lead the crypto charge is by accepting virtual currencies to pay for goods and services. The senator added that his resolution will put Congress in the lead “by having congressional cafeterias, vending machines, and gift shops to accept crypto payments.”

House of Representatives Sends Infrastructure Bill to President Biden

As Cruz works to put Congress at the lead on crypto matters, the US House of Representatives has sent the bipartisan infrastructure bill to president Joe Biden for signing.

The representatives agreed to pass the bill despite it having disputed crypto tax reporting provisions. The Senate first passed the bill in August, with a majority of the lawmakers declining to review the crypto rules.

The bill contains crypto rules that industry experts warn will make it hard for some cryptocurrency businesses such as miners to comply.

For instance, the regulations require crypto brokers to report transactions. However, according to experts, the wording of the tax reporting requirements captures entities such as miners and stakers that don’t necessarily facilitate transactions.

Bitcoin is currently stuck at $61k as it failed to go above $63k once again. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has been stuck in a narrow trading range between $60k-$63k for much of the last few days but bears are appearing to knock on the doors now as further upwards price movement has been difficult to achieve. Altcoins on the other hand mixed gains despite both Bitcoin and Ethereum shedding some value. More on that later on.

Two more US mayors, one from Tampa, Florida and one surprisingly from New York have pledged to get their salaries in Bitcoin. The moves are symbolic in nature as mayors aren’t really paid all that well in the USA. Both are moves geared to announce crypto-friendly policies and attract crypto investment in their relative cities. The move follows another news from Miami, Florida where a mayor has also announced to accept his pay in Bitcoin.

MetaMask, a browser extension service by ConsenSys has teamed up with Bitfinex Pay to offer tens of millions of people access to their app-less wallet features. The new initiative is aimed to make accepting crypto easier for sellers around the world and make it easier than ever. 

An analyst believes that if Bitcoin goes above $64k convincingly, it can turn things around and carry on with the bull run. Currently, it is believed that the next big resistance is the newly set all time high resistance of $67k, but Michael Van de Poppe disagrees. He also gave his opinion on why this bull run is much longer than previous ones. More on that later on. 

A new survey shows which US cities are leading in crypto and blockchain hirings. While smaller states like Wyoming and Delaware have made the headlines, it is still the financial powerhouses like New York and California where most such hires are being made. Miami, Florida and Dallas, Texas are also in the run as the competition grows more and more intense. 

Bitcoin price at $61.000

Bitcoin is trading flat at $61k earlier today as another move upwards failed earlier today. The digital currency has made several such moves in the last couple of weeks but to no avail. The resistance above $63k is often too much to handle for the bulls right now and they can’t cope beyond it. 

The last 24 hours started with the index at around $61.2k. It traded sideways for a while till around 2:45 AM in the night when it started to rise. At first, it went above $62k and posted a high of $62.5k within a few hours. However, this proved to be the highest point for the digital asset during the last 24 hours. The index began to drop once again at 10:30 AM and after a brief fightback, was trading around $61k again at press time. 

Going forward, Bitcoin is currently trading in a narrow trading range of $60k-$62k for most of the time and the bulls are unable to make a definitive move above it. Moves both above and below have been negated in recent weeks. While the long-term trend is still very much bullish, the short-term is quite even at the moment with the bears trying very hard to enter the picture. A move above with a lot of volume is needed to recontinue the rally but that is hard to come at this time.

The total market capitalization of Bitcoin was around $1.15 trillion and its share of the proceedings was 42.81%.

Altcoins Post Mixed Gains

Many of the smaller altcoins posted gains during the course of the day as both Bitcoin and Ethereum faltered. Binance Coin (BNB, 11%) was the most prominent gainer of today. Others included Shiba Inu (SHIBA, 8%), Terra (LUNA, 4%), Chainlink (LINK, 8%), VeChain (VET, 12%) and Crypto.com Coin (CRO, 32%).

In Other News…..

Analyst Says Prepare for a Slower, More Prolonged Bull Run this Time

Youtube crypto analyst Michael Van de Poppe believes that Bitcoin will likely have a much more prolonged rally this time around that might continue on to 2022. This makes sense as it is already a lot longer than the previous two iterations back in 2013 and 2017. The last bull run lasted around 15 months after the halving in September 2016. We are in the 18th month since the May 2020 halving already. 

Based on our insight, it is possible that the rally will continue in the near future, perhaps even beyond 2021. While we don’t know how long the rally will continue, it is obvious that the price rally is already longer than the previous one and a record one at that. 

However, it doesn’t mean that you can expect crazy figures like $300k or something even higher just because this rally is longer than previous ones. While it is longer, it is also much more subdued as the digital currency has only risen 3.2 times from its previous all time high. In the previous bull run, Bitcoin rose almost 20 times from the 2013 all time high. So, we can expect a long and subdued rally with each new halving cycle. 

In the current phase of the cryptocurrency bull cycle, the altcoin market seems to be completely dominated by meme tokens. While whales and institutions are still focused mainly on Bitcoin, and on quality altcoins like Ethereum, Solana or Cardano, the imagination of retail investors is fully captivated by meme tokens based on cats, dogs and TV shows. But is the growing popularity of increasingly shady meme projects really a sign that we’re at the top of the current market cycle?

Shiba Inu Loses Almost 30% In a Week - Is the SHIB Pump Over?

On October 28th, the SHIB price reached an all-time high of $0.00008845, which briefly made it surpass DOGE and become one of the top 10 largest cryptocurrencies in the ecosystem. While many Shiba Inu bagholders were hoping that the most successful Dogecoin clone will soon remove another zero and reach $0.0001, the price has crashed, and now it looks like SHIB will gain back a zero instead of losing one.

A correction in price was of course natural after such a massive pump, especially for a token with no intrinsic value. However, many factors point to the fact that the steep decline in SHIB price might have been more than just a temporary correction, and that Shiba Inu might soon be replaced by another meme token as rapidly as it has previously replaced Dogecoin.

For one, nobody is certain as to what the circulating supply of SHIB truly is. CoinMarketCap, the most popular and respected cryptocurrency tracker in the world, has recently increased its circulating supply of Shiba Inu from 394,796,000,000,000 SHIB to 549,095,509,738,353 SHIB. The Shiba Inu community is convinced that this is just a simple error, but CoinMarketCap has still not changed this “mistake” - so there’s also a possibility that the Shiba Inu team has simply added 155 trillion coins to the supply while forgetting to inform anyone about it.

The circulating supply controversy has also stopped Shiba Inu from being listed on the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken and on the trading platform Robinhood. While the community was almost convinced that these listings are imminent, they now seem to be postponed indefinitely.

Finally, the SHIB price was affected by the fact that the second largest whale has moved SHIB tokens worth around $2.3 billion to four different wallets, presumably with the intention of selling them. Since Shiba Inu is an extremely centralized project with a few wallets holding almost 70% of the total supply, the price can plummet instantly if any of the whales start to sell.

SQUID Token Makes History By Becoming One of the Fastest Rug Pulls Ever

Retail investors are ready to buy anything - it doesn’t even need to have a dog or a cat in the logo. SQUID is a meme token with no other value except sharing the name with the popular Netflix show Squid Game, and it has managed to appreciate in price rapidly by 230,000% within a few days - only to drop by almost 100% in an instant.

It’s worth noting that the SQUID token was only accessible on one exchange - PancakeSwap. According to the users’ reports, while it was easy to buy the token, it was impossible to sell it. In other words, anyone who “invested” in SQUID has lost money.

Meme Cryptocurrencies Are Here to Stay - But Which Will Be the Next SHIB?

The idea of a meme token is now deeply engraved into the imagination of retail crypto investors, and there’s no denying that while these tokens are a terrible long term investment, they can be immensely valuable as speculative assets due to their ability to grow in price rapidly. Although the SHIB pump happened just a few days ago, some meme token fanatics are already looking for the next Shiba Inu.

It’s hard to say exactly how many meme coins exist, but the number might already be nearing one thousand. Most of these assets are very niche and only have a few thousand holders at best.

New meme tokens are created every day, with most of the trending cryptocurrencies on CoinMarketCap currently being such unique and original projects like “DogeMoon”, “ShibaZilla”, “MarsRise” or “BabyShibaInu”. But will any of these tokens be able to become the next big meme cryptocurrency, or will the investors decide to return to Dogecoin one day?

XRP Fails to Deliver On Vague Adoption Promises

Although XRP is still one of the top 10 largest coins and even though it has managed to gain almost 7% over the past few days, the week cannot be considered successful for Ripple fans. While the On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) volume of the XRP is growing, the investors are concerned with the lack of transparency of Ripple Labs Inc. - it’s unknown whether the ODL volume is attributed to Ripple’s partners actually utilizing XRP in real-life scenarios, or is it simply a pumped number with no relation to actual adoption of XRP.

Bitcoin dropped earlier today as further moves upwards failed yet again. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization looked promising at the start of the day but went on a slow, long price decline over the day. Altcoins also mostly lost value throughout the day except for a couple of outliers like Solana, Luna and Avalanche. More on that later on.

In other news, the global labour shortage that has hit businesses around the world the hardest may have some silver lining for the workers themselves. According to a recent survey, many of these low wages workers made money via crypto investments during the pandemic and lockdown days. As a result, they aren’t feeling the need to work dead-end jobs too much. More on that later on.

India’s biggest e-payment solution Paytm is reportedly considering Bitcoin services. This is despite the lack of regulatory clarity around the sector as the Indian government keeps everybody second guessing about its latest move. However, the company obviously believes that the crypto sector is going to improve in the near future and the government will regulate it sensibly. 

On-chain metrics show that if Bitcoin follows the same trend as the 2017 bull run, it could rise to as high as $253k by the end of this bull run alone. Ethereum too may see its worth increase to $22k by the end if it follows the exact same route. However, while Bitcoin may follow the 2017 bull run’s course, such a big rise in price will be difficult as the price appreciation is subdued in each successive bull run. A more realistic price target anywhere between $80k-$120k is still much more plausible.

FC Barcelona football club is looking to offer NFT soccer moments with the NFT company called Ownix. The currently troubled sports team is looking at new ways to connect with fans after a disaster run of the last couple of years and the departure of Lionel Messi to Paris Saint Germain.

Bitcoin Goes Below $61k

Bitcoin is currently trading just around $61k at press time. The cryptocurrency is currently on a slight price squeeze after failing to go ahead. The bulls were looking to post a healthy growth at the start of November but it has faced challenges. 

THe last 24 hours started with Bitcoin at around $63k. For much of the rest of the day, the digital currency was on a slow, steady decline that took it eventually below $61k at one point. The bears managed a 24-hour low of around $60.7k just before press time. At press time it has recovered slightly to $61.2k.

Going forward, Bitcoin is currently on a slight price squeeze that is keeping it from continuing its long-term price rally. Overall, the digital currency still has some time left to re-ignite the bull run but “Moonvember” may not happen if it doesn’t take its chances and further price action may be in jeopardy for this month. Overall, the long-term trend is still very bullish.

The total market capitalization is around $1.15 trillion and its share of the proceedings is 43.2%.

Altcoins Post Losses

Other cryptocurrencies aka altcoins posted some losses during the course of the day. Many of the cryptos posted losses similar to Bitcon’s but some did post price appreciations in between. Avalanche (AVAX, 4%), Terra (LUNA, 6.5%) and Solana (SOL, 2%) posted some gains but that was about it. 

In Other News…..

Global Labour Shortage Partly Because of Crypto Investment

In an interesting twist to the global labour shortage and inflation figures, it has come to surface that good returns from crypto investments have helped millions around the world including low wage workers. As a result, they are not jumping with joy to get back to their old jobs and are pressurizing employers to pay more.

The Coronavirus pandemic has affected supply chains and businesses around the world. Apart from chip shortages, rising shipping costs and crude oil prices, another factor why businesses are struggling is due to labour shortage. One of the causes of this labour shortage is because of profits from crypto assets, Civic Science reports. Around 4% of workers with under $50k annual income quit their low paid jobs according to a recent survey because they reaped nice profits from crypto investments during the Coronavirus cycle. So, for this small number of people, crypto provided a life changing solution and uplifted them from poverty. For still others, it provided a good additional income source and increased their buying power. 

Overall, it is a good idea that the workers have more power to lobby businesses and get better working conditions and pay. It is also good to see that the crypto sector is helping them achieve this goal to have a better life.