Issue #2

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market $US1.20T, up 2.5% from last week.

Below is the weekly performance of the top crypto and NFT assets. 

News Headline Highlights

• The US Treasury Department has sanctioned the popular Ethereum mixing service Tornado Cash on suspicions of aiding in money laundering.
  Magnet Quick Take: Tornado Cash is an Ethereum service that aids in maintaining financial privacy. There are many desirable ethical reasons for such a service to exist (such as obfuscating your financial state from anyone you interact on Ethereum with, e.g. an employer, cafe owner or a friend). Unfortunately for the masses, many useful technologies are also useful for bad actors. It will be interesting to see how regulators attempt to understand and regulate this new asset class. We suspect they’ll require new frameworks they are yet to attempt to create.
• ASIC calls for ‘Robust and appropriate’ regulation after their survey of 1,000 retail investors found that 44% held crypto, making it Australia’s second most popular investment product after Australian shares (73%).
• The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has taken a ‘big step’ towards a digital currency pilot, inviting proposals to work with it and the new Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre on potential use cases for a CBDC in Australia.
• Circle, a compliant, centralised and regulated US entity has 'blacklisted' 44 addresses associated with Tornado Cash smart contracts. This means that no USDC will be able to be sent to or from these addresses.
• CME Group, one of the world’s largest derivatives market, is launching Bitcoin/Euro and Ethereum/Euro futures markets on the 29th of August. CME already has USD futures markets for Bitcoin and Ethereum.
• Coinbase has reported a 63% drop in revenues, citing a significant fall in retail and institutional volumes through Q2.

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• Ethereum successfully completed its third and final Testnet Merge, this time on the Goerli Testnet. The Ethereum Mainnet Merge, where Ethereum transitions from Proof-of-Work consensus to Proof-of-Stake, is estimated to happen around September 15-16.
• White hat hackers have returned over US$32m of the US$200m of stolen funds to the Nomad bridge that was exploited last week.
• One of Yuga Lab’s rarest assets, a trippy skin mega mutant, sold for an undisclosed amount. It is rumoured to have cost 2300 ETH (~US$4m).
• Synthetix announced a partnership with traditional liquidity juggernauts Jump Capital, who will be working closely with the broader ecosystem to support asset liquidity and product development.
• Maven 11 has launched a US$40m credit pool on Maple Finance, a DeFi credit platform. The pool was designed to provide liquidity to institutional borrowers in the absence of centralised institutional borrowing after the fallout of previous months.
• The popular Moonbirds NFT, launched by Kevin Rose, has made all of their assets public domain by moving to a CC0 licensing arrangement (i.e. no rights reserved on IP).

The Weekly Deal Room

• Pinata, an NFT-focused media distribution platform, raised $21.5M from Greylock, Pantera and Offline Ventures.
  
• CreatorDAO, which invests in content creators in return for a cut of future revenues, raised $20M in a round led by a16z and Initialized Capital.
• RISC Zero raised $12M in a seed round led by Bain Capital to create a scalable blockchain using zero-knowledge (zk) proofs.
• Injective, a Layer-1 blockchain optimised for DeFi, raised $40M in a round led by Jump Crypto.
• Gunzilla Games has closed a $46M round from Republic Capital, Animoca, Blizzard, Jump and others to incorporate NFT technology into its Battle Royale games.
• Merkle Science raised $19M in their Series A to continue developing its threat detection platform, which uses machine learning to track suspicious crypto wallets to identify and prevent crypto-related crimes.

Metric of the Week

Ethereum options Open Interest, or the total amount of Ether options contracts currently open, reached 4 million ETH ($8.2B), surpassing its all-time high and, for the first time ever, Bitcoin Open Interest ($5.5B).

Source: The Block