Issue #11

BNY Mellon to custody Bitcoin, Google to allow for crypto payments, Uniswap raise $165m & more...

Oct 18, 2022

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market $US964B, down 1.9% from last week.

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

America’s oldest Bank, BNY Mellon, commences cryptocurrency custody services for its customers.
Google announced they will allow customers to pay for cloud services with digital currencies from early next year. As part of the announcement, they shared they will be using Coinbase Prime for storing and trading cryptocurrencies.
21 Shares are launching the Middle East’s first Bitcoin spot electronically traded product (ETP). The physically-backed Bitcoin product will trade on the Nasdaq Dubai exchange.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has granted Coinbase Singapore in-principle approval to provide regulated services under the Payment Services Act.
The SEC is conducting an investigation into Yuga Labs to determine whether or not any securities violations were committed as part of Yuga related airdrops of NFTs or ApeCoin.
The opening legal brief has been filed in Grayscale's lawsuit against the SEC. Grayscale has argued that the SEC’s logic for denying their application to convert the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust to a Spot Bitcoin ETF is “flawed” and “inconsistently applied.”
Coin Center has officially filed a lawsuit against the Treasury Department to delist Tornado Cash privacy tools from sanctions, and to prevent Treasury from enforcing against Americans utilising the tool to exercise their basic rights to privacy.

Tether announced that they have eliminated commercial paper from their reserves. This is evidence of our commitment to back our tokens with the most secure, liquid reserves in the market.
Solana decentralised lending protocol, Mango DAO, was exploited for $114m in customer funds. The hacker who had funded their account from an KYC’ed exchange wallet has since been outed and has returned $67m.
~50% of Ethereum blocks validated follow the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) compliance recommendations. The primary reason for this is that ~57% of all blocks validated use MEV-Boost software, of which >80% are done by Flashbots (an Ethereum-based research and development team), who refuses to pass along blocks containing transactions from sanctioned addresses.

Ethereum’s leading decentralised exchange, Uniswap raises $165m in Series B funding, led by Polychain Capital.
Soroban, a smart-contract platform, raised $100m to build on the Stellar Network.
Nxyz, a data infrastructure provider for blockchains, raised $40m in Series A funding, led by Paradigm.
Blockchain development platform Tatum raised $41.5m from Octopus Ventures, Circle and others.
Settlemint raised $16m in Series A funding from Molten Ventures and OTB Ventures to build a low-code platform for blockchain engineers.
Rye, a shopping platform aiming to use crypto tokens to build a cheaper ‘Spotify for ecommerce’, raised $14m in funding led by a16z crypto.
Pine Street Labs raised $6m in a round led by Polychain to build a ‘better’ enterprise grade crypto wallet.
Decentralised finance (DeFi) asset manager, Arch, raised $5m in a seed round led by DCG and Upload Ventures.
NFT infrastructure company, Gomu, raised $5m in a seed round with participation from Coinbase Ventures, DeFiance Capital, Saison Capital and others.

Bitcoin's hash rate, a network security measure, continues to reach new all time highs, now sitting above 260 exa-hashes per second.

Despite Bitcoin's price falling ~58% year-to-date, the mining hash rate is up 43%. This could be a factor of several things, including:

Bitcoin miner profitability. As long as Bitcoin miner's costs to mine a Bitcoin are below their revenues, they will continue to acquire more equipment. As operating costs are mostly energy, this could indicate increased renewable resources powering the Bitcoin network.
Bitcoin miner bullishness. Bitcoin miners would not be spending millions on mining equipment with no alternate use without taking a long term view on the value of bitcoin.
New and more efficient equipment. The S19 XP Antminer is the latest model from Bitmain and is rumored to be coming online soon (maybe they're testing the new equipment themselves before they share it with the rest of the market!).