Issue #3

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market $US1.06T, down 11.7% from last week.

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

News Headline Highlights

• BlackRock (~$10 trillion AUM) has launched a private trust offering US-based institutional clients direct exposure to spot bitcoin. This follows last week’s announcement of a partnership with Coinbase to offer similar exposure. 
• The US’s leading crypto asset policy/advocacy group, Coin Center, is planning legal challenge against the US Treasury Department for their sanctions against Tornado Cash, an Ethereum-based privacy tool. 
• Venn, the analytics platform of US$58b asset manager 2 Sigma, has partnered with Coinbase to provide tools and frameworks for institutional investors to evaluate digital assets. 
• Galaxy Digital have withdrawn from their proposed US$1.2B acquisition of crypto custody provider BitGo, citing failure to deliver required documentation as the reason. BitGo is reported to be pursuing legal action and damages in excess of US$100m for what they consider improper grounds for withdrawal. 
• Crypto.com has obtained approval from the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to provide compliant crypto asset services and products to UK customers. 
• XP, Brazil’s largest brokerage, has launched a crypto trading platform, giving their 3.6m+ users the ability to trade BTC & ETH.
• The Bank of Russia continues working towards the upcoming adoption of the central bank digital currency (CBDC), planning an official digital ruble rollout in 2024.
• Crypto exchanges in several Canadian provinces impose an $30K CAD annual limit on all coins with the exception of BTC, BCH, LTC and ETH. 

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• The IP rights agreement for the CryptoPunks collection has been released, granting owners full commercial rights to their NFTs. 
• Over 2 million Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain names have now been registered. Using ENS, Ethereum users can replace their 40-character Ethereum address with something more simple and memorable, e.g. “magnet.eth”, making it easier to receive crypto assets and interact with decentralised Apps (dApps).
• Multi-signature wallet creator Safe (prev. Gnosis Safe) announced an airdrop of 50 million SAFE tokens to thousands of safe wallets as part of the launch of its DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation).

The Weekly Deal Room

• CoinFund is launching a new $300m Web3 fund, with the goal of making larger bets into early stage web3 companies.
• Primitive raised $9 million from Bain Capital Crypto to build products that make it easier to discover popular AMM liquidity pools.
• Satellite IM raised $10.5 million from Framework Ventures and Multicoin Capital to continue building its peer-to-peer decentralised communications platform.
• Koibanx raised $22M for its low-code platform that allows developers to create financial products on the blockchain.
• Fractional rebranded to Tessera and raised $20M to simplify joint ownership of NFTs
• .bit raised $13M to build a cross-chain decentralized identity protocol. Think ENS (see below) but multi-chain.
• EtherMail, an email solution for encrypted wallet-to-wallet communication, raised $3M
• dWallet Labs raised $5M to continue developing cybersecurity solutions for blockchain.

Metric of the Week

40 of the top 100 US public companies made investments into blockchain companies between September 2021 and June 2022. A combined $6B was invested, with Google ($1.5B) leading the way followed by BlackRock ($1.2B) Morgan Stanley ($1.1B) and Samsung (1.0B).

Source: Blockdata.