Issue #24

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market is $US1.04T, up 22.9% from last week.

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

News Headline Highlights

• Voyager Digital, a bankrupt Canadian crypto lender, has received initial court approval for a proposed $1B sale of its assets to Binance.US. New York based U.S. Bankruptcy Judge, Michael Wiles, allowed Voyager to enter into an asset purchase agreement with Binance.US and to solicit creditor votes on the sale, which will not become final until a future court hearing.
• $50B Chicago-based market maker, Group One Trading, has disclosed a 13.5% Stake in MicroStrategy, or ~$237m. MicroStrategy is the owner of ~132,500 bitcoin (BTC), and as such is sometimes considered a bitcoin proxy.
• The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged crypto firms Genesis and Gemini with allegedly selling unregistered securities in connection with a high-yield product offered to depositors. Gemini, a crypto exchange, and Genesis, a crypto lender, partnered in February 2021 on a Gemini product called Earn, which touted yields of up to 8% for customers.
• El Salvador’s congress approved a digital securities law (62 votes to 16) that would allow the nation to raise funds through the world’s first sovereign blockchain bond. 
• FTX announced they have located $5 billion in cash and liquid crypto. In the announcement, they stated: "We have located over $5 billion of cash, liquid cryptocurrency and liquid investment securities measured at petition date value. [It] just does not ascribe any value to holdings of dozens of illiquid cryptocurrency tokens, where our holdings are so large relative to the total supply that our positions cannot be sold without substantially affecting the market for the token"
• The Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, one of the country’s financial regulatory agencies, has granted the local arm of crypto exchange Binance approval to manage and trade digital currencies.
• A tough week for crypto businesses as: 
  
  • Coinbase released 20% of their workforce
  • Crypto.com reduced its workforces by 20% 
  • Blockchain.com announced a 28% reduction in workforce.
    

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• Ethereum has returned to ‘ultrasound’ status, a term used by the community describing a net deflationary change to the supply of ETH since The Merge occurred in September 2022. For reference, under a PoW network, Ethereum’s ETH supply would have inflated almost 1.5m ETH since September.

• Yuga Labs and the Bored Ape Yacht Club have announced an interactive mint as Phase 1 in the ‘Trial of Jimmy the Monkey’.  Holders of Bored Apes and Mutant Apes will be able to partake in the ‘Dookey Dash’, a skills based interactive online game where their score will dictate the quality of the minted asset they receive in Phase 2.

The Weekly Deal Room

After the holiday period deal flow / announcements of raises are back! 

• Crypto market maker CyberX raised $15m in a strategic investment from Foresight Ventures to expand teams in Asia and North America, add more integrations with exchanges and decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols and build out its trading infrastructure.
• The Easy Company, the builders of the first social wallet that combines  user-curated profiles with engaging social discovery features, raised $14.2m in a Seed Round led by Lobby Capital, Relay Ventures, 6th Man Ventures
• Sortium, a developer of Web3 entertainment technology, raised $7.75m in a Seed Round, with crypto hedge fund Arca among the investors.
• Alkimiya raised $7.2m from Dragonfly, Circle Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island Ventures and others to build 'decentralised capital markets’ for block space.
• Quasar Finance, a Cosmos based decentralised asset management protocol, raised $5.4m at a $70 million valuation in a round led by Shima Capital 
• Open Forest Protocol, a forest measurement, reporting and verification platform built on a carbon neutral blockchain, raised $4.1m in a pre-seed round led by Shima Capital.
• Jumbo, a provider of a decentralised exchange built on the NEAR Protocol, raised  $3.5m in a Strategic Private Sale led by Pantera Capital. 

Metric of the Week

Despite the recent crypto bear market, Ethereum usage has remained steady throughout 2022 as measured by weekly active addresses. 

Source: Dune Analytics and Blockworks