Issue #25

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market is $US1.08T, up 4.0% from last week.

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

News Headline Highlights

• National Australia Bank (NAB) has created a stablecoin called AUDN that will allow business customers to settle transactions (e.g. carbon credit trading, overseas money transfers and repurchase agreements) in Australian dollars on the Ethereum Network.
• Genesis Trading has finally filed for Chapter 11  bankruptcy protection after suffering crippling losses from the collapses of FTX and hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. The company listed over 100,000 creditors in a “mega” bankruptcy filing, with aggregate liabilities ranging from $1.2 billion to $11 billion dollars, according to bankruptcy documents.
• Brazil's second-largest private bank, Bradesco, launched a tokenized credit note as part of a regulatory sandbox promoted by the South American country's central bank.
• Robinhood rolls out a ‘Robinhood Wallet’, a crypto wallet and smartphone app that allows users to swap and transfer crypto, and view owned NFTs and crypto. competitor to 1mn users
• Thailand’ Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued regulations for crypto custody providers to establish a digital wallet-management system to ensure the safety of customers' assets.
• Crypto exchange Bitzlato, was shut down by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and its founder was arrested, charged with laundering over $700m through the exchange.
• Nexo, a retail crypto lending platform, has agreed to pay $45m to settle SEC and state charges for failing to register their crypto lending products.

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• Ethereum now boasts a community of over 500,000 validators securing its blockchain. These validators have staked over 16m ETH, or $25.6B, into the Ethereum Network since December 2020, to partake in the Proof of Stake consensus security model. 
• Bitcoin’s mining difficulty jumped over 10% during the week, its biggest move since October 2022. Mining difficulty adjusts up or down depending on the amount of hashrate being contributed to the Bitcoin Network, relative to the prior adjustment, to partake in the Proof of Work consensus algorithm.
• Polygon, an Ethereum scaling layer, successfully completed a hard fork designed to reduce the likelihood of gas fee spikes and disruptive chain reorganisations (reorgs).

The Weekly Deal Room

• Hashkey Global, a crypto fund based in Singapore, raised a $500m third fund.
• Sports NFT Company, Candy Digital, raised $38.4m in a Series A1 extension co-led by Galaxy Digital and ConsenSys Mesh.
• Web3 social platform builder Plai Labs raised $32m in a Seed Round led by a16z. 
• NIL Foundation, a data accessibility protocol, raised $22m in a funding round led by Polychain to build out its Proof Marketplace, which will allow crypto protocols to outsource the production of zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs.
• Ulvetanna, who aim to accelerate the ZK revolution by supporting web3 networks with reliable and cost-efficient proof generation, raised a $15m Seed Round co-led by Bain Capital Crypto and Paradigm.
• Web3 infrastructure provider Parfin raised $15m in a Seed Round led by Framework Ventures in a bid to dominate the Latin America region.
• Obol Labs raised $12.5m in a Series A led by Pantera and Archetype to decentralise Ethereum staking infrastructure by building a sustainable protocol and ecosystem for distributed Ethereum validators.
• Ahead of an upcoming Q1 launch on Polygon, Web3 gaming platform Intella X raised $12m from Polygon, Animoca Brands, Magic Eden and others.
• SYKY, a web3 luxury fashion platform , raised $9.5m in their Series A led by Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six.
• Architect, which aims to make trading infrastructure for large crypto investors, raised $5m in their Seed Round from Coinbase Ventures, SV Angel, Circle Ventures and others.
• Cypher, a multichain web3 wallet company, raised $4.3m in a Seed Round from Y Combinator, Samsung Next, Balaji Srinivasan and others.
• Gateway, a web3 credentialing protocol , raised $4.2m in a Seed Round led by Reciprocal Ventures and with participation from 6th Man, Spartan Group, Figment and others.
• Sleepagotchi, which has launched a mobile app that helps gamify sleep via digital collectibles, raised $3.5m in a recent round 6th Man Ventures, Collab+Currency, Shima Capital.
• Diva, a distributed liquid staking protocol, raised $3.5m in a Seed Round led by A&T Capital.
• Blue, a KYC and AML identity verification product for DeFi protocols, has come out of stealth and announced their Seed Round raise of $3.2m co-led by Blockchange Ventures and Fenbushi Capital.
• Fintech company Arch, who are launching a crypto lending product, raised $2.75m in a funding round from Tribe Capital, Castle Island Ventures, Untamed Ventures, Global Founders Capital and others.

Metric of the Week

Justifiably, investors lost a lot of confidence in centralised service providers through 2022 after the failures of several notable ones (FTX, Voyager, Celsius, Genesis and Gemini Earn). This has resulted in many electing to leverage one of crypto’s valuable characteristics, the ability to securely self-custody one's assets. 

This has resulted in user’s bitcoin balances held on exchanges continuing to fall throughout 2022, recently dropping to a 4 year low of under 2.25m BTC. 

Source: Glassnode