Issue #33

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market is $US1.20T, up 13.7% from last week.

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

News Headline Highlights

• National Australia Bank (NAB) announced the completion of an intra-bank cross-border layer-one public blockchain transaction using its self-issued stablecoins, claiming to be the first financial institution to do so. NAB hopes to roll out a solution for corporate and institutional clients by the end of 2023.
• Fidelity Crypto, which 37.1m retail customer accounts, quietly went live with their retail crypto product, giving millions of customers access to commission-free trading of bitcoin and ether.
• BlackRock CEO Larry Fink earmarked several trends in digital assets in his annual letter to shareholders. Amongst them are advances in digital payments across emerging markets and the promise of tokenization were among the topics addressed. 
• Brevan Howard, a global asset management firm with ~$30 billion in assets under management, has entered into an agreement to take over a long-short hedge fund run by Dragonfly Capital, a 10yr old crypto asset manager.
• Metamask, the most popular web3 browser wallet provider, reported that swap volumes it an all-time high last weekend as the fall of top crypto-friendly banks Silvergate and Signature sent shockwaves through the sector.
• Crypto exchange-traded products issuer 21Shares is closing down five funds (S&P Risk Controlled Bitcoin Index, S&P Risk Controlled Ethereum Index, DeFi 10 Infrastructure, Crypto Layer 1 ETP and USD Yield ETP) and delisting another (Terra Classic ETP). Combined these products have less than $1m in assets.
• The FTX administrator released a report detailing the fraudulent transfers between SBF and other senior FTX employees. Employees took the following sums in payments and loans from FTX:
  • SBF, the CEO of FTX, took $2.2B 
  • Nishad Singh, ex-FTX director of engineering, took $587m
  • Gary Wang, an FTX co-founder, took $246m
  • Ryan Salame, former co-chief executive officer of FTX Digital Markets, took $87m
  • Sam Trabucco, former co-head of Alameda, took $25m
  • Caroline Ellison, ex-chief executive officer of Alameda, took $6m
• Meta is cutting off support for digital collectibles or NFTs on its platforms (e.g. Instagram) less than a year after rolling it out.

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• Ethereum core developers are targeting April 12 to release the highly-anticipated Shanghai-Capella upgrade, or Shapella, on the mainnet. This upgrade will enable beacon chain depositors (doing so to partake in Proof of Stake consensus) to withdraw ETH that was previously locked indefinitely. 
• Arbitrum, one of the leading Ethereum layer two scaling protocols, announced plans to launch a protocol token (ARB) and transition operations to a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO). The token is to be launched on the 23rd of March.
• Euler Finance, a decentralised-finance (DeFi) lending protocol, suffered an exploit that resulted in almost $200 million being lost. The attacker used a flash loan (a several million dollar loan that is borrowed and repaid within the same transaction) to conduct the attack.
• Circle’s USDC stablecoin has regained its US$1 peg after assuring markets that the $3.3B it held in custody with Silicon Valley Bank would be made available.

Regulation Station

• The Blockchain Association submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the Federal Reserve, FDIC and OCC seeking information related to the potential “de-banking of crypto firms” in the wake of the failures of the Signature, Silicon Valley Bank and Silvergate banks.
• Former CFTC Commissioner and now a16z Head of Policy, Brian Quintenz, spoke at the Futures Industry Association conference last week, commenting on the SEC's current stance on crypto, "The SEC is totally out of control. They are going rogue".
• An European Union’s proposal on digital identity framework passed the Parliament’s plenary vote (418 in favour, 103 against and 24 abstentions). The EU-wide framework would give citizens control of their ID in their own wallet which could interact with public services.

The Weekly Deal Room

• Jungle, a web3 gaming studio focused on mobile first blockchain-enabled games, raised $6m in a Seed Round co-led by Bitkraft VC and Framework Ventures.
• Perpy, a web3 social perpetual futures trading platform, raised $5m in a public token sale.
• Soul Wallet, a social recovery tool for wallets leveraging the newly announced ERC-4337 standard, raised $3m in a Seed Round from Struck Crypto.
• Alex, a Bitcoin decentralised exchange, raised $2.5m in a strategic round from Trust Machines and Gossamer Capital.

Metric of the Week

The number of bitcoin (BTC) that has not moved on chain in over 10 years (most commonly considered as lost assets), now exceeds the BTC deposited on exchanges by customers. Pretty wild to see!

Source: Glassnode