Issue #9

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market $US969.4B, down 0.6% from last week.

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

News Headline Highlights

• $75b asset manager, WisdomTree, is launching a fund that digitises its shares ownership record on Ethereum. The fund has received regulatory approval and will invest in short-term US Treasury obligations. Magnet quick take: One of the long term bullish cases for crypto centres around the digitisation of traditional assets and/or products on a blockchain. This is a massive step by a large US asset manager towards crypto building legitimacy in this space.
• Meta is now permitting all US Facebook and Instagram users to connect their crypto wallets to share their NFTs on the respective platforms.
• Pantera Capital are raising $1.25b for their second blockchain fund, citing continued appetite for digital assets amongst institutional investors in spite of recent public market prices. The fund will invest in both equity of blockchain companies and publicly available crypto tokens.
• Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), has introduced a Bill to the US House that would allow for Bitcoin to be allocated to 401(k) Plans. 
• Israel, Norway and Sweden Central Banks are partnering with the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) to explore the use of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) for international retail and remittance payments.
• The RBA released a white paper and announced a timeline for its CBDC project, eAUD.  The pilot will be conducted on a private, permissions Ethereum (Quorum) implementation and is expected to be completed by mid-2023.
• 256-year-old international auction house, Christie’s, has embraced Web3 via the launch of an on-chain Ethereum NFT marketplace called ‘Christie’s 3.0’.

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• Circle, the company behind the popular stablecoin USDC, announced plans to launch USDC on 5 new blockchains in the coming months. Their plan includes launching on Arbitrum, Optimism, Polkadot and NEAR this year and adding support for Cosmos in 2023.
• One of only 24 (of a total 10,000) rare 'ape' type CryptoPunks sold for 3,300 ETH (~USD$4.5M).
• DeFi derivatives protocol Ribbon Finance launches Ethereum options trading.
• Thorchain have integrated their cross chain swaps with Edge Wallet and are building the integration for Trust wallet. This will permit the millions of users of these wallets to conduct permissionless and decentralised cross chain swaps whilst maintaining asset custody (i.e. without having to engage with a centralised exchange).

The Weekly Deal Room

• Bitcoin payments network, Strike, raised $80m from Ten31, the Washington University Endowment, the University of Wyoming Endowment and others.
• Multi-party computation (MPC) developer MPCH Labs has raised $40m in Series A funding to develop an operating platform to enable secure safeguarding of digital assets.
• All in one crypto wallet provider OneKey raised $20m in Series A funding led by Dragonfly Capital and Ribbit Capital.
• Blockchain data platform Space and Time raised $20m in strategic funding from Microsoft’s VC arm M12.
• Solana developer platform Coral raised $20m in a round led by FTX and Jump Crypto to develop an interactive crypto wallet.
• Blockchain reinsurer Re raised $14m in a seed round led by Trive Capital to build a decentralised insurance market.
• Decentralised database protocol, Kwil, raised $9.6m from FTX Ventures, DCG and others.
• Eclipse raised $9M seed funding from Tribe Capital and others to allow developers build customisable, modular rollups using the Solana VM on any chain.
• Krypton Protocol, a DEX designed to help users achieve the best execution on their trades, raised $7m in a round led by Framework Ventures and Samsung Next.
• Crypto derivatives exchange Deribit has raised funds from existing shareholders at a $400 million valuation, significantly lower than its last valuation of $2.1 billion in August 2021.

Metric of the Week

As the Euro and British Pound continued their depreciation against the US Dollar, investors throughout Europe turned their attention to crypto assets as an alternative asset that might provide them with some protection. Were this to have been volumes seeking to capture increased volatility in markets, we would have expected similar sized purchases in March 2020 or May 2021.

Throughout September, exchanges experienced record volumes of EUR and GBP Bitcoin purchases as depicted below. 

Source: Messari