Issue #49

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market is $US1.21T, down (3.2%) from last week.

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

News Headline Highlights

• BlackRock CEO Larry Fink called Bitcoin an “international asset” and said he hopes a BlackRock ETF will make it less expensive and easier to invest in Bitcoin. “It costs a lot of money right now to transact Bitcoin,” Fink said during a Fox Business interview. “We hope our regulators look at these filings as a way to democratise crypto.”
• CoinShares reported $125m of weekly inflows into crypto asset management products last week, bringing the total inflows into such products to $334m over the past fortnight. Bitcoin investment products accounted for the vast majority of inflows, with more than 98% of funds.
• The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has experienced one of its strongest weeks of 2023, recording:
  • Open interest all-time highs in their ether options markets
  • A surge in the number of large BTC futures holders (>25BTC), increasing from a recent low of 94 during the week of May 30 to 121 in the week of June 27
• Nasdaq resubmitted an updated filing for BlackRock’s spot bitcoin ETF with the SEC, this time naming Coinbase as their surveillance partner. The updated application states: “The Spot BTC SSA is expected to be a bilateral surveillance-sharing agreement between Nasdaq and Coinbase that is intended to supplement the Exchange’s market surveillance program”.
• It was reported by Fortune that several executives at Binance resigned last week over CEO Changpeng Zhao’s handling of regulatory investigations into the company. This included general counsel Han Ng, chief strategy officer Patrick Hillmann and SVP for compliance Steven Christie.

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• Ethereum community members proposed a new standard, ERC (Ethereum Request for Comments) 7265, to help prevent the impacts of DeFi hacks.  The standard allows protocols “to create a circuit breaker protecting their protocol, with highly customised rate limit parameters per asset”, said Meir Bank of Fluid Protocol.
• Circle, the company behind the second largest blockchain stablecoin (USDC), is considering issuing a stablecoin in Japan, co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire said. This comes after Japan legislation governing stablecoins took effect on June 1.
• Multichain's Fantom bridge was seemingly exploited for nearly $130m. This amounts to nearly the entirety of the project's wBTC, USDC, and USDT. Since, Circle has frozen ~$60m of USDC and Tether has frozen $2.5m of USDT tied to a likely exploit.

Regulation Station

• The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) released new public guidance addressing the application of goods and services tax (GST) on certain 'digital currency' interactions.
• The Hong Kong government established a task force for promoting Web3 development. The task force is chaired by Financial Secretary Paul Chan and comprises 15 non-official members, including the Animoca Brands chairman Yat Siu.
• South Korea's National Assembly passed the Virtual Asset User Protection Act, marking the country's first step towards building a legal framework for virtual assets. The legislation defines digital assets and sets out penalties for unfair transactions. Service providers must segregate user assets, have insurance, hold some reserves in cold wallets and maintain records of all transactions.

The Weekly Deal Room

• CryptoQuant, an on-chain data/analytics provider, raised $6.5m in a Series A led by Atinum Investments.
• Shardeum, a Layer 1 blockchain deploying efficient sharding technology, raised $5.4m in a strategic funding round from Amber group, Galxe, J17 Capital and others.
• Web3Go, a blockchain company offering data tools backed by artificial intelligence (AI), raised $4m in a Seed Round led by Binance Labs.
• Ola, a zero-knowledge Ethereum layer 2 protocol, raised $3m in a Seed Round co-led by Web3.com Ventures and Foresight Ventures.