Issue #51

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market is $US1.24T, down (-1.6%) from last week.

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

News Headline Highlights

• Societe Generale Forge, their blockchain unit, was designated a digital asset service provider (DASP) by France’s Autorité des Marchés Financiers. Receiving the first crypto licence issued by French Authorities demonstrates the investment bank’s continued interest in digital assets.
• Nasdaq has dropped plans to launch a crypto custody solution, citing the difficult regulatory environment in the USA. In the same statement, Nasdaq confirmed their intention to continue supporting the digital asset industry in several ways, including partnerships with potential ETF issuers as well as providing technology for crypto custody.
• U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled a plan to exempt small bitcoin (BTC) transactions from capital gains tax and to begin to back ~1% of the greenback with "real finite assets" such as gold, silver, platinum and bitcoin.
• The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has formally accepted the BlackRock Spot Bitcoin ETF application for review. This is standard procedure for an ETF filing that starts a review process and deadline for the SEC to provide commentary.
• Prime Trust, the poorly run Crypto custodian, has been placed into receivership by the Eighth Judicial District Court of Nevada.  
• Binance’s share of total crypto spot volume has fallen to 73%, from 90% at the start of 2022. The world’s largest crypto exchange has faced several regulatory challenges that have stifled their global dominance.
• In an interview with The Block, Diogo Monica, co-founder of crypto custodian Anchorage Digital, noted that the “the institutional pie is getting bigger,” and that they are “seeing evidence that companies do not want to do business in the U.S.”.
• Cathie Wood and Tom Lee have increased their Bitcoin price targets. Tom Lee predicting Bitcoin is on its way $200,000, whilst Cathie Wood’s base case for BTC is $600,000 by 2030.

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• After passing an on-chain governance vote (mentioned in last week’s newsletter, lending protocol Aave launched their decentralised digital dollars, the GHO stablecoin, on the Ethereum mainnet. 
• Data provider Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), designed to help transfer assets across various blockchains, is now live for early access users on the Avalanche, Ethereum, Optimism and Polygon blockchains.
• ThorChain is in final testing and on-chain voting to enable streaming swaps. Streaming swaps will execute a single large trade over a pre-specified time interval in order to minimise slippage. 
• Interoperability project, Wormhole, announced the release of the Wormhole Gateway, a Cosmos based appchain. The appchain aims to connect multiple Cosmos chains and applications through a single cross-chain liquidity router.

Regulation Station

• Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-NY) has sent a scathing letter to Gary Gensler on the heels of the Ripple partial victory over the SEC last week. In the letter, Torres calls out the agencies “reckless regulatory assault on the crypto industry” and failure to provide clear guidance.
• Later in the week, Congressmen French Hill (R-AR) and Dusty Johnson (R-SD), wrote their own letter, calling on Gensler to work towards a comprehensive digital asset framework, versus his approach of regulating via enforcement.
• Lawyers for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) commented on the likeliness of an appeal in last week’s ruling in the agency’s case against Ripple Labs. “Respectfully, those portions of Ripple were wrongly decided, and this Court should not follow them,” SEC lawyers argued in a filing to Judge Jed Rakoff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The Weekly Deal Room

• Polychain Capital raised $200m in their fourth crypto venture fund.
• Crypto VC CoinFund raised $158m for a venture fund to back early stage crypto startups.
• Futureverse, an AI and metaverse platform, raised $54m in a Series A led by 10T Holdings.
• RISC Zero, the developer of zero-knowledge virtual machine technology, raised $40m in a Series A led by Blockchain Capital.
• Cosmic Wire, a Web3 infrastructure provider, raised $30m in a Seed Round co-led by Polygon Ventures and the Solana Foundation.
• P0x Labs, the cryptographic development team behind Manta Network, raised $25m at a $500m valuation in a Series A co-led by Polychain Capital and Qiming Venture Partners
• Echooo, a smart contract wallet leveraging ERC-4337 (account abstraction), raised $15m in a funding round led by AT&T Capital. 
• Radiant Capital, a cross-chain DeFi lending protocol, raised $10m in a strategic round from Binance Labs. 
• Ethena, a stablecoin startup, raised $6m in a Seed Round led by Dragonfly Capital.
• Side Labs, the startup behind the interconnected liquidity provider Side Protocol, raised $1.5m in pre-seed funding.