Issue #59

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market is $US1.10T, up (3.1%) from last week.

Below is the weekly performance of the top crypto assets. 

News Headline Highlights

• Franklin Templeton, a US asset manager with over a trillion dollars in assets under custody, filed an application with the SEC to launch a spot bitcoin ETF, joining Blackrock, ARK Invest, VanEck and others.
• FTX, the bankrupt crypto exchange, received court approval to sell over $3 billion worth of cryptocurrency that has been frozen since the exchange’s collapse, a move that would help repay its customers and reduce its exposure to sudden changes in crypto prices. The sale of assets still requires court approval and is expected to take place over months/years.
• ABN AMRO is the first Dutch bank to register a digital green bond on a public blockchain. This particular issuance used the Polygon blockchain as the registry. For this issuance, ABN AMRO engaged the services of Tokeny and Fireblocks for the digital wallet. Legal services were provided by Allen & Overy and Clifford Chance.
• Boerse Stuttgart Digital, the crypto-focused arm of the Stuttgart Stock Exchange, plans to introduce a fully insured Ethereum staking service next year. As part of the development, global reinsurance company Munich Re has crafted an insurance product dedicated to reducing risks of slashing.
• Brevan Howard Asset Management is predicting a potential boom in digital assets similar to what the internet has seen in the past couple of decades and is looking to make “disproportionate returns”. CEO Gautam Sharma noted that despite a lot of challenges, blockchain and crypto are transformational technologies whose full potential has yet to be tapped, “We truly believe that this is a very disruptive technology and it can unlock value in many ways”.
• Zodia Custody, a cryptocurrency storage provider and a subsidiary of Standard Chartered, has launched in Singapore, to provide digital asset custody services for financial institutions.
• Deutsche Bank has entered into a global partnership agreement with Taurus SA to provide digital asset custody and tokenization services to its clients. Taurus SA is a Swiss-based crypto infrastructure firm.
• The Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Central Bank of Kazakhstan and an unnamed central bank have joined the beta phase of bank messaging platform SWIFT’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) interoperability project. The three central banks have integrated their infrastructure with SWIFT’s “CBDC connector solution” for direct testing.

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• “Flatcoin” a term coined by former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, are stablecoins designed to peg its price to “...an on-chain basket of goods,” according to Srinivasan. This concept is designed to overcome the issue of fiat currency inflation that is not passed through to fiat pegged stablecoins. In an interview last week, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong showed enthusiasm and heightened interest in the implementation of a flatcoin, noting “[The Flatcoin concept is] a new thing on the horizon. There's a couple teams working on it,” said Armstrong in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “We're not building something in that realm yet, but we're interested in it”.

Regulation Station

• Leaders of the G20, the world's 20 largest economies, are urging a speedy implementation of a cross-border framework for crypto assets. At a two-day summit held in New Delhi, the leaders signed a consensus declaration endorsing the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) and calling for amendments to the Common Reporting Standard (CRS). The framework aims to enhance information exchange between countries and is expected to commence in 2027.
• Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler told lawmakers that he and the SEC are reviewing a court's decision that gave Grayscale Investments a recent win in its push for a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund.

The Weekly Deal Room

• Animoca Brands, a metaverse and gaming venture capital firm, raised $20m to advance its Mocaverse project in a round led by CMCC Global.
• Layer N, a rollup network designed to scale financial applications on Ethereum, raised $5m in a Seed Round co-led by Founders Fund and Dao5.
• Movement Labs, the founders of Move, a smart contract development language, raised $3.4m in a pre-seed round co-led by Blizzard Fund, Varys Capital, Dao5 and Borderless Capital.
• Only Dust, a web3 contributions platform, raised $3m in a Seed Round led by Fabric Ventures.
• Ripple acquired Fortress Trust, a Nevada-based trust company and custodian of digital assets.
• Mountain Protocol, a Bermuda-based yield bearing stablecoin issuer, announced their seed round led by Castle Island Ventures.