Issue #70

Written by Magnet Capital | Dec 5, 2023 4:00:00 AM

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market is $US1.61T, up (8.9%) from last week.

Below is the weekly performance of the top crypto assets.

News Headline Highlights

The US Securities and Exchange Commission met with many of the 12 Bitcoin spot ETF applicants, including BlackRock, ARK, Grayscale and Hashdex this last week to work through details of their proposals. A key topic of discussion was the creation of units with the SEC favouring cash creations with issuers favouring in-kind creation.
Microstrategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin (BTC), bought ~16,130 BTC for $593.3m in cash at an average price of about $36,785 apiece. Microstrategy now holds 174,530 BTC bought at an average of just over $30,000 per coin.
Grayscale, the world’s largest crypto asset manager, hired former Invesco Head of Americas John Hoffman to lead its distribution and partnerships team. Hoffman is an ETF veteran, having spent over 17 years in the ETF team at investment manager Invesco.
Digital Currency Group (DCG) has reached a new repayment deal with its bankrupt subsidiary, Genesis Global, as part of an agreement to end a lawsuit that sought roughly $620m from DCG. Genesis lawyer Sean O’Neal commented that the DCG will pay roughly $200m over the coming weeks, with full repayment to come in April 2024.
CF Benchmarks launched a new series of staking indexes, the CF Staking Reward Rate Series, for institutional clients. The new indexes are designed to provide investors with the reward rates from certain proof-of-stake protocols.
Cristiano Ronaldo faces a $1B class-action lawsuit for his role in promoting cryptocurrency exchange Binance. The lawsuit has been filed in the District Court for the Southern District of Florida (Miami), alleging that Ronaldo "promoted, assisted in, and/or actively participated in the offer and sale of unregistered securities in coordination with Binance".
Fidelity has filed their 19b, officially starting the ~240+ day clock for the US Securities and Exchange Commission to review and approve/deny their spot Ethereum ETF application.

Crypto Asset Project Updates

Pyth, a DeFi oracle network, airdropped their native token (PYTH) to users of Pyth network ecosystems, quickly nabbing an initial market capitalization of $765m.

Regulation Station

The hackers responsible for the $8.5m exploit of Platypus Finance in February 2023 have been cleared of criminal charges by a French court, which found that their use of a flawed smart contract did not constitute fraud.
The federal judge overseeing the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) case against crypto firm DEBT Box has ordered the agency to explain apparent “false or misleading” statements that the SEC’s lawyers made while arguing for a restraining order against the company. The SEC’s lawyers face sanctions and have fourteen days to file a response to Judge Robert J. Shelby, the top federal judge in Utah.

The Weekly Deal Room

Wormhole, a cross-chain protocol, raised $225m at a $2.5 billion valuation in a funding round from Jump, Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Arrington Capital and others.
OCEAN, a decentralised Bitcoin mining pool project, raised $6.2m in a Seed Round led by Jack Dorsey.
MYX, a crypto derivatives platform, raised $5m at a $50m valuation in a Seed Round led by HongShan.
Wind, a remittance platform built on Ethereum L2 Polygon, raised $3.8m in a funding round co-led by Global Founders Capital and The Spartan Group.
Open Campus, a community led web3 education platform, raised $3.15m in a funding round from Binance Labs.

Metric of the Week

The rate of Bitcoin adoption (measured by the number of addresses) continues to increase, with the most recent 10m users to join the network doing so in the last 11 months.

Source: nsquaredcrypto

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