Issue #14

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market $US1.08T, up 1.9% from last week.

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

News Headline Highlights

• Goldman Sachs, Coin Metrics and MSCI have co-developed a crypto asset taxonomy, Datonomy, to classify hundreds of digital coins and tokens so institutional investors can make sense of the new asset class.
• JP Morgan, DBS Bank and SBI have successfully executed their first trade on a public blockchain using DeFi (Aave!). The trade was facilitated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and involved foreign exchange and government bond transactions against liquidity pools composed of tokenised Singapore Government Bonds, Japanese Government Bonds, Singapore Dollars and Japanese Yen.
• 'We never lost interest': Asian family offices continue to be interested and accumulate crypto. A survey of 30 family offices in Hong Kong and Singapore, published by KPMG, found that 92 per cent of respondents were interested in digital assets, with 58 per cent already invested and 34 per cent planning to do so.
• $515 billion asset manager, Apollo Global Management, has launched bitcoin and crypto custody services for its clients in partnership with Anchorage Digital.
• Meta, announced plans to turn Instagram into an NFT marketplace. Users will be able to connect a digital wallet and share and sell NFTs in the app.
• $9.9 trillion asset manager, Fidelity, is launching Fidelity Crypto, a trading service that will allow retail investors to trade bitcoin and ether. While trades with Fidelity Crypto will be free of commission fees, the firm says it will factor in a 1% spread into every trade execution price.
• The largest crypto options exchange globally, Deribit, was hacked for $28m. Deribit's chief commercial officer, Luuk Strijers, commented that client assets were not affected, despite withdrawals being temporarily halted.
• The Japanese Government is set to create their own decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) to further their knowledge of Web3 technology and to understand its potential use cases.

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• Leaked financials may indicate solvency issues for Alameda Research, one of the largest crypto hedge funds and highly related to FTX, the fastest growing crypto exchange. The crux of the issue is related to a large and relatively illiquid holding they have seemingly taken significant loans against. This report has been rebuked by both Caroline Ellison (CEO of Alameda Research) who claims the leaked financials are only a subset of the broad corporate entity as well as Sam Bankman Fried (CEO of FTX).
• Opensea announced plans to launch enforceable royalties for NFT creators at the smart-contract  level. This comes after many new NFT platform providers have moved to not honour creator fees, thus creating cheaper markets for NFTs to try and take market share from incumbents. 
• Horizen Labs have released a detailed walk-through of the much anticipated ApeCoin staking platform. This includes a technical overview that details the coding complexities of the program which have resulted in some of the delays to date.

The Weekly Deal Room

• Evmos,  an interoperability protocol looking to build an ecosystem of cross chain dApps, raised $27m in seed funding led by Polychain Capital.
• WalletConnect, who are building a Web3 communications network, raised $12.5m in an ecosystem round to develop strategic partnerships. The round included participation from Shopify, Coinbase Ventures, ConsenSys, Polygon and others.
• Web3 asset custody solution, RakkaR Digital, raised $10m from Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank.
• Pantera Capital led a $10M funding round for Braavos, a crypto wallet firm hoping to offer a self-custody solution simpler than their custodial counterparts.
• Nomura’s Laser Digital has invested in Orderly Network at a $200m valuation, a DeFi infrastructure protocol build on the Near blockchain. 
• State-chartered bank, Custodia, has raised $7m according to a recent SEC Filing. This is in addition to the $37m raised in their Series A in March 2021.
• Fun, a blockchain software development company, raised $3.9m in a pre-seed round led by Jam Fund.

Metric of the Week

Once touted by many as an Ethereum killer due to its cheap fee model, Solana's TVL has fallen from almost $10B to $900m. Whilst this decline has occurred, Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solutions have launched and continued to receive adoption due to their low fee models that leverage the security and decentralisation of the Ethereum blockchain. The two most prominent Ethereum Layer 2 solutions, Arbitrum and Optimism, now have $1.4B and $900m in TVL respectfully. 

Source: DeFi Llama