Issue #1

Market Overview

As of the time of writing (Monday 5pm), the total market cap of the crypto asset market is: $US1.17T

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

News Headline Highlights

• BlackRock, the world's largest money manager, has announced a partnership with Coinbase that will allow their clients to trade and manage their Bitcoin positions through BlackRock's Aladdin asset management software tools.
• Brevan Howard have raised more than US$1b to launch a digital asset multi strategy fund.
• Gucci announce their foray into web3, announcing they will be accepting APE coin as a form of payment. APE Coin is a Yuga labs designed crypto asset associated with the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
• Ethereum open interest increased to near record highs, up from US$4.7b to US$7.6B in July as investor speculation around the upcoming merge increases.
• The US SEC has launched an investigation into Coinbase, alleging they have listed unregistered securities on their platform for the American public to trade.
• Coinbase hit straight back at SEC allegations, vehemently denying any securities are present on their exchange.

 Crypto Asset Project Updates

• Aave DAO approves the creation of a new over-collateralised stablecoin, GHO, to compete in the $150B+ USD-pegged stablecoin market currently led by Tether’s USDT ($66B) and Circle’s USDC (~$54B).
• The Total Value Locked (TVL) on Optimism grew to over US$2.5b, Surpassing Arbitrum for the first time ever as the largest Ethereum Layer 2 as measured by by TVL. 
• Tether declare the reserves backing their US$66B stablecoin contains no Chinese commercial paper (something that they are rumoured to have held significant amounts of historically). Tether has been steadily reducing their commercial paper reserves in favor of US Treasury bills, with the goal of reaching zero paper holdings be the end of 2022.
• Popular and heavily backed Nomad Protocol was drained US$200m in assets within a 12 hour period. Nomad is a custodial bridge that allows users to send and receive tokens between different blockchains.

The Weekly Deal Room

• OrBit Markets raised US$4.6m to launch a crypto asset options and structured products market. The angel round was led by Matrixport, with participation from Brevan Howard, Maven 11 and New for Capital. 
• OneOf, an NFT platform, raised US$8.4 million from Amex Ventures. 
• Debt DAO raised US$3.5m, to build a revenue based financing protocol, in a seed round led by Dragonfly Capital.
• Dove Metrics, an aggregator of crypto asset fundraising data, has been acquired by Messari for an undisclosed amount.  
• FC Barcelona is accelerating their NFT and Metaverse strategies by way of a $100M investment  from Socios into Barca Studios.
• Galoy raised $4M to build an open-source crypto banking system on the Bitcoin Lightning Network.

Metric of the Week

The number of individuals that own a whole Bitcoin is at all time highs. Investors have seized the opportunity to snap up a whole BTC in the recent market drawdown, with the number of ‘wholecoiners’ increasing by over 43,000 since the start of June.

Source: Coin Metrics