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Trading Desk Market Update: 8/4

August 4, 2022

BTC is currently trading around $23,000 and ETH around $1,650. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are CHZ, ENJ, and XTZ. The global crypto market cap is $1.12T, down 0.9% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$87b and BTC dominance is around 42%.

It’s a quiet day for risk markets with equities roughly flat while crypto is slightly down. The Bank of England hiked rates by 50 basis points, its largest hike in 27 years, and it warned that the country is facing a recession. On the crypto front, the long lasting Solana exploit appears to have been caused by a bug in the closed-source Slope mobile wallet. The exploit has sparked renewed conversations about the importance of using open-source software.  

Notable news includes: the CFTC would become the primary crypto regulator under a new bipartisan Senate Committee proposal that would formally define “digital commodities” which include bitcoin and ether; U.S. Senators reintroduced an amendment to clarify the “broker” definition in last year’s infrastructure bill; Senator Warren proposed reducing Wall Street’s involvement in crypto; Winnipeg police received provincial funding to bolster its blockchain forensics unit; the Chinese municipal bank issued its first-ever digital yuan loan using IP as collateral; Poloniex said it will support an Ethereum PoW fork as well as the proof-of-stake chain; Binance followed Circle’s lead and increased transparency on the collateral backing its BUSD stablecoin; Robinhood denied FTX M&A rumors, stating the firm has sufficient capital to do its own deals; Binance-owned WazirX is under investigation by Indian regulators over alleged money laundering; Riot earned nearly $10m for shutting down its rigs during the Texas heatwave; Bitcoin miner SAI.TECH terminated the remainder of its expansion into Kazakhstan due to uncertainty in the region; Alchemy integrated Astar Network to support developers in the Polkadot ecosystem; Github faced a widespread malware attack; Starbucks teased a web3 rewards program to attract new customers; the NFTs.com domain name was purchase for $15m; Binance’s co-founder Yi He will transition to leading the firm’s VC arm; Arnault-backed VC firm Aglae Ventures revealed plans to launch a ~$120m web3 fund; former PwC crypto head set up a crypto asset management firm in Dubai; Fairfax County Pension Fund invested $70m in crypto yield farming funds; Chainalysis reported that nearly ~70% of all crypto stolen in exploits this year came from cross-chain bridges; and, the SEC charged 11 people for their involvement in a $300m crypto Ponzi scheme.

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