BTC is currently trading around $28,300 and ETH around $1,850. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are DOGE, RUNE, and SHIB. The global crypto market cap is ~$1.24T, up ~1.8% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$51b and BTC dominance is around 47%.
Equities and crypto are up modestly, and bond yields are inching higher. Oil prices stabilized after yesterday’s pop, with gains moderating this morning. Crypto markets fell yesterday afternoon as Cobie — a prominent industry influencer — posted a SHA-256 hash to his Twitter. A common use case for posting a hash is to make a prediction without publicly disclosing the details of the prediction while being able to subsequently prove/reveal that you predicted the event at a later date. Since SHA-256 is a deterministic one-way hash function, any input that goes through it will always produce the same output (hash), but it’s computationally infeasible to derive the input from a given output (without further context to ease brute forcing). However, in Cobie’s case, crypto Twitter quickly determined that the hash’s input read, “Interpol Red Notice for CZ”, sparking market contagion that the CEO of the largest crypto exchange was wanted for a provisional arrest. How the hash input was determined remains unknown, it may have been “cracked” due to rumors circulating about a Red Notice before the tweet of the hash (unlikely in our view), or Cobie or a trusted party that he discussed the hash with leaked the input (more likely in our view). Regardless, the claims are still just rumors that CZ and Binance have denied, and crypto markets rebounded yesterday evening and through this morning, more than offsetting the initial drawdown.
Notable news includes: Kaiko research suggests Binance’s market share drop was more attributed to the sunsetting of its zero-fee trading program than the CFTC’s lawsuit; Canadian crypto exchanges WonderFi, Coinsquare, and CoinSmart revealed plans for a tri-party merger; a former Gemini exec launched a tokenized T-Bill vault OpenEden; Dogecoin soared after Twitter replaced its blue bird logo with the doge meme; the Euler exploiter returned all of the recoverable funds; the Allbridge exploiter returned most of the ~$573k stolen; Yuga Labs and Gucci announced a limited-edition series of physical Gucci products and associated NFTs tied into the lore of Otherside; South Korean authorities seized ~$160m in assets tied to Terra employees; and, the DoJ announced it seized ~$112m in crypto assets tied to investment scams.
Authors:
Matt Kunke, Research Analyst | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
Brian Rudick, Senior Strategist | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
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