BTC is currently trading around $26,100 and ETH around $1,700. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are RLB, OP, and HBAR. The global crypto market cap is ~$1.10T, down ~0.7% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$38b and BTC dominance is around 49%.
Equities and interest rates are inching higher while crypto is down modestly. Chinese equities notably diverged lower as policymakers unexpectedly held the 5y loan prime rate constant at 4.2% and made a smaller-than-expected cut to the equivalent 1y measure. It’s a slow start to the week elsewhere, but the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium kicks off on Thursday, with Fed Chair Powell delivering a speech at the conference on Friday.
Notable news includes: China is seeking to implement its social credit system with digital IDs in the Metaverse; Bitget announced the rollout of tighter KYC requirements due to regulatory concerns, and the exchange separately integrated with Copper’s ClearLoop to enable an off-exchange settlement solution; Hashkey is expected to debut retail crypto trading services in Hong Kong on Aug 28; reports indicate the SEC may simultaneously approve several Ethereum Futures ETFs to prevent becoming a kingmaker and giving a single issuer a head start as was previously done with BITO; Base activity soared past Arbitrum and Optimism amidst the friend.tech frenzy; MakerDAO’s money market, Spark Protocol, reached full borrow utilization for DAI just eight days after the debt ceiling was raised to $200m; THORChain processed record volumes after introducing ‘Streaming Swaps’ that break up cross-chain trades into smaller parts that are executed over a day; Kraken introduced support for PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin; Yuga Labs revealed it would soon end support for OpenSea due to its royalty fee policy; friend.tech generated over $1m fees over 24 hours, surpassing the fees generated on Uniswap and the entire Bitcoin network; Securitize acquired $40b crypto fund manager Onramp; NFT platform Recur announced plans to shutdown despite previously raising $50m from big named backers; Bitcoin Ordinals NFT trading volume tanked 98% from May; and, SBF is seeking regular release from jail and may place blame on his lawyers in his defense.
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Authors:
Matt Kunke, Research Analyst | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
Brian Rudick, Senior Strategist | Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn
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