Daily Market Update: May 22, 2023

May 22, 2023

BTC is currently trading around $27,000 and ETH around $1,800. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are NEO, CFX, and TRON. The global crypto market cap is ~$1.18T, up ~0.4% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$47b and BTC dominance is around 48%.

It’s a slow start to the week with muted volatility across equity and crypto markets. Short-term treasury yields defied this trend and rose as seemingly little progress to resolve the debt ceiling has been made as both sides of the Congressional split struggle for power. Sunday’s call was referred to as productive by both sides of the political aisle, and negotiations will continue later today. Some of this week’s prominent economic events and data releases include several U.S./U.K. PMI releases tomorrow, numerous BoE and ECB speeches, and Fed Meeting Minutes that will follow later on Wednesday, in addition to U.K. CPI and Core PCE in the U.S. on Friday.

Notable news includes: Congressman Emmer introduced the ‘Securities Clarity Act’ inserting the term ‘investment contract asset’ into existing laws to help crypto projects develop under a compliant framework; Gemini is considering forbearance after DCG defaulted on its $630m payment to Genesis; an attacker hijacked Tornado Cash’s governance with a malicious proposal, later issuing a separate proposal to purportedly restore the earlier state of governance but some community members are concerned it may be a last-ditch effort to pump the token price; Instagram is reportedly launching a text-based Twitter rival; Vitalik warned of risks to restaking in a new blog post; the NY Fed and MAS published results from its joint CBDC cross-border payment project; Apple’s crypto policy has seemingly softened as Stepn launched in-app digital asset trading; onchain tokenized bond offerings have surpassed $200m in TVL; 3AC’s NFT auction fetched $2.5m; Huobi Global was ordered to halt operations in Malaysia; Hotbit shuttered its crypto exchange and urged users to withdraw funds; Binance Australia will continue to support AUD withdrawals until June 1; Strike moved its global headquarters to El Salvador as it expands to 65 countries; Marathon pledged a $500k match on donations to the non-profit BTC research and development firm Brink; LTC and DOGE transactions continue to sit at a three week high due to Ordinals; the Monero community is lashing out against its Ordinals derivative ‘Mordinals’ as the implementation has the potential to disrupt the privacy properties of Monero’s ring signatures; and, Michael Lewis is almost ready to publish his latest book on Sam Bankman-Fried.

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Authors:
Matt Kunke, Research Analyst | TwitterTelegramLinkedIn
Brian Rudick, Senior Strategist | TwitterTelegramLinkedIn

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