Daily Market Update: October 17, 2023

October 17, 2023

BTC is currently trading around $28,400 and ETH around $1,600. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are OKB, KAS, and BSV. The global crypto market cap is ~$1.13T, up 0.6% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$37b and BTC dominance is around 52%.

US retail sales came in much stronger than expected this morning, sparking a sharp increase in interest rates and equity market weakness. The US 10Y briefly reached a local high of 4.85%. Crypto markets have remained relatively insulated from the move, and bitcoin dominance continued its recent exhibition of strength.

Notable news includes: BlackRock’s Larry Fink called yesterday’s crypto rally a “flight-to-quality”; FTX has released a revised plan aimed at returning more than 90% of creditor holdings that were held at the exchange prior to its collapse, totaling more than $9b of funds across FTX and FTX US; FTX is also seeking to clawback 15% from customers that withdrew more than $250k in the nine days before bankruptcy; Uniswap introduced a 0.15% fee to use its UI to swap via certain pools, but notably this will accrue to Uniswap Labs and not UNI token holders; Scroll’s zkEVM went live on mainnet; Lido is winding down on Solana in response to low fees; Coinbase delisted 80 non-USD trading pairs in its latest drive to consolidate liquidity; a Pennsylvania law maker scrapped a proposed two-year crypto mining moratorium from his energy conservation bill to give it a better chance of success; draft guidance published by the Basel Committee will require banks to disclose their crypto exposure by 2025; Animoca Brands’ Forj launched an ApeCoin community accelerator; fractionalized art platform Artfi has attracted 25,000 interested collectors via its Genesis Pass NFT ahead of its launch; Roblox integrated XRP as a payment method; TrueCoin’s third-party vendor breach may have leaked TUSD user data; Israel froze 100 Binance accounts with suspected links to Hamas; and, developer platform Stack Overflow axed nearly 1/3rd of its headcount in response to competition from LLMs.

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

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