Introducing Cryptocurrency Variance Swaps

Trading Desk Market Update: 11/15

November 15, 2021

BTC is currently trading around $65,300 and ETH around $4,700.  Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are KCS, ICX, and CRO. The global crypto market cap is $2.99T, up 0.5% over the last day.  DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$274b and BTC dominance is around 43%.

BTC is trading fairly in line with its price on Friday, despite the successful deployment of Taproot, which took effect at 5:15 UTC on Sunday.  Taproot is Bitcoin’s biggest upgrade since 2017, and has been seven years in the making.  The upgrade introduces new Schnorr signatures and a new script type to enhance privacy by making all transactions, including more complicated multisig and time-locks, look the same, and makes these transactions cheaper and more lightweight.  While it will take time for Taproot’s benefits to be fully seen, as most Bitcoin wallet providers will continue to use the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm in the near-term, the upgrade should encourage greater use of multisig transactions and Lightning Network channels, as well as the building of lightweight smart contracts on the Bitcoin network.

Other notable news from the weekend includes: The Indian government is reportedly intending to take  “progressive” and “forward-looking” steps regarding cryptocurrency regulation, and is scheduled to meet with industry representatives today; Barbados is preparing to legally declare digital real estate sovereign land with the establishment of a metaverse embassy; a new decentralized autonomous organization named ConstitutionDAO has raised over $2.7m to acquire a rare print of the US constitution going up for auction at Sotheby’s; the US SEC went to court to enforce an investigative subpoena issued to Terraform Labs; and VC firm Paradigm has announced a new $2.5b venture fund for crypto companies and protocols.  

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