Trading Desk Market Update: 12/22

December 22, 2021

BTC is currently trading around $49,200 and ETH around $4,000.  Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are NEAR, MIOTA, and CRV.  The global crypto market cap is $2.42T, up 1.0% over the last day.  DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$250b and BTC dominance is around 40%.

Notable news today includes: The Chinese Communist Party’s news agency Xinhua will release a set of NFTs later this week in a surprise move; crypto exchange Kraken announced the acquisition of non-custodial staking startup Staked; Swiss digital asset bank SEBA published a governance proposal requesting to be whitelisted for Aave’s institutional lending platform Arc; zero knowledge rollup-based scaling solution provider Starkware revealed plans to launch Layer 3 chains built on top of StarkNet for “hyperscalability”; a proposal to merge open interest rate protocol Rari Capital and algorithmic stablecoin protocol Fei was approved, marking one of the largest DAO mergers in DeFi history; NFT gaming generated $2.3b of revenue in 3Q, per the Blockchain Gaming Alliance; Under Armor is partnering with NBA star Steph Curry to drop new “wearable” NFT sneakers; and Elon Musk has criticized the metaverse while Jack Dorsey has criticized Web3.

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