Trading Desk Market Update: 2/3

February 3, 2022

BTC is currently trading around $36,700 and ETH around $2,600.  Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are QNT, LEO, and XTZ.  The global crypto market cap is $1.77T, down 5.0% over the last day.  DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$198b and BTC dominance is around 42%.

Crypto prices are down over the last day, with the weakness due to poor tech stock performance.  Shares of PayPal fell 24% yesterday after it provided weak forward guidance and missed its user growth targets.  In addition, Meta is down 25% in early trading after reporting disappointing results after the close yesterday, which included a $10b loss on its newly-broken out augmented/virtual reality operations in 2021.  Additionally, the wormhole bridge connecting Ethereum and Solana was exploited for $326m, causing additional consternation as bridged ETH to Solana is now potentially unbacked.  All eyes now turn to tomorrow’s US employment report where yesterday’s disappointing ADP jobs report could foreshadow a weak report and potentially slightly lessen the Fed’s push to tighten monetary policy. 

Other news includes: a court victory in the US may lead to the IRS not taxing staking rewards until sold; GameStop revealed plans to launch an NFT marketplace with Immutable X; Some crypto miners in Texas are shutting down operations prior to a coming winter storm; and, controversy has broken out around the authenticity of CryptoPunks V1, potentially causing the number of Punks in the collection to double to 20,000.

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