AROUND THE BLOCK - MAY 17, 2022

May 17, 2022 - 4 min
AROUND THE BLOCK - MAY 17, 2022

Will Bitcoin Stem Its Decline This Week? 📉

  • Bitcoin had its 7th straight week in red for the first time
  • The 90-day correlation between Bitcoin and Nasdaq (0.91) continues to hold. As QQQ jumped over $300 this morning, Bitcoin followed it over $30,000.
  • Investors flee from risker Alts towards Bitcoin whose share of the crypto market . cap (44.21%) continued to increase in recent weeks.
  • Ethereum which had held up well against Bitcoin in recent weeks is nearing a key trendline established in August 2021.
  • Bitcoin’s daily transaction volume surged 76% driven by a 72% increase in average transaction values despite a relatively small increase in mean transaction fees.

Daily News 🚨🗞🚨

  • Primer.io, the world’s first no-code automation platform for payments and commerce, has partnered with OpenNode to empower merchants to accept $BTC as payment.
  • Jack Dorsey’s Square May Provide Liquidity for Lightning Network Payment Channels in Near Future
  • May 16 marked the start of a 3-day bitcoin conference in El Salvador comprising 32 central banks and 12 financial authorities (44 ‘developing’ countries) to discuss the merits of Bitcoin and the potential for financial inclusivity. The team behind Bitcoin Beach, providing community banking solutions to underserved communities in El Zonte, will be featured at the event. Their core product is the Bitcoin Beach Wallet built on the Lightning Network to enable lower-cost transactions for residents and proposes a novel system of Community Custody harkening back to the era of Union Banks.
  • Cloudflare, a CDN and DDoS mitigation company, which handles ~20% of all internet traffic, will launch, and fully stake, Ethereum validator nodes on the Cloudflare global network as the community approaches its transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake with “The Merge.”
Background: Cloudflare has a long history of supporting Web3 development. In 2018, Cloudflare announced an HTTPS gateway for IPFS, a decentralized storage protocol that is often used to securely store data (e.g. for NFTs). In 2019, they followed this up with an Ethereum Gateway that would allow easier access to the Ethereum network. Similarly in 2021, unveiled a new indexing service that would enable connectivity between domains hosted on the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS).
  • Coinbase will begin allowing a small subset of its app users to access Ethereum dApps directly, thereby allowing users to purchase NFTs directly on platforms such as OpeanSea, trade on DEXs such as Uniswap and SushiSwap, and borrow/lend on Curve and Compound. ASIDE: Surprisingly, they still haven’t enabled low-cost withdrawals for $MATIC on the Polygon Network.
  • On May 12, Tether ($USDT) - the largest stablecoin provider in the market - briefly lost its 1 USDT - $1 USD peg, falling as low as 95¢. Tether has previously withstood downturns in 2018 and 2020 but has faced accusations of unsound accounting related to its “commercial paper” holdings which it slashed by 21% in Q4 2021. Recent figures suggest that digital investors redeemed (converted to Fiat) $7.6bn of USDT, suggesting that the company has paid out a sum almost twice its total cash holdings to spooked depositors.
  • Grayscale officially announced its first European ETF, called Grayscale Future of Finance UCITS ETF, which will be listed on major European stock exchanges, including the London Stock Exchange, Borsa Italiana as well as Deutsche Börse’s electronic trading platform Xetra.

Regulatory Updates 👮‍♀️👮‍♀️👮‍♀️

  • Bancor launches their V3 and tells CT that they will unveil the new version at Permissionless.
  • 1inch has voted to add Balancer Boosted pools to their aggregator. If 1inch successfully integrates Balancer pools within three weeks of this proposal, Balancer will reward 1inch with 20k BAL tokens. This proposal specifically selects two stablecoin boosted pools with 350m TVL that 1inch will initially add to their aggregator.
  • DEI, an algorithmic cross-chain fractional-reserve stablecoin by Deus Finance, becomes the latest algorithmic stablecoin to lose $1 peg, falling under 70¢.
  • Digital asset custody platform Fireblocks has launched a new web3 platform, with a suite of tools for developers to build DeFi, GameFi and NFT products and services.
  • NEAR developers to get seamless Web3 app deployment with Pocket Network allowing them to deploy their applications on other supported blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon etc.
  • Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon outlined a proposed fork for the Terra blockchain. The Terra community appears to be against the idea, favouring a token burn solution instead.
  • Parallel Finance is an institutional-grade lending protocol that specializes in decentralized finance-related services and products, recently secured Polkadot’s 16th Parachain Slot. It is currently offering some of the highest staking APYs for $DOT and $KSM.
  • GameFi seems to be in a lull. The number of active users decreased by 24.9% between March and April, continuing a downtrend seen since since October, despite an increase in the number of games. However, individual projects continue to shine as the Polygon gaming ecosystem saw 25% more new users, led by Crazy Defense Heroes and Pegaxy.
  • Index Coop is set to launch a basis-trading product known as BASIS-ETH, achieving price-neutral profit by arbing the difference between an asset price on the spot and near-term futures markets.

Deals and Investments 💸💰💸

From the Twitterverse ⭐️🐦⭐️