Bullish Insights Weekly Market Recap

The Bullish Insights Weekly Market Recap includes curated industry news and analysis from the Bullish team for the week of May 8, 2023.

Bullish Exchange

This week’s peak exchange trade volume 24h: $836,699,045 (30,550 BTC) on 11.05.2023.

This week’s headlines

• MakerDAO announced the launch of Spark Protocol, a new lending marketplace that connects Maker’s liquidity for the lend and borrow of DAI.
• According to a survey conducted by Goldman Sachs, ~26% of family offices have crypto investment exposure however, the number of participants that have no interest in entering the asset class also rose to 62% from 39% two years prior.
• Bloomberg reported that both market makers Jane Street and Jump have allegedly been scaling down their digital assets trading fearing for further regulatory crackdown in the US.
• PayPal’s SEC 10-Q filing indicates the firm held close to $1bn in crypto assets on its balance sheet. Assets were BTC, ETH, BCH and LTC.
• Stablecoin provider Tether has reported 1Q2023 net profit as $1.5bn with its reserves surplus reaching $2.4bn, an all-time high for the firm.
• The US IRS (Internal Revenue Services) has lodged a total of almost $44bn in unpaid taxes against FTX and Alameda Research.
• Marathon Digital has been issued a subpoena from the US SEC. The subpoena is in relation to whether the crypto mining firm had violated federal securities law.
• A US SEC filing by asset manager Franklin Templeton revealed that the firm intends to launch a private equity fund, Blockchain Fund II . This follows their first fund launched back in 2021.
• The National Blockchain Technology Innovation Center in Beijing has officially started its work in the Chinese capital. The centre will reportedly looking to provide training in DLT tech to 500,000 specialists.

Macro market highlights

• US equity markets saw mixed performance in Monday's session with tech stocks outperforming.
• US equity markets saw downside correction in Tuesday's session with regional bank stocks taking a hit after seeing earlier gains.
• US equity markets closed Wednesday's session on mostly gains after CPI figures came in at 4.9% YoY for April below estimates of 5.0%.
• US equity markets closed on a mixed note in Thursday's session as investors process initial jobless claims data signaling an increase of unemployment benefit filings by 22,000 indicating a rise in lay-offs. The S&P 500 fell by 0.2%, the Dow dipped 0.7% and the Nasdaq Composite climbed by 0.2%.

Crypto market highlights

• Last week we raised the increase in demand for block space on the Bitcoin network driven by BRC-20 tokens. As a result Bitcoin miners have seen a rise in revenue with the average fee reward per block reaching 2.905 BTC. These levels are close to previous bull market peaks.
• The number of Bitcoin transactions peaked to 521,848 on May 9 nearing its historic all-time high set earlier in May. Majority of the transactions were made up of ordinal NFTs and BRC-20 token transactions which were criticized as junk congesting the Bitcoin network.
• After the Shapella upgrade, the amount of ETH staked had largely been negative but has recently since May 9 turned positive. The total amount of $ETH staked exceeds 19mn tokens with over 600,000 validators on the network. The % of total ETH staked makes up ~16% of supply.
• The % of BTC supply held on exchanges has fallen to 2017 levels. According to Glassnode data, the metric has dropped to ~12% as of May 11. This might be an indication that investors may be increasingly turning to self-custody.

Other updates

• MetaMask’s PayPal integration that was announced last December will be rolling out to US customers, enabling them to purchase ETH tokens. (Source: Coinspeaker)
• The National Blockchain Technology Innovation Center in Beijing has officially started its work in the Chinese capital. The centre will reportedly looking to provide training in DLT tech to 500,000 specialists. (Source: CoinTelegraph)
• The hype from memecoin’s have driven validator earnings on the Ethereum network to $46mn over the first week of May. (Source: CoinTelegraph)

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