Bullish Insights Weekly Market Recap
May 19, 2023 • 3 min read
The Bullish Insights Weekly Market Recap includes curated industry news and analysis from the Bullish team for the week of May 15, 2023.
Bullish Exchange
This week’s peak exchange trade volume 24h: $517,140,094 (18,888 BTC) on 18.05.2023.
This week’s headlines
- Tether, issuer of USDT will look to allocate 15% of its profits into bitcoin. The firm will self-custody its own BTC holdings. In Q1, 2023 it reported $1.5bn in BTC holdings.
- The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has launched the pilot of the e-HKD program. The announcement notes a possibility for the program to later expand to a retail CBDC in the future.
- Australian bank Westpac has banned its customers from their ability to complete fund transfers in relation to Binance transactions.
- Benoît de Juvigny, Secretary General of the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF) hinted at welcoming crypto firms to France as refuge from US regulatory uncertainty. “If American players want to benefit, in the very short term, from the French regime, and from the start of 2025 from European arrangements, clearly they are welcome,” Juvigny said.
- Dogecoin meme tokens which is the DRC-20 token standard inspired off Bitcoin’s BRC-20/ordinal hype, has caused the Dogecoin network to see an all-time high reaching over 719,000 daily transactions.
- ETH developers have released a patch update for last week’s finality issue on the Beacon chain that led to the impediment of the network in finalising blocks on May 11 and May 12.
- In a notice to Quadriga CX creditors issued by Ernst & Young, users of the fallen exchange are anticipated to recover 13% of their claim. A total of 17,648 claims from the Canadian exchange’s creditors were filed.
- MakerDAO announced the launch of Spark Protocol, a new lending marketplace that connects Maker’s liquidity for the lend and borrow of DAI.
Macro market highlights
- US equity markets edged higher in Monday's session after Joe Biden's meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
- US equity markets took a downhill turn in Tuesday's session while debt-ceiling negotiations halted to a standstill.
- US equity markets rebounded in Wednesday's session as debt-ceiling discussions turn positive and bank stocks gaining.
Crypto market highlights
- Back in 2018-2019 Bitcoin's drawdown reached 83.3% on day 364. Meanwhile the current crypto winter 2022-2023 saw its largest drawdown on day 378 peaking at 76.67%. While the recovery period is still underway, we do note that the severity of the drawdown has been less deep than what was seen back in 2018-2019.
- The number of wallets that hold one Bitcoin or more has now reached 1 million wallets. This may have also been exacerbated by the launch of the BRC-20 token that brought 30,000 wallets to reach the category.
- The 30-day correlation between Bitcoin and Ethereum has historically held above 80% since November 2021. This figure dipped below 80% on May 12.
Other updates
- The US SEC has deemed Filecoin as a security and thus has requested the withdrawal of Filecoin Trust’s registration statement by Greyscale. (Source: GlobeNewsWire)
- In an effort to extend its international presence, Coinbase Global has announced a no-fee purchase of USDC for Singaporean customers using SGD. Staking services will be rolled out for USDC with the company also looking to offer ETH, SOL, ADA, ATOM and XTZ. (Source: TheBlock)
- Lido V2 has officially been released updates include allowing stakers to unstake ETH and withdraw from the network as well as staking router updates for the ability to on-ramp new node operators. (Source: Lido)
- In a unanimous vote, the EU council has approved the MiCA framework (Markets in Crypto Assets
- regulation). The EU is now one of the first major region in the world to have a crypto licensing framework. (Source: Coindesk)
- South Korea’s Central Bank has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Samsung Electronics in the research of offline CBDCs. (Source: CoinTelegraph)
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