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 July 3, 2023.

Bullish exchange

This week’s peak exchange trade volume (24h): $529,506,809 (17,065 BTC)) on July 4, 2023.

This week's headlines

• The SEC in Thailand has introduced a ban of crypto companies offering any lending services to customers. The ban is set to take effect from July 31.
• BlackRock has refiled for its spot Bitcoin ETF naming Coinbase as an intermediary.
• After crypto management tool Bakt, delisted ADA, SOL and MATIC, Revolut has also notified its customers that they will no longer support the token after the SEC’s crackdown on alt coins.
• Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, has appeared to soften his tone on crypto calling the firm’s recent spot filing as a way to democratize and make it cheaper for investors. He also noted that Bitcoin had a role in “digitizing gold”.
• USDC issuer Circle is looking at potentially creating a Japanese stablecoin after clarity with a stablecoin framework was established in the country earlier on June 1 this year
• Blur, the NFT marketplace that launched late last year to rival OpenSea has issued a V2 update to its platform. Gas fees for trades on the platform have been cut by 50% and trait bidding are the two main features of the new update.
• DeFi platform Poly Network has been hacked again. This time over US$4.39mn has been exploited. Some of the tokens have been swapped on Uniswap and PancakeSwap with the hacker using other platforms like Tornado Cash, Kucoin, FixedFloat etc.
• The Hong Kong government has announced that it has established a task force of 15 non-official members, chaired by Financial Secretary Paul Chan to promote the development of Web3 in the city. Chan said “With the task force bringing together leaders and professionals in the sectors involved, I believe their valuable advice will help Hong Kong develop into a Web3 hub".

Equity markets

• US equity markets started the week off on a high note in Monday's session despite a slowdown in manufacturing data.
• US equity markets closed lower in Wednesday's session after FOMC minutes signalled a potential rate hike for July. The S&P 500 fell by 0.2%, the Dow retreated by 0.4%, and the Nasdaq Composite dipped by 0.2%.

Crypto market highlights

• The total spot trading volume for BTC and ETH (7 day MA) has been consistently dwindling below US$10bn since the end of March this year. In contrast, Bitcoin futures and ETH futures open interest has been trending upwards (mainly BTC) over the same period.
• Last week, for the second consecutive week, digital asset investment products saw another round of inflows at US$125mn. Bitcoin saw majority of inflows of $123mn, Ethereum saw minor inflows of $2.7mn and contrastingly short bitcoin also saw outflows of $0.9mn. Other alts like Cardano, Ripple and Litecoin saw inflows of $0.9mn, $0.4mn and $0.3mn respectively. By region, Germany and Canada saw the bulk of inflows at $64.8mn and $34.7mn respectively. Sweden and Brazil saw the largest outflows by region of $3.1mn and $2.2mn respectively.
• Bitcoin perps funding rate 14 day MA has largely been positive since the beginning of this year except for a brief period earlier in March. This indicates that longs are paying shorts. The number of open BTC perp contracts in USD terms has also trended upwards to a YTD high. In BTC terms however, the number of open BTC futures perp contracts remains flattish YTD.

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