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 24, 2023.

Bullish exchange

This week’s peak exchange trade volume (24h): $452,090,604 (15,540 BTC) on July 25, 2023.

This week’s headlines

• EraLend, a lending protocol on zkSync was recently hacked for $3.4mn where the perpetrators exploited a smart contract vulnerability manipulating the interest rate and withdrawing excess funds than what was deposited.
• The US SEC has filed further charges against another crypto firm, Quantstamp. The blockchain security company has been charged with selling unregistered securities dating back to 2017.
• Partnering with Polygon, the Bank of Italy’s innovation center will look to pilot an “institutional DeFi” platform in a regulated environment.
• Avalanche Vista a program by Avalanche aiming to target tokenized off-chain assets has $50mn approved by the Avalanche Foundation for allocation of purchases into real world assets minted on the avax chain. Assets in consideration include equity, real estate, commodities, credit etc.
• A reversal of Namibia’s original ban on cryptocurrency exchanges back in 2017 has been signed. Approved by President Hage Geingob, the bill titled “Namibia Virtual Assets Act 2023” will look to regulate crypto-related activities in the country.
• Custodian and trust provider, First Digital Group has launched FDUSD, a stablecoin backed 1:1 to the US dollar by cash and cash equivalent reserves.
• The High Court of the Republic of Singapore has ruled in a case between Bybit and a contractor that “Like any other thing in action, USDT is capable of being held on trust,” Philip Jeyaretnam, judge of the case said.
• Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin stated in a recent blog post key concerns around Worldcoin; that is, privacy, accessibility, centralization and security.
• OpenSea has launched a new feature “Deals” on the NFT marketplace which will allow users to trade one or more of their NFTs in exchange for another users NFT. The user who accepts the deal will be charged the gas fee.
• The chairman of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party highlighted in his opening address at the WebX conference in Tokyo that Web3 has the potential to transform the current framework of the internet as well as the possibility of it leading to social change.
• Ripple has announced a collaboration with SUPER HOW, a European research and development firm that explores crypto assets and CBDC’s. The collaboration project dubbed Axiology, will look at testing stablecoins and CBDCs.

Equity markets

• US equity markets closed on a higher note in Monday's session after energy and entertainment stocks rallied.
• The Dow continues its twelfth consecutive streak in the green in Tuesday's session with big tech stocks leading gains.
• Blue-chip index, the Dow continued its thirteenth consecutive streak in the green in Wednesday's session for the first time in more than 35 years. The Fed raised rates by 25bps to the highest level seen in 22 years with Powell stating hikes for the remainder of the year would be "data dependent". The S&P 500 rose by 0.3%, the Dow up by 0.1%, and the Nasdaq Composite climbed by 0.6%.

Crypto market highlights

• Bitcoin wallets that have a 1 year+ age band are currently at all-time highs. Current circulating supply (%) that was last moved on-chain: 1+ years ago is at 69.2%, 2+ yrs at 55.7%, 3+ yrs at 40.1% and 5+ yrs at 29.1%
• When observing Bitcoin's dominance in trading volume, we notice that it has dipped by 8% since the beginning of July when Ripple's ruling concluded. Altcoins subsequently rallied driving up their volume dominance while Bitcoin's volume dominance fell to 27% back to levels last seen in April.
• Since Arbitrum's mainnet launch earlier in March, its transaction count exceeded the Ethereum network and spiked to 62.5% market dominance in L2 transactions on March 23. Since then its market dominance has dipped to 31.6% overtaken by zk Sync Era who claims a 32.2% share in L2 transactions as of July 23. The L2 transaction count 3,126,694 represents over three times of that on Ethereum mainnet which only accounts for 977,300 transactions as of July 23.
• Arbitrum will have a key unlock occurring next year which will see an increase of 116.3% of the token's current circulating supply. The unlock is anticipated to add an extra 1.48bn $ARB tokens to the market. The token's current circulating supply is at 1.275bn $ARB with a maximum supply of 10bn $ARB.

Back to Market Recaps