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 August 14, 2023.

Bullish exchange

This week’s peak exchange trade volume (24h): $433,654,604 (15,140 BTC) on August 17, 2023.

This week’s headlines

• BitGo Inc. raised $100 million at a valuation of $1.75 billion from new investors. CEO Mike Belshe acknowledges the challenges of the current market but emphasizes that BitGo's focus on obtaining licenses and adhering to regulations has helped it differentiate itself in the uncertain legal landscape surrounding digital assets.
• The latest L1 blockchain Sei has launched on Mainnet after its Testnet saw over 7.5 million wallets created. The protocol is invested by Jump, Flow Traders and Multicoin Capital.
• One of Base networks DEX protocol RocketSwap has been exploited for ~$865K, 471 ETH hacked.
• In a recent blog, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin wrote about Community Notes, a fact-checking tool. He noted that while it is not a crypto project, “Community Notes are not written or curated by some centrally selected set of experts; rather, they can be written and voted on by anyone, and which notes are shown or not shown is decided entirely by an open source algorithm.”
• The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) released updated regulatory framework around stablecoin requirements. Issuers will need to fulfill core requirements around 1. Value stability 2. Capital 3. Redemption at Par and 4. Disclosure.
• In a bid to promote Dubai as a global tech hub, the city has offered a 90% subsidy of commercial licenses to AI and Web3 businesses.
• Since launching their own stablecoin, the PYUSD, PayPal has incorporated a new feature in their terms and conditions which would open up the sale and purchase of crypto for select users that meet certain prerequisites.
• Coca-Cola has officially launched its first NFT collection on the Base network, Coinbase’s L2 blockchain.
• DeFi project, Zunami Protocol has been reportedly hacked for an estimated $2.1mn according to PeckShield. The protocol confirmed there was an exploit in one of it’s stablecoin pools earlier on Sunday.
• Crypto exchange HKVAX announced that it received an in-principle approval by the Hong Kong regulator, the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) for Type 1 and Type 7 activities.

Equity markets

• US equity markets closed on a mixed note in last Friday's session with tech stocks down and consumer sentiment data showing signs of downturn from a near two-year high.
• US equity markets closed higher in Monday's session with tech stocks leading the recovery.
• US equity markets closed lower in Tuesday's session with retail sales data showing an increase of 0.7% in July.
• US equity markets closed lower in Wednesday's session after hawkish comments from the Fed were digested by investors. The S&P 500 was down by 0.8%, the Dow fell by 0.5%, and the Nasdaq Composite retreated by 1.2%

Crypto market highlights

• In regards to the current top 25 projects in daily TVL (Total Value Locked), Lido Finance holds clear dominance with $14.9bn in TVL followed by MakerDAO with $5.9bn and Aave $4.8bn respectively. On a year-to-date basis, Lido Finance has seen a significant rise in TVL by 2.6x from $5.8bn on January 1, 2023 to $14.9bn. MakerDAO saw little change still at ~$5.9bn while Aave gained $1bn and Curve Protocol dipped from $3.6bn to $2.4bn over the same period.
• Similar to the VIX that tracks the market's expectation of volatility of the S&P 500 over the next 30 days, the Crypto Volatility Index (CVI) attempts to create a benchmark of volatility in the crypto market. The CVI tracks the 30-day implied volatility of BTC and ETH to create an index from 0 to 200. 0 indicates the lowest level of volatility while 200 represents the maximum level of volatility. CVI has been oscillating between 40 and 34 in the past to extreme lows, indicating that volatility in the asset class has dipped to near all-time lows.
• Lido protocol still makes up the largest market share in ETH stakers controlling 31.8% dominance. Second place is Coinbase with 9.1% followed by Binance with 4.9%. In terms of the one month change in ETH stakers where the change exceeds 10,000 ETH tokens, Lido gained over 400K ETH
  while Figment gained over 175K ETH and Coinbase suffered net withdrawals of -54,784 ETH.

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