Bullish Insights Weekly Market Recap
Aug 24, 2023 • 3 min read
The Bullish Insights Weekly Market Recap includes curated industry news and analysis from the Bullish team for the week of August 21, 2023.
Bullish exchange
This week’s peak exchange trade volume (24h): $780,539,888 (30,008 BTC) on August 23, 2023.
This week’s headlines
- FTX may look to Galaxy to hedge its BTC and ETH positions as the fallen exchange looks to possibly liquidate its $3bn holdings in crypto.
- Following OpenSea’s recent update to its royalty-option model, Rarible released a tweet stating their support in maintaining creator royalties. According to DappRadar, Rarible’s trading volume spiked by 585% on August 23.
- Circle announced in a tweet that it will launch $USDC natively on six additional chains. Those chains are: Base network, Cosmos, Near Protocol, Optimism, Polkadot and Polygon. The expansion brings Circle’s access to a total of 15 ecosystems.
- The Reserve Bank of Australia has unveiled their 44-page report with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre around CBDC’s. The pilot program highlighted four focus points where CBDC’s could help facilitate an improvement in complex payments and asset tokenization.
- Crypto scam ads from Google are becoming more prevalent with a victim recently losing close to $900,000 after being redirected to a fraud site by the search engine.
- Nathaniel Chastain, OpenSea’s former product manager has been sentenced to three months in prison and a $50,000 fine for charges of wire fraud, money laundering as well as insider trading allegations.
- Oman has reportedly spent ~$370mn in the construction of its new crypto mining facility. The centre operating in the Salalah Free Zone is anticipated to set up 15,000 mining machines by October 2023.
- The Ministry of Digital Economy and Society in Thailand has threatened legal action against Meta for Facebook’s alleged promotion of crypto scam ads on the social media platform.
- Avalanche is set to unlock 9.54 million AVAX tokens this week on August 26. The unlock makes up ~2.8% of current circulating supply.
- OpenSea’s announcement to change to a royalty-optional model on its marketplace has led to Yuga Labs decision to cut ties with the NFT platform.
- Yuga Labs noted in their tweet that the company “...believes in protecting creator royalties so creators are properly compensated for their work”
- Tron DAO’s venture arm has announced a $2 million investment into Curve. Curve will also launch its protocol on both TRON & BTTC (BitTorrent Chain).
Equity markets
- Major US stock indexes fell by over 2% last week as the August slump steepens. Meanwhile Treasury yields climbed to highs last seen in years.
- US tech stocks rebounded in Monday's session ahead of Fed Chair, Jerome Powell's speech later this Friday at the Jackson Hole conference.
- US equities edged lower in Tuesday's session after investors doubt the strength of US consumers following disappointing earnings reports from retailers.
- US equities saw a strong rebound with the S&P seeing its best day since June in Wednesday's session. Tech and real-estate stocks outperformed despite signs of an economic slowdown. The S&P 500 rose by 1.1%, the Dow gained 0.5%, and the Nasdaq Composite advanced by 1.6%.
Crypto market highlights
- The Bitcoin network's hash rate is rising again to near all-time highs. Its current level of 421.91 million h/s, is up from 364.61 million h/s yesterday and up from 210 million h/s one year ago. This indicates a change of ~16% from yesterday and 101% from one year ago.
- The supply of Bitcoin that has not been spent in 3 years or more is currently at its all-time high exceeding 40%. It appears that long-term hodling is trending upwards.
- Bitcoin dominance fell to 49.2
- Last week, digital asset investment products saw $55mn worth of outflows. Bitcoin saw majority of outflows at $42.3mn while Ethereum saw outflows of $9.0mn. Short Bitcoin saw outflows of $2.2mn. Ripple and Cardano were the only assets to see inflows of $1.2mn and $0.1mn respectively. By region, Canada and Germany saw the bulk of outflows at $35.9mn and $11.0mn respectively. Switzerland and Australia saw the largest inflows by region of $3.5mn and $0.1mn respectively.