Bullish Insights – Weekly Market Recap

Feb 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 February 20, 2023.

Bullish Exchange

This week’s peak trade volume (24h): February 24, 2023, $830,757,022 (34,798 BTC)

Crypto market highlights

Layer-2 transactions have exceeded Ethereum's mainnet transactions by over 40%. Arbitrum dominates Layer-2 transactions holding a 71.6% market share as of February 22.
Within Arbitrum, Uniswap V3 ranks as number one in terms of the number of unique active wallets interacting the platform. The trend of L2 transaction dominance restarted on February 17 and is still currently in its seventh consecutive day. This is the longest streak breaking January's record of five consecutive days.
Blur, the latest NFT marketplace to rival OpenSea has seen a 525% increase in trading volume in the past 7 days, compared to OpenSea up by 221%. The new protocol is aimed at "pro traders" enabling them to sweep the floor on NFT collections, with sniping and dashboard analytics for users. Blur has already airdropped 360,000,000 $BLUR tokens to the community in season one. The increased volume could be due to the anticipated season two airdrop.
Old coin supply measures the number of Bitcoin older than 6 months that has not been active. Generally speaking in bear markets, old coins grow in volume indicating a decreasing active supply. In bull markets, they decrease as investors take profit. Despite this past week's rally, old coins have been mainly dormant nearing an ATH of 15 million BTC. Supply older than 1-year did see an ATH break above 12.91 million BTC this week.

Macro market highlights

Growing concern that the Fed will draw out rate hikes for longer led US equity markets to record its worst session of the year on Tuesday.
US equity markets saw mixed performance as the Fed maintained their stance on taming inflation in its Wednesday meeting minutes. The S&P 500 was down by 0.2%, the Dow dipped by 0.3%, and the Nasdaq Composite advanced by 0.1%.
On Friday, US equity markets saw a slight rebound as 4Q2022 GDP came in at 2.7% below expectations of the initial 2.9%. The S&P 500 was up by 0.5%, the Dow rose by 0.3%, and the Nasdaq Composite advanced by 0.7%.

Other updates

Ordinal inscriptions are the latest craze on the Bitcoin network. Similar to NFTs but instead on the Bitcoin network, ordinal inscriptions can be fractionalised into the smallest denomination of BTC called Satoshis enabling digital assets to be inscribed. The Bitcoin network has seen over 150,000 inscriptions. (Source: Yahoo Finance)
ETHSign, an electronic signature protocol, has raised a total of $14 million to date. Investors include Animoca Brands for an undisclosed amount. Under the protocol, TokenTable launched its beta platform last week allowing legal agreements to be embedded in smart contracts. (Source: The Block)
Charles Cascarilla, Paxos CEO has severed ties with Binance, noting “The market has evolved and the Binance relationship no longer aligns with our strategic priorities.” (Source: The Block)
FTX Japan is set to resume withdrawals for Japanese customers on February 21. Withdrawals will be processed through the Liquid Japan platform with customers having to confirm their balance and create an account if they have not done so. (Source: The Block)
The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission released a consultation paper on digital assets. The paper outlined that retail investors will be able to participate in trading large-cap tokens such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Crypto exchange, Huobi Global announced they will be applying for a Hong Kong license to be able to reach a wider range of customers in the region.
Justin Sun told Nikkei Asia in an interview that Huobi Global is looking to relocate their headquarters from Singapore to Hong Kong. He also noted the firm has applied for a crypto trading license and will be targeting high-net worth individuals as well as institutional investors. (Source: Forkast)
ASIC, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission launched a review into Binance’s business in the nation after scrutiny around the exchange’s classification of retail versus wholesale customers was flagged. The exchange has since stated it has shut down certain users and closed out their positions as they were in the incorrect category as wholesale. (Source: Bloomberg)

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