Bullish Insights – Weekly Market Recap
Aug 19, 2022 • 2 min read
The Bullish Insights Weekly Market Recap includes curated industry news and analysis from the Bullish team for the week of August 15, 2022.
Bullish Exchange
This week’s peak trade volume (24h): August 16th, 2022, $603,803,2497
Crypto market highlights
- Ethereum open interest options reached an all-time high of $8.32bn on August 14, almost three times higher than its figure a month ago.
- Last week, digital asset investment total flows saw $17mn worth of outflows. Bitcoin saw the majority of outflows at $21mn and Ethereum saw minor inflows of $0.1mn. Short Bitcoin saw dominant inflows of $7.5mn, while other assets like Ripple, Cardano, and Tron saw inflows of $0.2mn, $0.2mn and $0.1mn respectively.
- As of August 16, a total number of 415,314 validators have staked 13.29mn ETH on the Beacon Chain marking an all-time high record. The staked ETH on the Beacon Chain represents ~11%, (~$25bn) of the total supply in circulation.
- There is speculation that when the Merge goes live, Ethereum may fork to ETHW (ETH Proof-of-Work). On-chain wallets that hold ETH may potentially be airdropped ETHW thus there may be increased demand to borrow ETH nearing the Merge as investors will want as much of the airdropped token as possible.
Macro market highlights
- Despite a slight pull-back in tech stocks, the S&P 500 rose by 0.2%, the Dow was up by 0.7%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite down by 0.2% as of August 17, 2022.
- US equity markets retreated in Wednesday's trading session after the Fed's minutes maintained tightening policy and controlling inflation as a key priority. Retail sales data indicated a decline in auto and gasoline prices where consumer spending remained resilient. The S&P 500 fell by 0.7%, the Dow was down by 0.5%, and the Nasdaq Composite retreated by 1.3%.
- Dip buyers emerged in Thursday's trading session with US equity markets back up in the green. The S&P 500 rose by 0.2%, the Dow saw little change and the Nasdaq Composite climbed 0.2%.
Other updates
- Galaxy Digital terminates its acquisition of custody platform, Bitgo. (Source: CISION)
- Tencent will be closing down its NFT marketplace, Huanhe, after only launching the platform last August. (Source: BITCOINIST)
- The Korean Financial Services Commission conducted investigations into 16 crypto firms including exchanges KuCoin, MEXC, Bitrue, Bitglobal, Poloniex, etc. for violation of the Specific Financial Information Act. (Source: News1 Korea)
- DeFi platform of Polkadot, Acala network has allegedly $1.68 aUSD, following a recent exploit where the attacker minted billions of aUSD stablecoin in exchange for other tokens. (Source: CRYPTO BRIEFING)
- When CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong was asked if he would rather censor transactions or shutdown the firm’s ETH staking business, in the event of regulatory threats, he expressed he would choose the latter. (Source: Decrypt)
To receive daily market updates, subscribe to our Bullish Insights Telegram channel.