THIS WEEK IN CRYPTO

  • Fantom stablecoin DEI becomes the latest to lose dollar peg. It fell below its peg, possibly due to panicked investors wanting to sell their DEI for something backed by a more reliable asset, in the wake of Luna's fall. The selling-off, of course, resulted in further price drops. The coin, which had been sitting comfortably at $0.99, plummeted to $0.55, officially unstabilizing the stablecoin.

  • Biden administration wants crypto exchanges to separate customer and corporate funds. The plan could constrain the way the industry does business. Spurred by Coinbase’s recent disclosure that customers’ money would be jammed up if the company declared bankruptcy, federal officials intend to push U.S. lawmakers to fix the problem by insisting that a future legal framework requires crypto firms to keep customer assets walled off.

  • Investors withdrew over $7 billion from Tether. Its circulating supply has slipped from about $83 billion a week ago to less than $76 billion on Tuesday, according to data from CoinGecko. The situation has once again placed the subject of the reserves behind tether under the spotlight. Paolo Ardoino, the company’s chief technology officer, insists that its token was “fully backed” and had redeemed $7 billion in the past 48 hours.

  • Bitcoin production roars back in China despite Beijing’s ban on crypto mining. Underground mining operations have since emerged in the country, with miners taking care to work around Beijing’s ban. New research from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance shows that Chinese bitcoin mining activity has quickly rebounded. China now makes up over 22% of the total bitcoin mining market.

  • Robinhood to let users hold their own crypto and NFTs. The firm will launch a stand-alone app that lets users have custody of their own cryptocurrencies and NFTs, putting it squarely in competition with Coinbase. The self-custody wallets also will accelerate the company’s international launch. It’s the brokerage firm’s latest move into digital assets as it searches for growth beyond stock trading. Read more here.

  • Crypto funds keep raising money, despite the market meltdown. Venture funds focused on crypto raised $11.92 billion in Q1 of this year, about 24 times the amount raised in Q1 of 2021, according to Dove Metrics, a crypto fundraising database. The money went to crypto and blockchain startups that raised more than $9 billion in equity deals during the first quarter, more than double the total raised in Q1 of 2021. Read more here.

  • MicroStrategy won’t change Bitcoin plans despite recent declines. The company's new chief financial officer on Wednesday said its strategy to buy and hold bitcoin long term won’t change despite the recent selloff in the digital asset, which has dented the value of the analytics-software company’s holdings. He said that there are no scenarios that they would sell.

  • Crypto mining is flocking to the U.S. The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance said on Tuesday that the U.S. held nearly 39% of the world’s Bitcoin mining power in January, up from 35% in August and from 17% in April. More mining power in the U.S. is good for publicly traded Bitcoin miners, like Marathon Digital Holdings, Riot Blockchain, or Core Scientific. That means more potential Bitcoins for mining rigs in America. Read more here.

  • S&P Global Ratings forms a DeFi group to build out a crypto framework. The company’s ratings division has created a Decentralized Finance strategy group to help build the company’s decentralized market framework for investors. The team seeks to build out S&P’s analytics and risk assessment capabilities for both traditional finance and DeFi clients. Read more here.

  • Crypto markets are becoming more efficient. With LUNA out of the equation for the BTC exogenous risk, you’re seeing ETH price in a lot of the exogenous risk. DeFi has a lot of pending headaches: 1) stable coin regulation; 2) more stable issues such as the $DEI blow up, 3) LIDO and st-ETH starting to break down and 4) potential selling pressure post-ETH-merge. Read more here.
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