THIS WEEK IN CRYPTO
- Binance.US eliminates spot trading fees on Bitcoin. The company eliminated fees to trade Bitcoin against Tether, USD Coin, and its proprietary token, BinanceUSD. Binance.US also announced a new tiered pricing structure and said it plans to add more coins to its free-trading tier. The high fee business model for other exchanges will eventually go close to zero as the market is very competitive and is getting tighter. Read more here.
- eBay buys NFT marketplace KnownOrigin. Both companies said the deal had been signed and formally closed on Wednesday, but didn't disclose further details on the transaction, including a purchase price. The deal furthers the e-commerce company's push into the world of blockchain technology and digital collectibles. KnownOrigin enables users to create, buy and resell NFTs through blockchain-supported transactions.
- Sam Bankman-Fried bails out BlockFi and Voyager. FTX, Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, agreed to provide crypto lender BlockFi with a $250 million revolving credit facility. Meanwhile, Alameda, Bankman-Fried’s quantitative trading firm, committed $500 million in financing to Voyager Digital, a crypto brokerage. Bankman-Fried has emerged as a savior for the $900 billion crypto market as it faces a deepening liquidity crunch.
- Crypto startup FalconX raises $150 million despite market rout. FalconX is a cryptocurrency trading platform geared toward institutional investors. The financing was led by Singapore sovereign-wealth fund GIC Pte. Ltd. and B Capital Group and valued FalconX at $8 billion, more than double the valuation it received as part of a capital raise in August of last year.
Read more here. - Elon Musk intends to personally support Dogecoin. Musk explained his reasoning behind his public endorsement of the digital currency at the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha. Musk said he intends to personally support Dogecoin because he knows a lot of people who are not that wealthy who have encouraged him to buy and support Dogecoin and it was his employees around the Tesla and SpaceX factories who requested that he champion Dogecoin in the public square.
- Bitcoin holders will soon be able to store crypto at Louisiana banks under pending law. The website for the Louisiana House of Representatives shows that the Governor signed Bill 802 on June 15, 2022, and it will become law 10 days from that signing date. The intent of this new Pelican State legislation is to allow financial institutions and trust companies to serve as custodians of digital assets. Read more here.
- Cardano (ADA) delays its network upgrade until the end of July. The core Cardano development group posted a statement Monday announcing the programming slowdown. The Vasil enhancement was deployed to the Cardano testnet the first week in June to boost the overall performance of the blockchain. However, the discovery of seven bugs in the coding has since triggered the delay in the project's live rollout.
- Nexo hires Citigroup to advise on acquisitions. The crypto lending platform is working with banking giant Citigroup as it pursues a consolidation of other crypto lenders hit by the recent market downturn. The company also later announced the information in a blog post. The news comes weeks after rival lending platform Celsius Network halted customer withdrawals, spurring speculation of insolvency.
- The crypto lending platform issue is contagious. Alameda has written a check to prevent Voyager and BlockFi from defaulting. The question is if this is the only issue. There are still several other lending projects out there including Nexo, Lendabit, crypto.com, and more all offering “double-digit returns” which makes little sense. It's clearly not a one-off issue and the cascading effects of leverage will reveal soon. Read more here.
- Polygon surges 25% on two catalysts. First, on-chain data from Santiment has shown that MATIC whales have added an aggregate of 8.7% to their portfolios over the past month and a half. Secondly, Polygon has announced that it has retired $400,000 in carbon credits. This equates to nearly 105,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases, or more than the entire network's carbon emissions since inception. Read more here.
- Solend tried to take over a ‘whale’ account. The lending platform built on the Solana blockchain said that if SOL drops to $22.30, the whale’s account becomes liquidatable for up to 20% of their borrows (~$21M). It’d be difficult for the market to absorb such an impact since liquidators generally market sell on DEXes. Solend passed a proposal granting it emergency powers to take over the whale account, an unprecedented move in the DeFi world. Read more here.
- ETF that bets against Bitcoin lauches. ProShares launched on Tuesday a short-Bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund, called Short Bitcoin Strategy. The ETF, which will have the ticker BITI, seeks to track the inverse performance of the S&P CME Bitcoin Futures Index and will have an expense ratio of 0.95%. For ETF investors, the usual benefits and risks of an inverse ETF apply.
- Solana-based NFT marketplace Magic Eden has raised a $130M Series B at a $1.6B valuation. Magic Eden is the number one player on Solana as a secondary NFT marketplace with over 7000 collections. It is responsible for 92% of all Solana-based NFT volume. As of June 1st, it made up almost 97% of the market share for daily Solana NFT transactions. Source(51:07)
- South Korean prosecutors have banned Terraform Labs employees from leaving the country. The South Korean government placed a travel ban on dozens of current and former Terraform Labs employees. The no-flight ban came after a special financial crimes unit in the prosecutor's office launched an investigation last month into complaints filed on behalf of 81 investors. Source(46:02)
