Powered by 21Shares
This Week in Crypto
Inflation is at a record high of 9.1% in the US, with fears next hike might be 100 basis points, although Fed officials signaled that they would stick to a 75-bp rate increase during their meeting last month. Moreover, the European Central Bank is expected to raise rates by 25 bps at its policy meeting later this week. The crypto market however has been working upwards, with Bitcoin improving by 3.6% over the past week, while Ethereum has performed exceptionally better, up by 27.3% since last Monday. The Merge inches closer towards reality after the ninth shadow fork went live on July 15. In the meantime, equities have been sluggish over the past week with S&P 500 index declining by 0.63%,the NASDAQ composite dipped by 0.56% and Dow Jones Industrial Average barely moved with a 0.18% decline.
Key Takeaways:
UK court files lawsuit against anonymous people linked to NFT airdrop
Net transfer from/to exchanges depicts moderate momentum
DeFi's blue-chips further integrating with TradFi through tokenization
Gamestop’s beta NFT marketplace doubles Coinbase’s trading volume
Polygon part of Disney Accelerator 2022 cohort
Macro, Regulations; Spot, and Derivatives Markets
In a recent report, Chainalysis revealed that 10% of all funds coming from illicit addresses are sent to crypto mixers, such as Tornado Cash and Blender.io that has been recently sanctioned by the US on the back of the infamous Axie Infinity hack, where $620M in cryptoassets were stolen. As shown below, the 30-day moving average reached an all-time high of $51.8M worth of cryptocurrency on April 19.
Figure 1. 30-day Moving Average of Total Daily Value Received by Mixers |
Russia passed a law banning digital assets as payments, making it illegal to pay for goods and services in crypto. This comes as a sharp U-turn after the Russian president legalised cryptoassets as a payment method in February, which itself was another sharp pivot from the Russian central bank's proposed ban on the mining and use of cryptocurrencies, dubbed as a strategic move to quash opposition crowdfunding donations through BTC after having their bank accounts subdued. Moreover, the Russian parliament is also considering two further bills, one regulating crypto miners and the other setting requirem