Trading Desk Market Update: 7/20

July 20, 2022

BTC is currently trading around $23,800 and ETH around $1,600. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are OMI, FXS, and LDO. The global crypto market cap is $1.12T, up 4.2% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$87b and BTC dominance is around 43%.

Traditional markets are pointing to a calm day with global equities down slightly alongside a modest gain for bonds. Crypto is realizing another day of strong performance with bitcoin leading the charge. Bitcoin’s outperformance is a notable reversal from the recent trend that has been characterized by Ethereum performance leadership heading into the merge. 

Notable news includes: UK regulators will introduce rules for the use of stablecoins as a means of payment to parliament today; Japan’s self-regulation experiment for digital assets is allegedly unraveling as disagreements between financial regulators and industry advocates have deepened; Colombia advanced the regulatory framework for its local crypto industry; Polygon deployed a testnet for its EVM-compatible zero-knowledge rollup platform; staking company Figment revealed plans to support MEV after the Ethereum merge; Lido proposed selling 2% of LDO tokens to diversify its treasury into stablecoins; BNP Paribas reportedly entered the crypto custody space by partnering with Metaco; crypto exchange Zipmex halted withdrawals due to ‘volatile market conditions’; legal documents indicated Vauld owes more than $400m to its creditors which includes ~$363m of retail investor deposits; Binance.US launched an affiliate marketing program in the wake of Coinbase ending its program; Gemini received a virtual asset service provider license in Ireland; OKX signed a partnership with TradingView enabling OKX users to execute trades on their TradingView accounts; Coinbase, Crypto.com, and BitGo received approval to operate in Italy; Foundry launched a training program to train technicians for the crypto mining industry; 21Shares launched risk-controlled BTC and ETH ETPs targeting 40% volatility through dynamic rebalancing; blockchain security firm Halborn raised $90m in a series A round; Zebedee raised $35m to power in-game payments via the Lightning Network; DeFi infrastructure startup XLD Finance raised $13m; and, Twitter secured an October trial against Elon Musk. 

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