Daily Market Update: June 20, 2023

June 20, 2023

BTC is currently trading around $26,800 and ETH around $1,700. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are STX, FXS, and KAS. The global crypto market cap is ~$1.11T, up ~0.7% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$42b and BTC dominance is around 50%.

It’s a short week for markets, with Juneteenth yesterday in the U.S. and the Dragon Boat Festival in China on Thursday and Friday. Nevertheless, it’s a busy week from an inflation and monetary policy perspective. Tomorrow brings UK CPI and the start of two days of Congressional testimony for Fed Chair Powell. Interest rate decisions from the BoE and SNB will follow on Thursday, and both monetary authorities are expected to hike by 25 bps. Turning to performance, equities are modestly down, while crypto has a small headline gain as bitcoin gains offset losses from most other tokens. In fact, Bitcoin dominance breached 50% for the first time since April 2021 on the back of the BlackRock filing.

Notable news includes: Deutsche Bank applied for a digital asset custody license in Germany; the Citadel-backed crypto exchange EDX Markets went live;   a judge signed off on the Binance.US and SEC deal that would move all customer funds and keys back onshore in lieu of a restraining order; BNB Chain introduced a layer 2 testnet powered by Optimism’s OP Stack;  Binance began integrating Bitcoin’s Lightning Network to ease deposits and withdrawals; GBTC jumped more than 12% on Friday after BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF filing provided optimism of a potential approval; Ethereum core devs proposed raising the maximum effective balance placed on validators from 32 to 2,048 ETH; Cosmos’s Osmosis DEX cut its inflation rate by 50% and plans fee sharing in its OSMO 2.0 update; FTX billed more than $120m of advisor fees during the three month period from February to April; crypto investment products experienced their ninth week of consecutive outflows; renewable Bitcoin miner Arkon expanded to the U.S. after raising $26m in new funding; another CryptoPunk NFT was burned on Ethereum and migrated to Bitcoin; CertiK received a $500k bug bounty after uncovering a critical Sui vulnerability; onchain crypto sleuth ZachXBT raised more than $1m from the crypto community to support his legal defense after being doxxed and sued for defamation by MachiBigBrother; and, Do Kwon was sentenced to four months in prison on passport forgery charges.

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Authors:
Matt Kunke, Research Analyst | TwitterTelegramLinkedIn
Brian Rudick, Senior Strategist | TwitterTelegramLinkedIn

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