BTC is currently trading around $21,000 and ETH around $1,250. Notable gainers in the last 24 hours are LDO, QNT, and AAVE. The global crypto market cap is $979b, up 5.1% over the last day. DeFi Total Value Locked is ~$77b and BTC dominance is around 44%.
Risk markets are having a positive day as global equities are up 0.5% to 1.5%, crypto is up 5.1%, and global bonds are mostly flat. Ethereum was a top-performing coin over the last day (+13.4%) with performance likely being driven by optimism ahead of mainnet’s merge. Ethereum’s ninth shadow fork was completed yesterday, and a more transparent roadmap was released indicating the merge is expected to commence on September 19th.
Notable news includes: More than 2.6m users signed up for the city of Shenzhen’s digital yuan airdrop; UK government-backed Millicent Labs demoed a privately issued fiat-pegged stablecoin backed by cash deposits secured in a central bank account; The CFTC labeled 34 crypto and forex firms as unregistered foreign entities; The Financial Planning Association of Australia called for regulating exchanges instead of crypto assets directly; Circle disclosed the full breakdown of USDC reserves for the first time, indicating the stablecoin is entirely backed by a mix of cash and 3-month treasuries; the New York Yankees partnered with NYDIG to give players and employees the opportunity to receive portions of their salary in bitcoin; Celsius acknowledged the $1.2b hole in its balance sheet; CoinFLEX reopened limited customer withdrawals; MakerDAO voted to approve the creation of a real-world asset vault dedicated to SocGen’s digital asset subsidiary; Celo network is back online after a 24-hour outage; OpenSea laid off 20% of its staff citing “crypto winter”; GameStop’s NFT marketplace realized more NFT sales in its first two days than Coinbase’s first two months; PROOF, the team behind Moonbirds, acquired NFT engineering team Divergence; Indian blockchain firm 5ire secured $100m to fund sustainability-focused projects; UnCaged Studios raised $24m to support web3 game developers; NFT membership platform Hang raised $16m; NFT financing platform Supermojo raised $6m; and, Bitfinex donated 36 bitcoin to support economic development in areas of El Salvador that have struggled with gang violence.
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