Crypto

• Last year, Coinbase had marketers purring when they spent their 30 second allocated slot during the Super Bowl with a simple floating QR code which redirected a reported 60 million people to their platform.
• That’s pretty good cost-per-click and marketers worldwide were pointing to it as an incredibly simple but effective campaign.
• This year, unsurprisingly, we saw very few crypto ads during the Super Bowl. The market is down and crypto companies are protecting runway.

• Price Movements: cbETH, Coinbase’s liquid staking derivative, started trading at a discount after news broke that the SEC had fined Kraken $30mn. 
• Market Liquidity: LocalBitcoins shut down after 10 years of service after competition and a prolonged bear market sapped trade volume. 
• Derivatives: ETH options markets look bullish but more volatile than BTC. 

• Wash trading was at one point a pervasive problem in cryptocurrency markets.
• Today, most major exchanges have strict anti-wash trading measures, which has drastically reduced the problem since the ICO-led trading boom of 2017-18.
• Yet, due to the relatively low barriers to entry for launching an exchange, this type of market manipulation is far from eradicated on lesser-known, unregulated venues. 

• Beijing’s city market regulator has warned the public to steer clear of firms promising big returns with little risk from investments in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and the metaverse.
• The statement is the latest indication that China’s watchdogs are unlikely to change their stance on speculative investments like NFTs, a form of digital token, anytime soon.
• The latest warning comes less than two years after China outlawed cryptocurrency trading and mining, also seeking to stamp out rampant speculative investment in virtual currencies like bitcoin and ether.

• Investors will remember 2022 as the first real credit crisis that bitcoin and the broader crypto space have suffered. In historical terms, it was a significant year.
• The ensuing deleveraging eliminated many entities that got overzealous in the bull market and didn’t adjust their strategies to new market conditions.
• Almost the entirety of those now-insolvent entities were centralised conduits to the world of blockchain and digital assets. 

• Price Movements: DYDX has rallied 130% since the decentralized exchange announced they would postpone a planned unlock for the token. 
• Market Liquidity: BUSD’s market share has held steady since Binance admitted to mismanaging reserves.
• Derivatives: The open interest to market cap ratio suggests Optimism’s OP token is highly leveraged. 

• This piece was originally going to compare the average and median size of liquidity events – meaning any mint (deposit) or burn (withdrawal) to/from a DEX liquidity pool – on the most popular Ethereum DEXs: Uniswap V3, V2, and Curve. 
• There have been some excellent Twitter threads comparing DEXs and considering whether providing liquidity on Uniswap V3 can be profitable.
• But after taking a look at the Uniswap V3 liquidity event data, it became clear that I had to write about an under-explored and rapidly developing topic: just-in-time (JIT) liquidity.

• At long last — after months of rumours — Sorare and the English Premier League (EPL) have finally announced their exclusive multi-year deal thought to be worth £30m per year.
• For Sorare, this was the final piece to the puzzle. That final big deal in Soccer that they wanted to get over the line.
• Just over 4 years from inception, they now have deals in place with almost every top flight club and league in the world.

• What is Kyber Network and how does it work?
• The relatively old protocol might not be the most popular option with its meager $15 million TVL, but future updates have the potential to turn Kyber into a liquidity hub for the entire DeFi market.
• There are almost too many decentralized exchanges in DeFi, which contributes to a rising problem of liquidity balkanization.

• Are NFTs more than just pictures issued on a blockchain?
• There must be surely something more to non-fungible tokens, given that one sold for $69 million last week. Not an avid reader? That’s fine.
• You can also learn about NFTs in video format! Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have, for better or worse, expanded into new territory: mainstream circles.

• Even if the Tether FUD is only typical FUD, we still have to search for other healthy alternatives that help investors with hedging against the market.
• For some, algorithmic stablecoins are the best option and one popular project that stands out is Frax Finance.
• Without a shadow of a doubt, stablecoins are the most boring type of cryptocurrencies.

As of recently, Binance Smart Chain’s elusive PancakeSwap became quite popular among DeFi investors, reaching a level where it competes against traditional DEX options like Uniswap and SushiSwap.

Did PancakeSwap rightfully earn its fame and if so, how?

PancakeSwap is a decentralized exchange on Binance Smart Chain, one of Ethereum’s top competitors.

• Rocket Pool is undoubtedly the most popular name in the arena of Ethereum 2.0 staking pools, but how does it work and is it secure enough for beginners?
• Ethereum 2.0 is here, and everyone is now interested in making profits from their existing crypto assets by staking.
• Ethereum 2.0 is here, and everyone is now interested in making profits from their existing crypto assets by staking.

• Price Movements: BTC gained another 10% this week despite news that Genesis had filed for bankruptcy, with a reported $5bn in liabilities.
• Market Liquidity: Trade volume on the largest Asia-based exchanges fell to multi-year lows amid a tough regulatory environment in the region. 
• Derivatives: BTC open interest has dropped 25% as a short squeeze hits derivatives traders.

• In six years, stablecoins have grown from making up just 1.5% of BTC trade volume relative to fiat currencies such as the Dollar or Euro, to more than 87%.
• This has been matched with an explosion in market capitalization for the three largest centralized stablecoins: Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), and Binance USD (BUSD).
• The three had a combined market cap of $10bn in May 2020, the start of DeFi Summer.

• The crypto lending market has been decimated with casualties from both lenders and borrowers after the FTX fallout and credit crisis. 
• Most centralized lenders have been annihilated while DeFi platforms withstood the shock. The demand for lending has cratered and this will test the viability of existing platforms given lower volumes.
• However, we will likely see new platforms emerge that have the necessary lending, trading and risk management expertise from traditional finance that could propel further institutional participation in crypto. 

• ZaynFi, a stablecoin yield optimiser on BNB Chain, has announced a US$600,000 funding led by Cur8 Capital, the venture investing arm of UK-based Islamic Finance Guru.
• Started by Syakir Hashim and Aziz Zainuddin, ZaynFi is a DeFi protocol that helps users stake stablecoins safely and simply for top-of-the-range returns on the Binance Chain.
• According to the company, it helps users stake into the best liquidity pools across popular decentralised exchanges, enabling trades to happen while earning trading fees and rewards.