Something to remember: 

“The truth suffers from too much analysis”

Week Ahead

What’s driving markets?

• Crypto Market volatility (CVI) remains near multi-year lows. This appears to be the least volatile year in terms of price action in crypto history

• Bitcoin (BTC) and Nasdaq spot price correlation at multi-year lows. This week saw Fitch downgrade the US long-term credit issuer rating and a lackluster AAPL earnings report, which dragged down equity markets. 

• US CPI data will be released this Thursday. This past week, many big banks altered their forecasts to predict the probability of a recession being much lower than previously thought

• Ark 21Shares Bitcoin ETF Re-filing date August 13th

• Crypto markets are optimistic that a Bitcoin spot ETF is coming before the end of this year. The question is whether markets have accurately priced in the probability of the ARK ETF being approved later this week. Optimistic speculators have been piling into BTC ahead of decision dates, hoping to front run post-launch ETF flows. In addition to the flows themselves, the approval of a crypto spot ETF would be a significant step towards the validation of crypto as an asset class

Catalysts

Charts

Q2 2023 had the lowest overall CEX traded volume since Q4 2020 ($1.6T). This is due in part to Binance rolling back no-fee trading- Binance’s volume dropped ~70%

Binance still has a 52% spot market share, although it is down from 63% volume dominance in January ’23. Bybit, Coinbase and OKX have each won pieces of their market share.

Binance (53%), OKX (15%), Bybit (12%) and Bitget (12%) make up >90% of perpetual derivatives volume. Overall derivatives volume is up slightly since the beginning of the year

Many of the largest startups in crypto have failed to raise capital at an increased valuation since last year. Take a look at some recent secondary market offers for shares in popular venture-backed projects

Research Content

• Curve Pool Reentrancy bug Post-Mortem by Defillama team

• Crypto VC monthly funding report

• Polygon ZkEVM team accuses zkSync of copying Plonky2 source code for their new prover, Boojum

• CRV offers exploiter 10% bug bounty in exchange for return of hacked funds 

• Coinbase files a motion for judgement in its case with the SEC

• Elon Musk: X will never launch a crypto token

• Binance Research report on Telegram bot-related crypto projects

• BALD deployer revealed as Milkyway16eth

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