Something to remember: 

“The surest way to keep a secret is to make people believe they already know the answer”

Week Ahead

What’s driving markets?

• Regulatory factors and macroeconomic developments continue to be the tail wagging the dog. Crypto market volatility still remains low except in the moments leading up to and immediately following announcements related to these topics

• SEC delayed decisions on 7 BTC spot ETF products this week, although this outcome was widely expected– crypto markets declined anyway.

• Market rallied briefly after a positive decision in the Grayscale ETF conversion case, but price has now fully retraced.

• Institutional digital asset investment instruments saw outflows of $168m in the previous week, mostly concentrated in Bitcoin products. This may represent the unwinding of the spot-ETF related frontrunning trade that was popular in mid summer. In these products, outflows represent selling of both long and short position, so it is not necessarily an indicator of directional sentiment.

• The week of October 16th has become the one to watch with ETF decision deadlines for the Invesco, Valkyrie, and Bitwise products.

• NFT market volume has been in steep decline throughout 2023, reaching new lows this week

• Blur maintains a >60% volume market share in NFT trading

• Aggregate market depth across the top 10 centralized exchanges shows Okex has surpassed Binance on the ETH-USDT pair

• Binance market depth for the ETH-USDT pair is better at most price levels, however Uniswap V3 liquidity is superior at levels further from midpoint price

Research Content

• Hong Kong police arrest 458 individuals connected with a 478 million yuan money laundering organization

• OnlyFans purchased Ethereum with working capital in November 2022, balance sheet is impaired $9m as a result

• South Korea institutes minimum reserve requirement for centralized exchanges

• NFT market volume hits a new 2-year weekly low ($73.2m)

• Digital asset investment products see biggest week of outflows since March ($168m)

• Federal court rules in Greyscale’s favor regarding appeal of application to convert GBTC into an ETF 

• Southern District of New York dismisses complaint that Uniswap was responsible for a rug pull that was listed on its AMM

• SEC delays decisions on 7 Bitcoin spot ETF products

• Uniswap teases v4 release date

• Gala Games co-founders suing each other, both accusing the other of misappropriation of funds and unjust enrichment

• Kaiko Research compares liquidity between Binance and Uniswap

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