Crypto Research

In this Crypto Weekly, instead of discussing our usual views on the market, we’re going to talk about something a little different – our thought on stablecoins, borrowing & lending platforms, earing yield, leverage, risks, and regulation. We think it’s worth discussing these areas to expand on our notes from last Friday and Monday on leverage in the crypto lending space and given the House Financial Services Committee holds a...

AVALANCHE (AVAX) is a next-generation smart contracts platform that’s structured as a publicly-owned crypto network protocol. Ava Labs supports the Avalanche protocol in its mission to build a high-performing, secure, and energy-efficient cryptonetwork for decentralized applications ("dApps"), novel financial primitives, and new interoperable blockchains. Using its innovative technology approach, the Avalanche protocol is creating a new crypto-native economy for frictionless real-world and digital asset exchange, composable financial application primitives and derivatives,...

After bottoming on bad news a week ago, Bitcoin and crypto had been rallying heading into yesterday’s Fed meeting, but crypto markets fell slightly alongside other major asset classes following the Fed policy statement, and have remained roughly flat this morning. Source: Fundstrat, Bloomberg The Federal Reserve spooked some market participants with its commentary around inflation expectations, tapering and rising interest rates. Source: Fundstrat, CNBC, New York Times Inflation has...

* A rare CryptoPunk NFT called "Covid Alien" was sold at Sotheby's on Thursday for $11.8 million. Created by Larva Labs, CryptoPunks were among the first NFTs available on the Ethereum blockchain and consist of 10,000 unique, pixelated characters.Ledger, a manufacturer of hardware wallets for crypto, completed a $380 million Series C financing led by 10T Holdings on Thursday, implying a $1.5 billion valuation for the company. This new raise...

Bitcoin and crypto markets have been hit with a wave of bad news headlines over the past couple months and prices have taken a sharp hit in response. China’s regulatory crypto crackdowns have been some of the largest contributors to the market action. This morning, news of further crackdowns started circulating after the major Chinese internet service providers Baidu and Weibo started censoring searches for the three largest Asian crypto...

Crypto markets have remained relatively quiet (although Elon Musk hasn’t) and stable this week. Last week, we wrote several notes about why we thought the market may have found a bottom due to the massive deleveraging, that a falling BTC VIX is indicating peak fear fading, and how news getting “less bad” is good for the market. We didn’t expect the weekend sell-off that many were fearful of, and once...

Ethereum on-chain transaction volume and miner revenues reached monthly all-time highs in May, with monthly mining revenues hitting $2.3 billion, and miner transaction fees surpassing $1 billion for the first time. On-chain transaction volume was over $650 billion, nearly doubling the preceding month's total.

But unlike past weekends, Bitcoin barely responded to these headlines (see below).  In fact, Bitcoin is indeed flat/rising over the long weekend: - at 4pm ET Friday (5/28), Bitcoin was ~$34,900 - at 3:50pm ET Sunday (5/30) when FT story "broke" Bitcoin was ~$36,000 - as of this writing at 4:30pm ET (5/31), Bitcoin is $36,900, +$900 vs FT headline In other words, despite another set of "negative headlines" Bitcoin...

_PS: HOW DOES BITCOIN SPILL OVER INTO EQUITIES?_ These crypto sell-offs have potential impacts on equity and broader markets, for several reasons: - many US crypto holders also own equities (ala Robinhood) - Bitcoin futures are traded by macro funds, hence, drawdowns/limit down moves impact macro markets - Bitcoin has become somewhat loosely connected to the equities, because both are "risk-on" assets -- more apparent these days