Stripe Advances Crypto Efforts with Avalanche, Friend.Tech Airdrop Set for This Week

Market Update Investors will have a lot to digest this week, including various data releases such as consumer confidence, ADP Employment, JOLTS, and non-farm payrolls. Likely more important is the FOMC meeting and Treasury Quarterly Refunding Announcement (QRA), both set for Wednesday. Equities are gaining to start the week with the $SPY and $QQQ both up approximately 0.30% as the #DXY (-0.44%) slides after the BOJ intervened to support the Yen against the dollar. Crypto assets are struggling so far today, with #BTC (-0.51%) briefly falling below $62k before recovering to $62.8k and #ETH (-2.85%) trading at $3,170 after surpassing $3,350 yesterday. #AVAX is displaying strength today, rising 3.33% following news of a new partnership with payments giant Stripe. As highlighted in Friday’s market update, Stripe has introduced stablecoin crypto payments across the Solana, Ethereum, and Polygon networks. In addition, Stripe and Avalanche have struck a partnership to enable the functionality of the Avalanche C-Chain and to directly integrate Stripe’s fiat-to-crypto on-ramp into popular Avalanche dapps through Avalanche’s Core Wallet. Avalanche users will be able to fund their wallets via the Stripe widget and purchase assets via ACH, debit, or credit cards. S