Feb 21, 2021

02-21-2021

PRICE CHANGE: WTD/YTD

BTC ($58,127): +19% / +100%
ETH ($1,970): +8% / +167%
XRP ($0.55): -10% / +149%
UNI ($30): +40% / +504%
Crypto Market Cap ($1.7T): +18% / +131% 
BTC Dominance: 61%

STABLECOIN MARKET CAP CHANGE: WTD/YTD

Tether ($34.2B): +7% / +64%
USDC ($7.7B): +6% / +99%


THIS WEEK IN CRYPTO

- Bitcoin's total market cap hit over $1 trillion. Link

- Dapper Labs' NBA Top Shot sold over $50 million of digital collectibles this last week. NBA Top Shot allows fans to buy and sell video highlights called "Moments". The platform onboarded 33k new users this last week and completed 475k transactions. The platform has done $106 million in sales the past 30 days. Link

- Beepl, a renowned artist who recently started selling some of his art through NFTs, is auctioning a new piece via Christie's, in what is the auction house's most high profile NFT sale to date. The auction house replaced its typical "Estimate on Request" with "Estimate Unknown". Link

- Bitcoin miners earned $1.1 billion in January, up 62% from December when bitcoin's price surged to $42,000. As of Feb 2021 miners were earning 6.25 bitcoin for every new block mined + per trade transaction fees valued at roughly $20 per trade. Link

- Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the US, was valued at over $100 billion in a private market share sale. The company plans to go public via direct listing. The exchange generated $141 million net income in the first 9 months of 2020 across its 43 million users. Link

- DeFi aggregators are growing volumes. 1Inch, Matcha and Paraswap facilitated over $9 billion of volume in 2020, but 1Inch has recorded over $10 billion in volume in just the first 46 days of 2021. Link

- Robinhood plans to offer deposits and withdrawals for cryptocurrencies, including DOGE. Today users can use the platform to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, but can't move assets to and from external wallets. Link

- Popular DEX, Uniswap, collected more than $3 billion in just 24 hours this week. DEXs Compound and Sushiswap recorded $1.3 billion in fees during the same time. Link

- DJ 3LAU is auctioning a special edition of his album "Ultraviolet" via NFTs. 33 winning bidders will receive up to 11 bonus song NFTs from the album and a token redeemable for a physical vinyl, signed by the artist. Link

- Popular wallet and exchange Blockchain.com raised a $120 million funding round. Link

- BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager with over $8 trillion assets under management, announced it was buying BTC. Link

- Coinbase opened a waitlist for Eth 2.0 staking rewards, allowing users to earn up to 7.5% per annum staking rewards for holding ether. The rewards include a 25% commission, meaning net returns will be lower. Link

- Payments processor BitPay agreed to pay a $500k fine facilitating payments in nation-states subject to US sanctions, including Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Syria between 2013 and 2018. Link

- Radicle, a fully decentralized code repository to replace GitHub, raised $12 million in funding from NFX and Galaxy. Radicle has integrated its p2p network with Ethereum and launched the RAD governance token. Link

- Async Art, a platform for creating and trading NFTs, has raised over $2 million in seed funding. Async Art helps create programmable art that is split into "Layers", allowing collectors to become part of the art itself and alter the final work. Their first NFT was sold by auction house Christie's for over $130k. Link

- Autofarm, a Binance Smart Chain yield optimizer, has generated over $40 billion in volume and usage is up by almost 170%. Link

- Coinbase hires Melissa Strait to spearhead its AML / KYC strategies. She previously worked for Stripe as global head of financial crimes and preior to that was its US-focused compliance officer. Link

- Toy brand Superplastic launched two new figures on Nifty Gateway. Link.