PRICE CHANGE: WTD/YTD
- BTC ($11,675): +5% / +62%
- ETH ($392): +5 % / +199%
- LTC ($57): +0% / +37%
- XRP ($0.29): +1% / +50%
- Crypto Market Cap ($357B): +6% / +86%
- BTC Dominance: 60%
STABLECOIN MARKET CAP CHANGE: WTD/YTD
- Tether ($10.0B): 0% / +142%
- USDC ($1.1B): +5% / +119%
THIS WEEK IN CRYPTO
- Bitcoin briefly hit a 2020-high of $12,071 before falling back to the low $11,000s. BTC trading has been climbing since early July and nearly doubled in the last month; current BTC trading volume is more than double that seen at the height of the 2017 bull run. Though it's uncertain what caused the sharp sell-off, some speculate it was triggered by a wave of automated liquidations. Link.
- Goldman Sachs hired a new global head of digital assets, Matthew McDermott, to explore a GS stablecoin. Link.
- Dapper Labs, the company behind CryptoKitties and NBA TopShot, has raised $12 million in a new investment round that included several NBA players like Andre Iguodala, Spencer Dinwiddie, and JaVale McGee. Link.
- Dapper Labs launched its P2P marketplace for NBA Top Shot, allowing beta users to trade their NFT collectibles. NBA Top Shot allows users to collect official digital collectibles of NBA highlights, all powered by Dapper Labs' proprietary Flow blockchain. There are 13k NBA fans signed up for the waiting list for NBA Top Shot. Link.
- Coinbase is looking to add support for 19 cryptocurrencies including Blockstack, Fetch.ai, Flexacoin, and Paxos. Link.
- Bitcoin averaged over 1 million daily active addresses for the first time since January 2018; active users are calculated as either sender or receivers of the cryptocurrency. The uptick in usage coincides with a rise in Bitcoin prices over the last two weeks. The number of addresses holding $10+ in BTC has hit a high of 16.6 million addresses; Ethereum has also seen a surge, with 6 million addresses holding $10+ of ETH. Link.
- Square generated $875 million in revenue and $17 million in gross profit off it's Cash App's Bitcoin business. This was a 600% increase in year over year revenue. Bitcoin represented roughly 2.85% of Square's total gross profit of $597 million for the quarter. Link.
- Four congressional representatives wrote to the IRS this week, asking the tax authority not to overtax rewards from proof of stake blockchains. The IRS has not provided guidance on PoS taxation; it's unclear if they'll treat it as ordinary income, like with mining activities, or capital gains. Link.
- Infrastructure-as-a-service company Bison Trails hired Elizabeth Ralston as its internal General Counsel. Ralston previously served in a legal capacity at BlockTower Capital and was previously in Goldman's legal division. Link.
- Eth-based decentralized exchange Uniswap has gone from 90k visits in June to 1.4 million in July. Trading volumes increased 7x to $44 million. The growth is being fueled by the rise of DeFi applications, which has also led to massive growth in the price of ETH. Link.
- Chinese authorities arrested 109 people in connection with one of the largest Ponzi schemes in the crypto industry. PlusToken, an MLM scheme, involved more than 2 million participants and involved digital currencies valued at $5.8 billion. PlusToken launched in 2018 as an international crypto wallet project. Link.
- Coinbase is offering 2% APY rewards to Dai holders. Dai-issuer MakerDAO is the biggest platform in DeFi, and has more than $1 billion of cryptocurrency locked on its platform. Link.
- P2P bitcoin trading in India has hit all-time highs, after the country's supreme court quashed the Central bank policy that banned banks from providing services to crypto exchanges. Two prominent marketplaces, Paxful and Localbitcoins, have hit combined trading volume of $4.4 million weekly. Link.
- Hardware wallet provider Ledger said its market database was breached, compromising the email addresses of one million people. 9,500 customers had details such as first and last name, address, and phone number exposed. Link.
- dYdX launches perpetual swaps which enable traders to use leverage more easily than DeFi alternatives, such as using Instadapp to take out multiple loans at once on Compound. Its users also don't pay gas though they do pay trading fees. Trades on dYdX are among the largest for decentralized exchanges, around $10,000 on average. Link.
- There are currently almost 9,000 crypto ATMs and 211k non-ATM locations you can buy or sell crypto at across 71 countries. The US continues to lead in the number of Bitcoin ATMs. Link.