PRICE CHANGE: WTD/YTD
- BTC ($50,577): +4% / +74%
- ETH ($4,151): +2% / +462%
- XRP ($0.85): +9% / +286%
- UNI ($16.13): -1% / +227%
- Crypto Market Cap ($2.2T): +3% / +204%
- BTC Dominance: 41%
- ETH Dominance: 21%
STABLECOIN MARKET CAP CHANGE: WTD/YTD
- Tether ($76B): +1% / +264%
- USDC ($42B): +2% / +971%
NFT 3M TRADING VOLUMES
THIS WEEK IN CRYPTO
- Chief executives from 6 crypto companies testified before the House about regulating crypto. The CEO of crypto exchange FTX suggested a "unified" joint regime on crypto for agencies like the SEC and the CFTC, and Coinbase execs called for more regulatory clarity on cryptos status. There was repeated criticism of current SEC chairman Gary Gensler, who has said that many tokens fall under the agency's purview and should be registered as securities. Link.
- Cryptocurrencies fell across the board this week, following in live with the broader stock market. The decline was likely magnified by year-end profit taking. Link.
- Coinbase Wallet is adding support for Ledger as its first hardware wallet. Link.
- The US Senate's Banking committee is holding a hearing on stablecoins on Tuesday. The session will be livestreamed. Stream link.
- The floor price of CryptoPunks fell this week as NFT collectors like @punk4156 criticized the projects lack of commercial rights for tokenholders. Other projects like Nouns and Bored Ape Yacht Club offer tokenholders commercial rights to their NFTs. In contrast, CryptoPunks has issued DMCA takedown notices for derivative projects and it recently signed with UTA to grow the brand. @punk4156 sold his rare ape CryptoPunk for over $10 million in protest. Link.
- Brian Roberts, the former CFO of Lyft, joined OpenSea as CFO and discussed plans to take the company public eventually. The company is rumored to be raising $1 billion at a valuation north of $12 billion. Link.
- Ethereum miners earned more than Bitcoin miners in November. BTC miners earned $1.7 billion (-2% mom) while ETH miners earned $2 billion (+11.8% mom). Link.
- Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt joined Chainlink Labs as a strategic advisor to help the oracle achieve multi-chain interoperability goals. Link.
- Gaming giant Ubisoft launched the beta of a new platform called Ubisoft Quartz, which allows players to use NFTs in-game. The first compatible game is Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Ubisoft also said it had a five year vision of blockchain gaming, including play-to-earn models. Link. Link.
- Crypto exchanges received 546 million visits in November, the second-highest in 2021 behind the 638 million visits recorded in May. Binance accounted for over a third of traffic. Coinbase accounted for almost a fifth of traffic. Link.
- Reddit is expanding its Community Points beta offering, allowing any subreddit to request the ability to create its own token. The tokens are intended to incentivize good behavior and content creation within a specific community, and could potentially be used in the future to run the community itself. Link.
- Visa is launching a crypto advisory practice for its clients and partners to dive deeper in the space. Visa bought a CryptoPunk in August and launched a crypto-linked card program that has already seen $3.5 billion of spend. Link.
- Crypto research firm Messari released a new, free-to-use governance aggregator called Messari Governor that streamlines DAO operations into a single interface. Link.
- Kickstarter plans to build a decentralized protocol for crowdfunding on the Celo blockchain. It plans to transition its site to the new protocol in 2022. Link. Blog Post.
- Novi, the crypto wallet owned by Meta (fka Facebook), has launched a small pilot on WhatsApp. Users can send/receive money directly in app. Link.
- Pepsi is releasing a collection of 1,893 generative NFTs on 12/14. The free NFTs are only available for individuals on the waiting list, which opened on 12/10. Tweet.
- Blockchain data platform Chainalysis will begin supporting the Lightning Network starting February. Link.
- Braintrust ($BTRST), a Web3 talent network, raised $100 million in a private token sale from investors including Coatue, Tiger Global and True Ventures. Braintrust connects companies with skilled workers in the Web3 space. The platform has over 700k community members, 36k job seekers, 474 enterprise clients, and has done $28 million in gross service volume since launch in June 2020. Link.
- Polygon acquired zk-rollup startup Mir Protocol for $400 million. Mir will rebrand to Polygon Zero and is expected to be ready for launch on Polygon mid-next year. Link.
- DeFi trading platform Slingshot Finance raised a $15 million Series A led by Ribbit Capital. Slingshot currently supports Polygon and Arbitrum for token swamps, and will launch on Optimism next. Link.
- Palm NFT Studio raised a $27 million Series B led by Microsoft's M12 venture fund. Palm NFT Studio operates on Ethereum sidechain Palm Network. Palm is the platform behind Damien Hirst's 10k collection called The Currency. Palm also released 800k free NFTs with DC Comics for DC FanDome 2021. Link.
- The IMF is advocating for comprehensive and coordinated global policy on crypto. Link.