Weekly Update: Tokenization is the new hype
🏦 All Eyes on Central Banks: the BoE matches the consensus and raised interest rates by 50bps to 2.25%. For the first time since 1998, the BoJ intervened in the FX markets to buy JPY following a decision to keep interest rates low. Risk assets tumbled after the FED decision to try to cool inflation by increasing rates by 0.75bps on Wednesday.
💱The Merge is over: according to Paradigm, there is a reversion to BTC now that we are past the merge and tying up capital became less attractive.
⛏ Desperate to mine: despite the fact that Bitcoin has never been more difficult to mine as measured by the "network difficulty", there are more machines mining BTC than ever. While we would have expected the number to decrease due to the bear market, the rumour is that miners are looking to recoup the cost of the machines they ordered previously and that are only now being delivered.
📉 Liquidation over market plunge: according to Decrypt, over $433M were liquidated from 131,000 traders as BTC and ETH prices dropped. More than 87% were long positions which seems to indicate a bearish trend. Liquidations were led by ETH ($173M) followed by BTC ($121M).
📕 Tokenization is the new hype: according to the BCG, tokenized illiquid assets should go from $0.31Tn to $16.1Tn by 2030. It is worth mentioning that a large part of the world's wealth today is invested in illiquid assets. According to a survey in the US, 56%+ of the assets held by taxpayers with a net-worth between $600K and $1m were illiquid.
🥷 Now you see me: crypto market-maker Wintermute's DeFi operation was hacked for around $160m. Evgeny Gaevoy, founder and CEO of Wintermute, assured that the company remains solvent and that it will honor any loans being recalled from lenders.
💰The more the better: MicroStrategy bought a further 301 BTC between 2-Aug and 19-Sep for about $6m according to a filling with the SEC. The software company owns almost 131,000 BTC.
🏛 Almighty SEC: in a recently filed suit against Ian Balina for an unregistered 2018 ICO, the SEC claims that all of Ethereum network falls under US jurisdiction as validating nodes are densest in the US. According to Etherscan, 46% of all Ethereum nodes operate from the US. The SEC's comment on the 69th paragraph has no legal weight, but does offer a glimpse of how the SEC is thinking.
⚖️ Show must go on: Tether and Bitfinex have been ordered to show financial records to prove the backing of the USDT stablecoin. The firm said that it had already agreed to provide the documents and that the court's request is a "routine discovery order".
📋 EU-Leak: a draft of the EU crypto regulatory framework was leaked and shows that NFT PFP collection such as Bored Apes might be considered as securities.
📅 What's to come: IFO business climate in Germany (26-Sep); CB consumer confidence and durable goods orders MoM in the US (27-Sep); GFK consumer confidence in Germany (28-Sep); Inflation rate YoY preliminary in Germany & GDP growth rate QoQ Final in the US (29-Sep)