Happy Friday! The Weekly Market Highlights is an initiative from the Binance Research team to round up the week, summarizing key market events and views from the team.
🔎 Macro / TradFi
Michael Saylor said in an interview this week that MicroStrategy is looking very closely at Bitcoin Ordinals and assessing potential for application development.
🔎 Crypto
L1/L2:
Ripple has acquired Swiss-based crypto custody firm, Metaco, for US$250M. This is part of Ripple’s strategy to broaden its presence beyond the US. This comes the same week as they roll out their proprietary “Ripple CBDC Platform” to enable governments and central banks to create their own CBDCs.
DeFi:
Lido Finance v2 launched on mainnet, enabling ETH withdrawals for users of their liquid staking service. Lido currently has around 31% of the total staked ETH on its platform.
Uniswap is set to launch on Polkadot via Moonbeam, one of Polkadot’s parachains.
Hardware wallet company, Ledger, has been in the news following a new update for their Nano X device which allows users to subscribe to a recovery tool that encrypts their seed phrase and sends it to different custodians. Many in the community thought this defeats the purpose of a hardware wallet as this means your private keys can, in theory, leave the device.
Stablecoins:
Tether has announced that it will regularly allocate up to 15% of its realized profits to buy Bitcoin to further strengthen its reserves.
NFT:
NFT collection, Pudgy Penguins, has launched a line of toys, named Pudgy Toys. Each toy is an NFT that is directly licensed to the holder and unlocks more features via QR code.
Sky Mavis, the company behind Axie Infinity, has rolled out Mavis Market - a NFT marketplace for its native blockchain, Ronin Network. Creators set their own royalties, Sky Mavis gets a 2% fee and the Ronin treasury gets a 0.5% fee on all sales.
ApeCoin DAO has passed a proposal to launch the “Ape Accelerator”, which will aim to support the incubation of projects utilizing APE tokens.
Bitcoin Frogs, a new Bitcoin Ordinals-based NFT collection, has been leading the NFT trading charts this week, even surpassing the likes of Bored Apes.
Others:
Axie Infinity developers have rolled out a “lite” version of their Origins game to the Apple app store. This version does not require users to buy NFTs, but does allow existing Axie NFT holders to move their Axies into the app.
Borderless Capital has led a US$50M fund focusing on cross-chain projects that leverage the Wormhole cross-chain messaging protocol.
Story Protocol has raised US$29.3M. The firm will use the funds to further build its web3 infrastructure platform.
Airstack, the startup behind an AI-backed web3 developer platform, has raised US$7M.
Jia, a blockchain-based fintech which provides DeFi-linked loans to micro and small businesses in emerging markets, has raised US$4.3M in seed funding.
🔎 Latest Binance Research Publications
Check out our latest publications:
Explore our Binance Research website for more project and macro research reports.
For more frequent market updates and insights, follow us on Twitter @BinanceResearch.
Have a minute? Please share with us any feedback you may have via this form.
That’s a wrap!
Binance Research
About Binance Research: Binance Research is the research arm of Binance, the world's leading cryptocurrency exchange. The team is committed to delivering objective, independent, and comprehensive analysis and aims to be the thought leader in the crypto space. Our analysts publish insightful thought pieces regularly on topics related but not limited to, the crypto ecosystem, blockchain technologies, and the latest market themes.
General Disclosure: This material is prepared by Binance Research and is not intended to be relied upon as a forecast or investment advice, and is not a recommendation, offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities, cryptocurrencies or to adopt any investment strategy. The use of terminology and the views expressed are intended to promote understanding and the responsible development of the sector and should not be interpreted as definitive legal views or those of Binance. The opinions expressed are as of the date shown above and are the opinions of the writer, they may change as subsequent conditions vary. The information and opinions contained in this material are derived from proprietary and non-proprietary sources deemed by Binance Research to be reliable, are not necessarily all-inclusive and are not guaranteed as to accuracy. As such, no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given and no responsibility arising in any other way for errors and omissions (including responsibility to any person by reason of negligence) is accepted by Binance. This material may contain ’forward looking’ information that is not purely historical in nature. Such information may include, among other things, projections and forecasts. There is no guarantee that any forecasts made will come to pass. Reliance upon information in this material is at the sole discretion of the reader. This material is intended for information purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer or solicitation to purchase or sell in any securities, cryptocurrencies or any investment strategy nor shall any securities or cryptocurrency be offered or sold to any person in any jurisdiction in which an offer, solicitation, purchase or sale would be unlawful under the laws of such jurisdiction. Investment involves risks.
