Exciting developments on BNB Chain

Binance Research team

2023-02-03 12:55

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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

The Federal Reserve slowed its pace of rate hikes and raised the federal funds rates by 0.25%, bringing the target range to 4.50% - 4.75%. This marks the eighth consecutive increase since the central bank embarked on its rate hike cycle in March 2022. Statement from the Federal Open Market Committee (“FOMC”) highlighted the need for “ongoing increases in the target range.”
The European Central Bank (“ECB”) lifted interest rates by 0.5%, taking its key rate to 2.5%. In a statement, the ECB pledged to “stay the course in raising interest rates” and to “raise interest rates by another 50 basis points” in March.

🔎 Crypto

L1/L2:

BNB Chain unveiled the whitepaper for BNB Greenfield, a decentralized storage system and the third blockchain in the BNB ecosystem this week. Users and dApps will be able to create, store and exchange data with full ownership. Potential use cases include website hosting, personal and blockchain data storage, publishing, and more. The BNB Chain core developer team has teamed up with Amazon Web Services, NodeReal and Blockdaemon to build the BNB Greenfield testnet, with plans for launch in the coming months.
Ethereum staking withdrawal testnet, “Zhejiang”, has gone live. This marks another step closer to the highly-anticipated Shanghai upgrade which will allow the withdrawal of staked Ether when implemented.
Optimism has proposed a protocol upgrade to boost performance and functionality. The “Bedrock” upgrade will be scheduled 2 weeks after the vote passes, and the current estimated implementation date is 15 March.

Stablecoins:

Cardano's decentralized algorithmic stablecoin Djed has gone live on mainnet. Djed is pegged to the U.S. dollar and will be over-collateralized by 400-800% with ADA. A separate token, SHEN, will act as a reserve coin.

DeFi:

Two Solana DeFi projects have decided to shut down their services. Citing challenging market conditions, Friktion Labs, a startup that builds systematic DeFi portfolio management strategies, has announced that they will sunset its user platform. Separately, Everlend, a decentralized yield and loan aggregator, also announced it will shut down due to a lack of liquidity and a shrinking market.
An oracle hack has resulted in an estimated US$120M loss for BonqDAO. However, due to illiquidity issues, the hacker has only managed to withdraw around US$1M.

NFTs:

Sorare has scored a US$150M deal with the English Premier League. Under this four-year agreement, users will be able to collect and trade official Premier League-licensed NFTs representing players from top-tier teams and use them in Sorare’s fantasy football game.
NFT marketplace Sudoswap has airdropped its $SUDO token to eligible users. Holders of $XMON (a token created with the 0xmon NFT collection by Sudoswap founders) will be able to lock $XMON and receive $SUDO. Other eligible users include early liquidity providers on Sudoswap and 0xmon NFT holders.

Others:

Bullish sentiment seems to have perpetuated the crypto market. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index recorded a one-year high of 61 this week, putting the index firmly in the “Greed” zone.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (“HKMA”) issued its “Conclusion of Discussion Paper on Crypto-assets and Stablecoins”. Initial points include licensing requirements for stablecoin issuers and zero acceptance for algorithmic stablecoins. The regulatory arrangements are expected to be implemented in 2023/24. CZ highlighted that stablecoins regulation “will bring much needed certainty to issuers, users and service providers, as well as accelerating adoption.”
72% of institutional traders have no plans to trade crypto. A J.P. Morgan survey revealed hesitation among institutional traders around digital assets. Only 14% of respondents mentioned they are currently trading or will trade crypto within 1 year, and the remaining 14% said they do not currently trade crypto but have plans to do so in the next 5 years.

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Exciting developments on BNB Chain