4 August 2023
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
Fitch Ratings downgraded the United States' Long-Term Ratings from 'AAA' to 'AA+'. The credit agency cited a growing government debt burden and the erosion of governance relative to peers.
The U.S. Treasury has plans to increase the size of its quarterly bond sales to US$103B for the first time in over 2 years to help finance a surge in budget deficits. The announcement led to a sell off in treasuries, which sent 10-year yields to the highest level in 10 years.
🔎 Crypto
L1/L2:
The Sui network underwent an upgrade this week, enabling liquid staking for its native token. Sui developers will now be able to offer fully non-custodial liquid staking solutions.
Litecoin has executed its block reward halving, reducing the reward for miners from 12.5 LTC to 6.25 LTC. The last halving event was in August 2019.
DeFi:
Decentralized exchange, PancakeSwap, has announced that it will start sharing trading fee revenue with stakers of its native token, CAKE. Specifically, CAKE stakers will directly share the trading fee revenue of its PancakeSwap v3 pools. Additionally, PancakeSwap also announced the launch of v3 on the Polygon zkEVM Mainnet Beta.
Members of dYdX, a perpetuals decentralized exchange, have proposed to reduce rewards to liquidity providers, which could allow for cost savings for the DAO. The proposal appears on track to be passed based on the current votes submitted.
Wombat Exchange, a multichain stableswap platform currently on BNB Chain and Arbitrum, has expanded to Ethereum this week.
Curve, a decentralized exchange, suffered an exploit on Sunday due to a “re-entrancy” bug in Vyper, a programming language used in parts of the Curve system. There are fears that this may lead to further liquidation and bad debt as a result of Curve’s founder Egorov’s loan of around US$100M, backed by almost half of the entire circulating supply of CRV.
Stablecoins:
Tether has released the assurance opinion for Q2 2023 and reported that there has been an increase in its excess reserves of about US$850M, bringing its total excess reserves to approximately US$3.3B at the end of Q2.
Others:
New memecoin, BALD, attracted significant attention and amassed a market cap of US$85M on the Base blockchain. However, an abrupt liquidity withdrawal caused the price of the token to plunge, resembling the features of a rug pull.
GameStop, a video game retailer, has announced that it will terminate service of cryptocurrency wallets from November, due to regulatory uncertainty.
Consensys has released "Fuzzing," a smart contract testing tool that allows developers to identify vulnerabilities, removing the need to establish their own infrastructure.
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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.
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