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BEQUANT Crypto&Coffee
Bitcoin traded a touch softer, although there was also plenty of dip buying interest and in early European trade Bitcoin was trading in the mid-$17,000 area. The growth in the open interest (OI) has abated somewhat, where stablecoin margined venues have gained market share relative to Bitcoin margined venues. That being said, the volume surged close to $60bln, with Huobi accounting for $13bln and Binance $16bln. Elsewhere, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said blockchain will have a pivotal role in the future of finance even if bitcoin, the market-leading cryptocurrency that made blockchain famous, is not his “cup of tea.” Speaking at the New York Times’ DealBook Conference Wednesday, Dimon reiterated JPMorgan’s support for blockchain technology as a potentially transformative financial mechanism. Of note, OKB, the in-house token for crypto exchange OKEx, rallied more than 13% Wednesday on rumors that the firm’s founder, Mingxing “Star” Xu, had been released from police custody. After more than a month of zero completed withdrawals, Xu's rumored release could mean a return to normal for the exchange. OKB's primary uses are for discounts on trading fees and collateral for margin trading at OKEx, so its utility depends on the exchange's viability. SushiSwap rallied sharply as liquidity on the protocol continued to increase and stands just over $1bln. The native token SUSHI has been particularly well performing lately but even in spite of this, based on P/S ratio it trades well below its peers. Of note, Balancer trades at 77x and Curve at 100x. It is also worth noting that a new proposal was issued to utilise Cover Protocol. As a guide, Cover Protocol is a protocol that is focused on protecting and covering the DeFi community in the unfortunate event of a hack, bug, exploit and or economic manipulation attack. In terms of other developments, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently answered a number of community questions as part of an "ask me anything," or AMA, session on Reddit. During the AMA, hosted by the Ethereum Foundation’s ETH 2.0 research team, Buterin said that he expects noticeable network improvements sooner rather than later. “TLDR: merge happens faster, PoS happens faster, you get your juicy 100k TPS faster,” Buterin said on Wednesday as part of the foundation’s fifth AMA on ETH 2.0. Ethereum Classic users will now have the option of a new bridge to the $13 billion DeFi market with the launch of Wrapped Ethereum Classic tokens (WETC). ETC users, who were previously unable to access the full array of non-custodial financial services available to ETH users, will now be able to stake their ETC holdings to gain entry into the world of decentralized finance, which currently exists predominantly on Ethereum. As a guide, Ethereum Classic is up 32% year-to-date, while Ethereum is up 260%. CoinDesk writes that four years after forking from Bitcoin, privacy-centric blockchain network Zcash has completed its first halving and rolled out a major upgrade that does away with the unpopular “Founders Reward.” As noted by CoinDesk, a miner reward reduction or “halving” event occurs when the block subsidy, generated from new coins mined, is divided by two. The coded-in event usually triggers every four years at particular block heights depending on the particular chain.
