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Despite the recent shift in focus on the positive news relating to Pfizer’s Covid vaccine, macro driven volatility may yet resurface. The latest reports indicate that US President Donald Trump’s campaign on Monday filed a lawsuit in a Pennsylvania federal court, seeking to block state officials from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state. In addition, the Trump campaign has requested an emergency injunction in a federal lawsuit aimed at preventing the State of Michigan from certifying the results of last week's election until election officials can certify that only legally cast, on time, and legally observed ballots are included in the count. As alluded to recently, at least for now this is yet to translate into capital flight, although further escalation can quick turn into a very gloomy end to the year. Looking at crypto assets and large caps are again underperforming relative to small and mid-cap sized assets, with the MVIS small cap index up 18% over the last 7 days vs 12% for large cap index. The positive sentiment towards Bitcoin has not gone away completely, with the open interest (OI) well within the recent record highs, even if the options skew did shift slightly higher. At the same time, Ethereum bulls are on the rise, also as evidenced by the recent upside by ETHBTC. It is worth recapping yesterday’s reports that Ripple for the first time bought $46 million worth of XRP in the third quarter of 2020, despite already owning nearly half of the digital asset's supply. Ripple said the purchase was made to support "healthy markets," possibly referring to creating interest around XRP and thereby raising its price. Another development that also took place not long ago is the merger of Voyager and LGO Markets. Now the interesting part is that as part of the merger, the next version of the Voyager token will be minted, which will allow holders of the VGX and LGO token holders to swap into the new token. The holder ownership percentages will be commensurate with the existing fully diluted market caps of the tokens. The new token will include decentralized finance features such as community governance, as well as advanced utility including staking with an initial 7% interest. As a reminder, Voyager is a publicly listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange. Buybacks and mergers may be nothing new in equity markets but for digital assets based companies this presents another huge opportunity and something that should be paid attention to. In other news, The Block writes that Ethereum infrastructure provider Infura is currently facing a service outage, causing a delay in price feeds of ether (ETH) and ERC-20 tokens of some services. The issue has also caused crypto exchanges, such as Binance, to disable ETH and ERC-20 tokens withdrawals. The popular Ethereum wallet MetaMask is also having issues since Infura is its default service provider. Elsewhere, CoinDesk reported that China Construction Bank (CCB) has tapped Hong Kong-based digital asset exchange Fusang for the issuance of $3 billion-worth of debt securities over a blockchain. Notably, the digital securities will be exchangeable for bitcoin on the Fusang exchange, as well as U.S. dollars. Trading is slated to commence this Friday.
