Weekly Newsletter – 12 May 2023

Market Drop on Liquidity Concerns as U.S. Regulatory Uncertainty Continues

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Weekly Summary

  • Jane Street, Jump Slow Crypto Trading Over US Regulatory Uncertainty
  • Binance Temporarily Halted Bitcoin Transaction, Citing Bitcoin Network Congestion
  • Crypto Exchange Bittrex Files for Bankruptcy After SEC Complaint
  • Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and Others Team Up to Introduce Blockchain Network
  • PayPal Discloses Nearly $1B of Crypto Assets on Balance Sheet

Industry Stories

Jane Street, Jump Crypto Slow Trading Over US Regulatory Uncertainty: Jane Street Group and Jump Crypto, two of the world’s top market-making firms, are paring back their trading of digital assets in the U.S. due to regulatory crackdowns on the industry. While both firms continue to make markets, they are doing so on a smaller scale and are expanding their international operations. The exit or reduction of trading by these influential market makers has the potential to disrupt the fragile flow of liquidity across the industry, which has still not recovered since the collapse of FTX in November 2022.

Binance Temporarily Halts Bitcoin Transactions, Citing Bitcoin Network Congestion: Binance halted Bitcoin withdrawals for the second time in 12 hours on May 8, due to a “large volume of pending transactions.” The company tweeted that it closed off BTC withdrawals “temporarily” as the “set fees did not anticipate the recent surge in network gas fees,” and provided an update shortly after that it was “replacing the pending withdrawal transactions with a higher fee so that they get picked up by mining pools.” The exchange resumed Bitcoin withdrawals about three hours after the initial tweet. The company is reportedly working on enabling withdrawals via the Lightning Network to mitigate such withdrawal halts in the future.

Crypto Exchange Bittrex files for bankruptcy after SEC complaint: Seattle-based crypto exchange Bittrex, has filed for bankruptcy protection following the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) recent lawsuit against it for allegedly operating an unregistered securities exchange. Bittrex has denied the SEC’s allegations and is still holding the crypto assets of U.S. customers who did not withdraw their funds before 30 April. While the bankruptcy filing will not affect Bittrex Global, Bittrex’s non-U.S. operations, the company’s assets and liabilities were both between $500m and $1bn, according to the bankruptcy petition. Bittrex’s largest unsecured creditor is the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, owed over $24m.

Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and Others Team Up to Introduce Blockchain Network: Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Deloitte and CBOE are among the organisations partnering to create the Canton Network, a blockchain system that aims to link different institutional applications, which could encourage the adoption of distributed ledger technology in financial markets. Participants believe that Canton offers better privacy and controls than currently available systems and can achieve a scale and standard appropriate for financial institutions. The network will bind together blockchain apps that were created using Daml, a smart-contract language created by Digital Asset. Canton claims to allow systems to work together without requiring the entities that run them to give up control.

PayPal Discloses Nearly $1B of Crypto Assets on Balance Sheet: PayPal has reported holding nearly $1 billion in cryptocurrencies on its balance sheet in a 10-Q filing with the SEC. The company revealed that it holds $943 million worth of customer assets in bitcoin, ether, bitcoin cash, and litecoin on its balance sheet, a $339 million increase from the end of last year. The payments provider has introduced numerous crypto features to its customers in the past few years, including enabling customer transfers to third-party wallets and exchanges and rolling out crypto transfers on Venmo.

Matrixport Highlight

Markus Thielen, Matrixport’s Head of Research, has released a book titled “Crypto Titans: How trillions were made and billions lost.”

In over 400 pages, the book explores the evolution of the crypto industry through four bull and bear markets, providing insight into why and when crypto prices move up or down. Thielen reveals the main players behind the multi-trillion-dollar industry, and how some have made fortunes while others lost large sums of money. The book also covers the progression of crypto markets and how everything in the industry is ultimately connected. Crypto Titans has received praise from industry figures such as Matrixport’s Jihan Wu, Wintermute’s Evgeny Gaevoy and Coinbase’s Marcel Kasumovich, among others.

For investors who are interested in understanding the history of crypto and how it works, Crypto Titans is a must-read.

>> Check out the book on Amazon

Matrixport News

Matrixport has supported Interest Compounding ETH ($icETH) token by Index Coop, a leading provider of on-chain index tokens. By listing icETH, Matrixport incorporates an investment product into our Earn offering, delivering transparent yield from on-chain DeFi for our users. 

Onboarding Index Coop on the Matrixport platform underscores our ongoing commitment to providing seamless and transparent access to innovative DeFi products and solutions.

Matrixport now lists 7 new #stablecoins including Pax Dollar ($USDP), Gemini Dollar ($GUSD), Magic Internet Money ($MIM), Liquity USD ($LUSD), sUSD ($SUSD), USDD ($USDD), and Frax ($FRAX). Matrixport users can now deposit, withdraw and transfer these stablecoins on our APP.

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