Weekly Summary
- Markets rallied as the Fed prepares to slow the pace of rate hikes in December
- BlockFi officially files for bankruptcy with estimated liabilities ranging from $1-10 billion
- Sam Bankman-Fried confronted over the failure of FTX in a live interview
- Fidelity has started opening retail crypto trading accounts
- StarkNet, L2 network over Ethereum, releases new performance roadmap
Industry Stories
Crypto rises with Fed hitting the brakes on rate hikes: Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell laid the groundwork on Wednesday calling central banks to slow down the pace of monetary policy as soon as December. Odds of a 50 basis point rate hike next month has increased from 65% to 77% after the announcement, and markets closed in the green. Though economists are predicting a recession in the next 12 months, Powell said a “soft-landing” for the economy remains very plausible and is still achievable. On the same day, Bitcoin jumped 4.4% to a 2-week high, trading over $17,000.
BlockFi, the next domino to fall from FTX contagion: BlockFi has filed for bankruptcy and the firm has more than 100,000 creditors to repay. Cash on its balance sheet currently sits at around $257 million with estimated assets and liabilities range from $1 billion to $10 billion. BlockFi also sued FTX in an attempt to recover Robinhood shares that were held with Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) holding company as collateral three weeks ago.
Sam Bankman-Fried defends FTX collapse, “I wasn’t trying to commingle funds.”: Former FTX CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried said he’d had a “bad month,” but denied committing fraud at his crypto exchange in a live interview with New York Times. While admitting he “screwed up”, SBF described the fall of his $32 billion cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, mainly as a risk management problem that they lost control of, and deflected blame for Alameda’s actions as he claimed he wasn’t privy to all the goings-on at the firm.
Fidelity opens up crypto for retail: Fidelity has opened up retail crypto trading accounts, allowing users to trade bitcoin and ether on their platform — available to those who signed up for the waitlist last month. The investment powerhouse has more than a trillion dollars in AUM and has been actively involved in the crypto industry. The financial powerhouse has been mining bitcoins since 2014 and launched a spot bitcoin ETF in Canada in 2021.
StarkNet performance roadmap summary: StarkNet, a permissionless STARK-Powered L2 ZK-Rollup, which has been live on Mainnet for almost a year, presented a new roadmap for performance improvements. The first step is to introduce parallelization to the transaction execution where blocks of transactions are processed in parallel. Secondly, the Cairo-VM will be re-written from Python to Rust to improve the sequencer’s performance. Finally, the sequencer will also be re-implemented in Rust for further optimizations in the way the state is stored and accessed.
Product Highlight
Matrixport launched a new staking strategy for ETH, the ETH 2.0 Staking — Balancer. It is a combination of liquid staking, AMM and yield optimizer strategy, offering one of the most competitive yields in the current market. Adding up the enhanced DeFi mining rewards and the ETH staking rewards, the estimated APY for this strategy can be up to 8-9%.
Mechanisms are as follows:
- Stake 50% ETH with Lido Finance, obtain liquidity token stETH, and then wrap the stETH into wstETH on Lido Finance
- Wrap the rest 50% ETH into wETH via wrapeth.com/
- Pair up the wstETH & wETH and provide liquidity to Balancer (wstETH + wETH pool)
- Stake the Balancer Pool Token (BPT) with Aura (wstETH+wETH pool) to earn boosted yield
Estimated yields are updated monthly. Early redemption is also allowed with conditions applied.
>> Stake your ETH with Matrixport
Matrixport News
Matrixport was honoured to be awarded as “Digital Asset Player to Watch” by The TRADE News. We joined nearly 300 fellow industry leaders at the London event, recognising the year’s leading individuals and firms in the field.
We remain steadfast in our commitment to preparing for the next wave of institutional adoption with our best-in-class offerings across custody, crypto prime brokerage, and asset management.
Team Matrixport attended City AM’s “3rd Crypto A.M. Annual Summit & Awards” to share how we help institutional investors effectively manage their risk, portfolios, liquidity and grow and scale their businesses onsite. The event took place in London on November 22-24, featuring some of the world’s most prominent figures in cryptocurrency and blockchain.
Matrixport now supports Dash(#DASH), an open-source digital currency that enables quick, easy and cost-effective payments worldwide. Matrixport users can now swap, auto-invest, deposit, withdraw and transfer DASH on our app. Read about what you can do with DASH on our platform here.
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