MARKET WRAP

1. Crypto Market surged as the release of Producer Price Index (PPI)

CoinDesk - December 12, 2022 at 7:49 a.m UTC

Cryptos

During the first half of the week, BTC and ETH had investors on a roller-coaster ride with a large mid-week dip to $16,800 and $1,200 respectively, which is a probable result from a 0.4% rise in the November’s U.S. Producer Price Index (PPI) data - a metric that calculates monthly wholesale prices. As long as the number is above zero, inflation pressure is not likely to lessen. Not long afterwards, an increase of 2.3% in the matter of hours between Friday and Thursday sent BTC price through the sticky $17,000 benchmark while a 4.1% uptick brought ETH past its 30-day $1,260 support line. The positive course then remained steadfast over the weekend without much turbulence. However, the side-way trend does not sustain into the early week we are right now and a gloomy mid-week history seems to be repeating itself. If last week witnessed the PPI indicator crippling the momentum built by BTC and ETH stabilized trading price, the latest Consumer Price Index and U.S. central bank interest rate issuance are going to have certain (presumably detrimental) effect on the crypto industry. Other coins do not seem to escape the same fate. DOGE, a well-known meme currency, grew over 3% by mid-week but quickly slided by 3.6% approaching the new week while MATIC surged by roughly 3.3% but jumped off the cliff by 6.3% as the new week kicks off. The largest bitcoin fund in the world, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), saw its shares hit a record-high discount rate of about 50% in relation to the price of bitcoin later on Thursday. This has made traditional investment vehicles look really bad to a majority of crypto investors.

Insights

A sideline, yet huge, benefit took place on Tokocrypto Exchange - the largest Indonesian crypto trading platform - when an unofficial narrative disclosed that Binance is setting the motion to acquiring the local-based exchange. As soon as the cat is out of the bag, the native token TKO experienced a whopping 97% surge and skyrocketed by 50% over the past week. No spokesperson from the exchange itself has come forward to confirm this yet and to be frank, no acquisition agreement has been signed, either. Another piece that got the crowd talking the past week was the “fee switching” proposal made by the largest DEX Uniswap, which will ultimately result in less earnings for the DEX’s liquidity providers and more value accruement for UNI holders, hence the general concern whether liquidity providers will pull their fund out as it seems less attractive to them benefit-wise.

Equities

The tech-heavy Nasdaq and S&P 500 first gained 1.1% and 0.8%, respectively, proudly ending their five-day losing streak, but it was not long until the Friday close-down showed each dropped 0.7%. There was yet one beacon in this deep raging red sea. The University of Michigan's Index of Consumer Sentiment has risen to 59.1 points, much higher than what was initially predicted by Dow Jones index - which could be a counterpoint to the widespread inflation fear in the macroeconomy.

Takeaways

- BTC drop was a direct upshot from market indicators.
- CPI and new interest rates will be published this week, both of which could send markets in jitters.
- If the CPI is going lower, markets may start the new year with an even stronger belief in lower inflation.

Note: To facilitate your reading flow, we now introduce 3 new sections that cater to your reading preference:

CARDIAC ARREST - shocking news alike

WEAK PULSE - mildly negative news & pre-fall indicators

STRONG PULSE - tech/project development update pieces.

Hope this helps!

CARDIAC ARREST

No one is summoned on the operation table today.

WEAK PULSE

2. Finance Stops Working with OIrthogonal Trading

Decrypt - December 05, 2022

Maple Finance - a DeFi lending platform has stopped working with Orthogonal Trading firm due to its financial position misrepresentation. Orthogonal Trading received a default notice from M11 Credit, a Maple Finance pool delegate yesterday, alleging that the business has $31 million in unpaid liabilities and is unable to pay those bills. To provide loans to potential borrowers, M11 Credit leverages the services of Maple Finance. Other than offering technical services, Maple Finance is not involved in the lending process. The platform's CEO Sidney Powell stated at the time that "the lending business is really the delegate." Delegates provide the pool with funds and carry out due research on any potential borrowers. In other words, M11, a company that established a loan business utilizing Maple Finance, is the one from whom Orthogonal Trading is borrowing.

However, Maple suspected that Orthogonal Trading misrepresented its financial position. Maple stated that Orthogonal Trading has been working while aware of their insolvency and that they would only be able for them to continue to run a trading company with outside funding. As such, this misrepresentation of Orthogonal Trading violated Maple’s agreement and that Maple shall seek all available legal remedies, including arbitration and litigation if necessary, to recoup the funds. Nonetheless, Orthogonal Credit said that they had no idea of the misrepresentation and no insight or influence over the trading business.

3. ConsenSys Updated its Privacy Policy of MetaMask in Response to the Previous backlash

MetaMask - December 06, 2022

ConsenSys, the company behind the MetaMask crypto wallet, recently deployed a number of improvements, in response to complaints from users about its data collection methods. Last month, ConsenSys revealed that users' IP addresses and transaction data from MetaMask were shared with Infura - the ConsenSys-made RPC (remote procedure call) service, which enraged many investors in the crypto community. It is because some users were afraid that their transaction data was not as secure as they thought.

Therefore, on December 6th, 2022 ConsenSys announced and committed that they could never associate wallet account addresses to an IP address since they did not store wallet account address information, but instead collected wallet and IP address information of transactions to ensure transactions were working properly. They also added that secured data related to a transaction, including wallet addresses, is not saved simultaneously with IP addresses. According to the data retention policy, they would keep and erase user information after 7 days and they would never sell any user data that they have collected.

4. The Withdrawals of Staked ETH Are Targeted To Open In March 2023.

CoinDesk - December 08, 2022

ETH developers aim to open withdrawals for staked ETH on the Beacon Chain as an agenda of the hard fork “Shanghai” in March 2023. 

The "EVM Object Format" (EOF), which is a collection of EIPs that effectively update the Ethereum Virtual Machine, the setting in which Ethereum is able to execute smart contracts, will also be addressed by developers in Shanghai. 

The developers also agreed to postpone EOF until the fall in order to avoid delaying staked ETH withdrawals if EOF appears to be too difficult to achieve by the next All Core Developers call scheduled for January 5.

The developers also agreed to a second hard fork that would solve proto-danksharding, commonly known as EIP 4844, probably in the fall of 2023.

It will be less stressful for anyone whose ETH (and any earned benefits) are trapped in the Beacon Chain staking smart contract because of the two forks, giving developers enough time to concentrate on one problem at a time.

5. Abnormal price movements on Binance

The Block - December 11, 2022

The trading pairs of $SUN, $ARDR, $OSMO, $FUN, and $GLM price movements were said to be odd and suspectedly the result of compromised accounts or stolen API keys. Binance immediately started the investigation at 3:10 a.m ET only to find out that the movements of “pump & dump” of price were “just market behavior”.

STRONG PULSE

6. CRO tokens price fly as it partners with CocaCola

CoinDesk - December 06, 2022 at 12:59 AM UTC

Crypto.com’s CRO token (CRO) price skyrocketed as it was teaming up with Coca-Cola to launch the NFT collection commemorating the World Cup 2022 in Qatar. Crypto.com said that they have collaborated with Coca-Cola and digital artist GMUNK to create NFT “heatmaps” that represent in-game movements of players during matches at the Qatar World Cup.

7. Offshore Chinese Yuan (CNH₮) Is Live on Tron

Tether - December 06, 2022

The first and most popular stablecoin is powered by Tether Operations Limited (Tether), which just announced the integration of its offshore Chinese Yuan (CNH₮) to the Tron blockchain. Bitfinex will be the first exchange platform to enable deposit and withdrawal of CNH₮ using the Tron blockchain.

8. Ankr deploys $15M to make whole users

CoinTelegraph - December 07, 2022

The hacker who exploited 20 trillion Ankr Reward Bearing Staked BNB (aBNBc) last week from Anker, which was pegged to BNB, took advantage of purported hard-coding of fixed prices between aBNBc and BNB on the Helio Protocol. The exploitation caused HAY to lose its peg and the price went as low as $0.20 per coin. On December 07, the stablecoin protocol Helio published that they have bought back $3M worth of bad debt in HAY;

Ankr also tweeted that due to its most recent exploit and the subsequent overcirculation of HAY, they would set aside $15 million to buy back the bad debt.

9. Binance To Buy Tokocrypto Exchange?

Techinasia - December 06, 2022

The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance is negotiating with Indonesian exchange Tokocrypto about a potential acquisition of the company. The CEO of Tokocrypto, Pang Xue Kai, said that he/she would resign if the deal is completed. At the time of press, Tokocrypto’s native token (TKO) price jumped from $0.3 up to $0.583 (~97%) and is currently trading at $0.46.