MARKET WRAP

1. DOGE Leads Surge This Week as Other Cryptos Trade Flat

CoinDesk – November 28, 2022

Cryptos

Throughout Thanksgiving in the United States, DOGE saw a 16% increase in price over the past 24 hours, to top off a more than 50% increase since this past Tuesday. While its difficult to attribute the positive price action to any single thing, in particular, social media influencer David Gokhshtein shared with his large Twitter followers the possibility of Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin working together on DOGE improvement overall, stating

“I feel that we’ll all see Vitalik and Elon working together to somehow upgrade $DOGE.”

Beyond that, however, the crypto market remains bleak, albeit not entirely in shambles. $BTC has remained resilient, recently trading at $16,500 just as it had throughout the holiday. The same goes for $ETH, trading at around $1200 from Thursday to Saturday.

Insights

While cryptos remained rather stable this past week, much is yet to be seen for the market in the midst of Genesis’ latest difficulties in fundraising after its exposure to the FTX debacle. Given the firm’s high holdings in $BTC and struggles to acquire sufficient funding to keep itself afloat, there could be a large sell-off in some time of those holdings, resulting in another tumultuous decline in the market.

Equities

Traditional markets were closed on Thursday, and with many businesses remaining closed on Friday as well, trading was light and uneventful. Much of this carried over into crypto, as mentioned above. The S&P 500 closed at 4,026.12 on the past Wednesday, not having changed from that through Sunday.

Takeaways

Overall, the market, whether due to Turkey Day or otherwise, appears to be settling down from FTX’s collapse and subsequent tidal waves. Genesis is the latest to receive the spotlight from investors worldwide as a result of the incident, but in recent weeks, much focus has been placed on security, decentralization, and consumer protection, brought upon responsibly by strong opinion leaders like CZ. While the damages the market may endure are not yet over, the outlook and sentiment of the industry as a whole appear to be healthy ones for the future.

2. Genesis Is The Next Fall After FTX?

Cryptonews - November 22, 2022

Crypto firm Genesis is facing difficulties in raising a minimum fund in fresh capital, yet no investors are interested in it. According to Fredrik Vold - a Cryptonews reporter, Genesis was calling for an emergency loan of $1 billion before suspending users' withdrawals last week. They acknowledged that they were dealing with a liquidity constraint due to some illiquid assets on their balance sheet and went on to say that they were also dealing with an ongoing run on deposits, mostly driven by retail programs and partners and institutional clients testing liquidity. As such, they were unable to obtain the required financial facility. The firm also reached out to Binance for investment; however, according to Watcher.Guru, Binance did not accept the request which was not a surprise since Genesis was already a sinking ship.  The inability to raise funds could put Genesis to its trumps, which means the company might have to file for bankruptcy. 

As reported by Gary McFarlane - a winner of Cryptocurrency Writer of the Year in the 2018 ADVFN International Awards, Genesis was one of the victims of FTX incident transmission. Genesis stopped making new loans and was suspending redemptions on their lending product after revealing that they had $175 million locked in FTX. 

3. Uniswap Will Collect User Data In The New Privacy Policy

Cryptonews - November 22, 2022

On 11 November 2022, Uniswap - a prominent decentralized exchange (DEX) changed its privacy policy to crawl certain data on-chain and off-chain from their users to enhance user experience. The decision has set the flame for some crypto users as the policy does not fit with the crypto’s core, which is the values of privacy and anonymity. However, Uniswap ensures that they will only claim public data on-chain and limited off-chain data like devices, cookies, browser language, etc. but not personal users' data such as first name, last name, street address, date of birth, email address, or IP address, which was considered sacred and was guaranteed not to be shared with any third parties. 

4. Ardana - Cardano DeFi Project Is Closing Down

CoinDesk - November 25, 2022

Ardana (DANA) - a promising decentralized finance project built on the top 10 proof-of-stake blockchains Cardano (ADA) that closed a deal of $10M by now bankrupt crypto fund firm Three Arrows Capital last year is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. 

On Twitter, the DeFi project claimed that they will cease the operation for the reason of “funding and project timeline uncertainty”. This is the end of the vision to be the MakerDAO and the Curve Finance of Cardano which majored in developing stablecoin minting and foreign exchange services. After the tweet, the price of DANA ($0.0547) went down a steep hill by more than 82%, currently trading at $0.0085.

5. Bank of Japan to Launch Experimental CBDC Program in Early 2023

Watcher Guru - November 23, 2022

The Bank of Japan is reported to be looking to provide an initial trial for the digital Yen issuance in partnership with three undisclosed megabanks and other local organizations within two years starting from spring 2023. Uncertain as it is for Japanese governments to make any final decision on their issuing CBDC any time soon until 2026, the Bank of Japan now proceeds with its pilot program which is set to first detect and resolve any possible difficulties incurred during the deposit and withdrawal process on behalf of users. In addition, due to the country's vulnerability to natural disasters, the pilot also aims to put the potential national digital currency under a no-Internet setting to the test. The race of CBDC is not uncommon among major economies, among which is China - which has conducted public testing for their CBDC e-CNY since April 2021.

6. Ethereum to Lower L2 Fees up to 100x Thanks to Proto-danksharding application

CoinDesk - November 24, 2022

Proto-danksharding, also known as EIP-4844, is the latest scalability proposal that has made the cut onto the CFI (considered for inclusion) list of the crypto giant Ethereum besides 7 other proposals. The decision was made during a call among core Dev team members of the chain last Thursday, which was being broadcast live on YouTube. Of course, the CFI list only reflects a degree of consensus from the Dev team to further pursue a proposal to the limit of its next development and devnet testing stage and, therefore, guarantees no outcome or future upgrade implementation. But if launched on the mainnet, the proposal is promised to enable ETH staking and curtail gas fees as much as 100x when applied on scalable L2 chains such as Optimism or Arbitrum through a new transaction format called “shard blob transactions" - which enhance the network's capacity and cost efficiency by dissecting the network into “shards”.