MARKET WRAP

1. Crypto Market Rises regardless of Fed Increased Interest Rate Announcement

CoinDesk - November 03, 2022

Crypto

On Wednesday, Nov 2nd, the US Federal Reserve announced that they had increased the interest rate by 75 basis points to a target range of 3.75% - 4%, which supposedly reached its historic peak since 2008. The act inadvertently emphasized the perpetual problems that central banks remain challenged by, which is effectively overseeing the current state of inflation. Consequently, since the decision was published, there have been some negative impacts felt on behalf of equities. BTC and ETH - the two largest cryptocurrencies regarding market capitalization, however, managed to maintain their price relatively as they were two weeks ago. With that said, BTC stabilized at approximately $20,000, whereas ETH held its price above $1,500.

Notably, other major tokens were also at their flying price. Two of those are related to Web3 platform projects: Filecoin and Storj.

Insights

After the Meta Platforms Inc, formerly Facebook Inc., revealed that they would use Arweave as a decentralized warehouse for storing their creators' NFTs, the value of Web3-based tokens - namely Filecoin and Storj - spiked, both receiving positive uplifts of more than 10%. In particular, AR - the token of Arweave, experienced a steep increase of 60% on the same day.

Equities

As the interest rate jumped, there were pieces of evidence showing that the market was heavily affected. The equity market underwent a slight decline as the Amazon and Uber giants’ job slashing took place. NASDAQ-100 Technology Sector Index dropped 1.7% while S&P500 experienced a less severe 1% decrease. The gold index continued on its downhill course with the most recent decline by 0.4%.

Takeaways

In an article penned by Helene Braun, the US market reporter at CoinDesk, Fed Chair Jerome Powell hinted that the Fed is planning to slow the pace of increasing rates soon. Although the velocity of inflation has slowed down in recent months, the monthly basis point is still on the rise. This observation hinders the Fed from considering a pause on further tightening interest rates. Powell underlined that Fed has overtightened interest rates and that it is “very premature” to discuss pausing and "not a conversation to be had." Therefore, perhaps the market could witness a temporary drop in the future.

2. DEX Rubic’s $1,000,000 Worth of Tokens Stolen

Cryptonews - November 03, 2022 at 9:44 am EST

Rubic, a Multi-Chain Swaps Protocol and decentralized exchange announced that they had lost more than a million worth of tokens when attackers were in control of the key access to a private administrator’s wallet. 

The developers of the project released a statement on Twitter, saying that the wallet in charge of the RBC/BRBC bridge and staking rewards had been compromised.

According to Rubic, 34 million RBC and BRBC tokens were stolen and sold on Uniswap and PancakeSwap exchanges. At the time of the incident, the total loss value was determined to equal more than $1.2 million. The incident caused RBC tokens to drop 98% in its price during that day. However, the length of the loss did not sustain since there was an immediate 15% increase following. To comfort its user base, Rubic claimed that:

The team also said that they had started the investigation with credible third-party services. However, they will withdraw the investigation if the attacker returns 80% of the hacked funds. The remaining amount can be considered the reward for the hacker as part of the bug-hunting campaign.

3. Binance CEO Invested $500 Million in Elon Musk Twitter Deal and This is Why

Cryptonews - November 02, 2022 at 7:38 am EST

Last Wednesday, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) said that his company had decided to invest $500 million in Elon Musk’s Twitter deal, backing the controversial billionaire's “free speech" vision for the platform.

CZ also admitted that he is a heavy Twitter user which could consolidate the fact that the exchange is planning to be a long-term investor in Twitter. Another reason for CZ to invest in Twitter is that he hopes “to be able to play a role in bringing social media and web3 together and broadening the use and adoption of crypto and blockchain technology”. Nevertheless, it is unclear how such active minority investors as Binance will be on social media going forward.

4. Instagram to Upgrade Key Functionality for NFT Creation, Showcasing, and Selling

CoinDesk - November 04, 2022 at 3:23 am EST

Meta - November 02, 2022 at 6:00 pm EST

 

 

In their most recent update regarding the NFT showcasing features on Instagram, the parent company Meta disclosed that the image-focused platform commits to equipping their users with a one-stop “end-to-end toolkit" that enables them to mint, display, and trade directly on the social media app with metadata of NFT collections pulled from OpenSea marketplace. They reveal that the functionality is first available to a small select set of US-based creators for testing at the moment and expansion to other countries is set to take place in the near future, despite the absence of the phase timeline. 

The L2 Polygon blockchain has also been chosen as its initial partner to launch this functionality. According to William Foxley, multimedia director at Compass Mining and a former tech reporter for CoinDesk, choosing the L2 project Polygon as their launchpad is quite a strategic move of Meta to make use of the platform's “scalable" advantage that goes up to a billion of users, which Meta needs at present, in comparison to the “infrastructure, base layer" L1 Ethereum.

Besides this, video-formatted collectibles are now accepted. Solana blockchain and Phantom wallet are officially among the latest additions to their existing lineup of supported chains and wallets.

5. dYdX Introduces a proposal for Autonomous SubDAO-based Infrastructure

The Block - November 03, 2022 at 3:44 pm EST

dydx Blog - November 02, 2022

 

Pledged to be one of the essential preparation steps for the Mainnet launch of the upcoming dYdX V4, the creation of an Operations subDAO, which succeeds the previously established dYdX Grants Program that, through an eight-person multi-signature trustee committee, has authority over some 5,401,080 DYDX tokens (~$5.4 million), is being proposed to the community by the dYdX team for consideration.

If overwhelmingly approved, the Operations SubDAO could pave the way for the establishment and management framework of additional subDAOs. The potential Operations subDAO’s offered responsibilities range from the setup of a bank payment system, facilitation and maintenance of DAO communication, and the building of relationships with vendors and service providers. If all goes well, the Operations SubDAO would go on forming a year-round, 24/7 dYdX user support service.