Market Highlights
- Bitcoin hits 20-month high of US$44,700
- Ordinals inscription sells for 10.4 BTC (approx. US$450,000)
- Federal judge demands Binance founder, CZ, must stay in Seattle
Bitcoin
Bitcoin (BTC) investors fought to hold on to last week’s gains, making a new yearly high of US$44,700 Friday night before abruptly falling over 7.0% to US$40,400 on Monday, which saw nearly US$100 million in leveraged long BTC positions liquidated that same day.
This brought BTC’s eight-week rally to an end, closing the week at US$41,262, down 1.7% over the last seven days.
Despite this, CoinShares’ latest fund report revealed crypto investment products to have gained another US$176 million in funds this week, marking a 10-week total of US$1.76 billion in digital asset inflows. Total assets under management is up 107% this year and stands at US$46.2 billion, 47% below the all-time high of US$86.6 billion in 2021.
Ethereum
Ethereum (ETH) followed in BTC’s footsteps this week, rising to a weekly high of US$2,403 before also suddenly crashing 7.2% Monday morning. ETH managed to hold on to a slight gain of 0.4% week-on-week before closing out at US$2,232.
Altcoins
Major market sectors were a mixed bag this week. Web3 held on to a massive 29.0% gain while DeFi and Currencies lagged behind, losing 4.2% and 0.4%, respectively.
With Solana (SOL) rising over 400% this year, many users have returned to the layer-1, causing a resurgence on many of its tokens. This week saw Solana-based hotspot protocol, Helium (HNT), rise 66.2% this week after the recent launch of Helium Mobile. Also gaining this week were Solana-base DeFi exchange, Raydium (RAY) and newly launched memecoin, Bonk (BONK), which added-on 76.9% and 89.7%, respectively.
Layer-1 protocol, Avalanche (AVAX) and the recently rebranded Beam (BEAM) also enjoyed healthy gains of 68.7% and 36.6%, respectively.
Securing top spot this week however was BitTorrent (BTT) which surged a whopping 183.5% after Tron’s founder, Justin Sun, announced the uptick in Tron (TRX) users and total value locked (TVL). Tron acquired BTT in 2018 and is the blockchain that BTT is issued on.
In Other News
Alongside BTC’s rally these past several weeks, Ordinals collections have picked up the pace as well with one particular inscription selling for 10.4 BTC (approx. US$450,000), a record sale for the protocol, and displaying a high level of resilience within the community.
Regulatory
- On Thursday, federal judge Richard Jones decreed that Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the founder of major crypto exchange Binance, is required to stay in Seattle, U.S, during the period leading up to his sentencing on criminal charges pertaining to anti-money laundering violations.
"The Court agrees with the government that this is an unusual case," Jones wrote in his ruling. "The defendant has enormous wealth and property abroad, and no ties to the United States." and the lack of an extradition treaty between the U.S. and the UAE posed too great of a flight risk.
- Tether, the company behind the world's largest stablecoin USDT, announced yesterday that it would be freezing its tokens in wallets belonging to individuals on the United States' Office of Foreign Asset Controls (OFAC) list of sanctioned individuals. In its announcement, Tether framed the move as a voluntary step to "proactively prevent any potential misuse of Tether tokens and enhance security measures."
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