Singapore Dollar Tested on Polygon, Silk Road’s Stolen 50K Bitcoins Seized, and More!

Markets entered another week of resistance, with Bitcoin closing at $20.6K on Monday, close to where it started a week before. Despite a brief jump over the $21K and $1.6K marks that lasted for three days, Bitcoin and Ethereum barely moved over the past week, increasing by 0.5% and decreasing by 0.2% respectively. The biggest winner of last week’s rally was Polygon, which increased in returns by 43% after getting monumental institutional recognition as JPMorgan traded tokenized cash deposits on the Polygon blockchain last week, which we’ll delve deeper into in the DeFi section. Other winners, as seen in the figure below were Binance Coin and Lido which increased in returns by nearly 4% and 13% respectively.

Figure 1: TVL and price development of major crypto sectors

Source: 21Shares, Coingecko, DeFi Llama

Key takeaways

• Binance Acquires FTX

• The Fed seized more than $3B in Bitcoin stolen from the Silk Road in 2012.

• Hetzner kicks one-fifth of Solana validators off the cloud hosting platform

• JPMorgan and Singapore’s Central Bank testing DeFi’s Infrastructure
Spot and Derivatives Markets

Figure 2

Source: Glassnode

The chart above plots the average funding rate (in %) set by exchanges for perpetual futures contracts. A negative funding rate means that short positions have to pay long positions periodically and usually indicates a bearish sentiment since more short traders are dominant, and vice versa. As seen in Figure 2, the funding rates of most exchanges have risen above the zero mark over the past week, except for those of Kraken and FTX, who are currently at a down downtrend, with the latter getting acquired by Binance.

On-chain Indicators

Figure 3

Source: Glassnode

The amount of Ethereum powering smart contracts are on the rise, as shown in Figure 3. Nearly 30% of the total supply of Ethereum is held in smart contracts. This indicates that the utility behind Ethereum’s value is intensifying, which means that the cryptoasset’s dollar figure will in turn follow suit.

Next Week’s Calendar

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Research Newsletter

Each week the 21Shares Research team will publish our data-driven insights into the crypto asset world through this newsletter. Please direct any comments, questions, and words of feedback to research@21shares.com

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