Crypto markets continued to see green for the second consecutive week.
In a typical week, market leaders Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) set the tone for everyone, but this week they took a back seat to other impressive rallies.
Bitcoin has gained 3% in the past seven days and is currently changing hands at $21,314. Ethereum has risen almost 2% during this time and is trading at $1,640. Both could have made more progress, but the US Federal Reserve’s announcement on Wednesday of still another 0.75% interest rate hike— the fourth this year — quickly sabotaged their trajectory.
Interest rate hikes are usually (but not always) met with bearish sentiment among investors opting for riskier assets like crypto or stocks. The reason for this is that higher rates make it harder for people to borrow money, so they basically keep their wealth and give up their more haphazard investments.
On Friday, the two market leaders recovered a little following the publication of a Department of Labor Report showing that job growth in the United States was on the rise.
Several of the thirty major currencies have positively lunated this week. Binance Coin (BNB) jumped 18.6%, Litecoin (LTC) jumped 25%, Chainlink rose 20%, and Algorand (ALGO) rose 24%.
Uniswap (UNI) and Cosmos (ATOM) both added around 10% to their price.
Top coin Dogecoin (DOGE) soared 22% over seven days and topped 12 cents (yes, yes, a far cry from its high 73 cents in May 2021). Like last weekEveryone’s favorite memecorner always responds positively to news of Twitter’s new executive director
And the most impressive rally among the top 30 coins was Polygon (MATIC), which jumped 28% during the week following Reddit’s Booming Polygon NFTs and an announcement Wednesday by Meta that Instagram would be integrating Polygon for its next NFT keystroke function.
Twitter goes crypto?
It’s been a week since Elon Musk took over Twitter and news since has offered strong indications that the world’s largest microblogging platform may pivot to Web3 and crypto sooner than we think.
To start, on Monday, Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao appeared on CNBC and say his exchange had invested half a billion dollars in Musk’s takeover to give crypto a “seat at the free speech table.”
CZ also explained potential use cases for crypto on Twitter, saying Musk’s tentative plans to charge subscription fees for verified accounts could be “done very easily, on a global scale, using the cryptocurrencies as a means of payment”.
Binance announced last week create an internal blockchain team to help the CEO of Tesla in his crackdown on robot accounts.
The day before, Sriram Krishnan, general partner of venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) shared a photo to his followers from Twitter’s San Francisco office and tweeted that he is “help Elon Musk with Twitter temporarily with other great people.
Krishnan added: “I (and a16z) think this is a hugely important undertaking and can have a big impact on the world and Elon is the person to make it happen.”
Adoption!
The steady and widespread adoption of crypto continued this week when on Monday the industry applauded two major announcements.
The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission now says it is ready to conduct a public consultation on how to give retail investors access to crypto. Although crypto exchanges are allowed to operate in the special administrative region, integration is limited to investors with at least HK$8 million ($1 million) in their portfolios.
The regulator said it was open to reviewing the ownership rights of tokenized assets and the legality of smart contracts at some point and was exploring a number of pilot projects to test the potential benefits of the use of cryptography.
Potential projects include publishing a NFT for Hong Kong Fintech Week 2022 and possibly even a pilot of the Hong Kong Central Bank’s (CBDC) own digital currency.
Private equity giant Apollo Global, which manages half a trillion dollars of wealth, announced on Monday that it hold cryptos for institutional clients through a new partnership with Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered crypto bank in the United States.
Anchorage will retain a “significant portion” of Apollo’s portfolio. COO Adam Eling said in a statement“We were attracted to working with Anchorage given their commitment to operating under strict regulatory oversight, their strong focus on security and segregation of client assets, and their ease of use for asset managers to hold digital tokens.”
On Wednesday, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) decentralized finance pilot program executed “the first real-world use case for institutional-grade DeFi protocols,” according to Aave Founder Stani Kulechov, who spoke with Decrypt.
JP Morgan, DBS Bank, and SBI Digital Asset Holdings used the Aave protocol on Polygon to transact FX and government bonds on Ethereum. Banks swapped tokenized versions of Singapore government bonds for Japanese government bonds and Japanese yen for Singapore dollars as a test.
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