The Friday Focus: Issue 43

Jul 22, 2022

Welcome to our Friday newsletter. Here you find the most exciting crypto content from the previous week - curated for you by us.

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Weekly happenings

As the dust settles in the crypto industry after a couple of months of ravaging failures of some of the industry’s most prominent players, information starts to come out about what went wrong. Crypto lender Celsius starts its bankruptcy proceedings. The bankrupt crypto trading firm Three Arrows Capital owes $3.5B to creditors, including $2.3B to Genesis. Vauld has followed other crypto lending peers in halting withdrawals.

Interestingly, Tesla may have played a role in the recent crypto contagion, as they just disclosed that they sold bitcoin worth nearly $1B in the second quarter, right before the market crashed. Elon Musk revealed that he is still open to buying more bitcoin later.

As usual, we see high activity on the regulatory front. The UK is moving forward with regulation that extends banking rules to crypto assets, while Russia broadens a ban on crypto payments. A congressional group in the US is ‘disturbed’ by crypto mining’s energy usage. Meanwhile, a former Coinbase employee is charged with insider trading, leading the SEC to list nine Coinbase-listed tokens as securities.

The crypto landscape continues to expand in Latin America. Paraguay keeps attracting bitcoin miners with its relaxed energy surplus and friendly regulations, while crypto exchanges expand into both Mexico and Peru.

The crypto capital raise activity has been relatively low the latest couple of months, but we have started to see a slight increase. FTX has bailed out several crypto companies during the recent crypto crisis and is now in talks to raise funds for additional acquisitions. “Sustainable” blockchain 5ire raises $100M at a $1.5B valuation, blockchain security firm Halborn raises $90M, and decentralized crypto exchange Hashflow raises $25M at a $400M valuation.