The Friday Focus: Issue 50

Sep 09, 2022

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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

The White House has studied crypto mining and calls for standards to minimize its environmental impact. Coinbase backs a lawsuit aimed at the U.S. Treasury’s Tornado Cash sanctions. The SEC chair Gary Gensler supports giving the CFTC bitcoin oversight. Russia explores stablecoin settlements with some of its trading partners.

Ethereum is expected to transition to proof-of-stake on Wednesday, after completing the ‘Bellatrix’ upgrade this week - the final upgrade to make it technically ready for ‘the merge’. The merge replaces miners with stakers, and most stakers will use third-party infrastructure to run staking nodes and pool capital. The Swiss bank SEBA and crypto exchange Binance US are the latest to enable staking as a service for ETH holders, following the likes of Coinbase, Bitcoin Suisse, and Lido.

Binance continues employing its hyper-aggressive business expansion strategy. Over the summer, Binance conquered a massive share of the bitcoin spot volume by enabling zero-fee trading for several bitcoin pairs. The exchange behemoth has now set its sight on the stablecoin market by halting rival stablecoin USDC trading-pairs to increase BUSD usage. Binance will also issue ‘soulbound’ tokens to users who complete KYC checks.

We see an increase in private crypto companies’ valuations after a depressing summer. Crypto startup Mysten Labs raises $300M from several industry heavyweights at a $2B valuation, while the parent company of crypto ETP provider 21Shares raises $25M at a $2B valuation. In 2021 the market expected many crypto miners to go public in 2022, but most of these deals have not come to fruition. The crypto miner Bitdeer is the latest to delay a $4B SPAC deal to go public.

Crypto mining companies continue struggling. One of the top bitcoin mining pools, Poolin, froze withdrawals due to liquidity issues. Bitcoin miner Marathon has been severely struggling with getting their machines up and running, but now it looks like they are gaining momentum after energizing 25,000 machines in August. We also see that some miners, like Argo, who didn’t hedge their power prices, were exposed to massive power price increases in August.

That’s it for now - until next time!