A Week to Restart!
Welcome to another edition of ProBit Global Bits, where we recap the most significant crypto-related developments in the past week for you. The crypto space never sleeps and is always full of happenings within its ecosystem despite macroeconomic factors from across the world.
Over the past week, Asian stocks have started rising as China announced plans to ease restrictions imposed on Shanghai — to be lifted from Wednesday, June 1 — — following the Covid-19 lockdown. Worth more than $600bn before the lockdown, Shanghai’s reopening is a major relief for the continent’s economic players.
The U.S. with the Memorial Day long weekend saw major stocks rally with the S&P 500 rising by 2.5% to finish 6.6% higher — the best weekly gain it has seen since November 2020 — while the Dow Jones and Nasdaq gained 1.8% and 3.3% respectively.
We’ll have to wait to see whether the crypto market is about to decouple from the stock market or not. Have a good read!
Terra Moves to New Chain
The Terra network got renamed to Terra Classic network as a new Terra chain — without the algorithmic stablecoin — was launched. The ticker for the old LUNA token was changed to LUNC while the former UST is now USTC.
The network also launched an airdrop program as part of the revival attempt to which the team came up with a distribution plan that would supposedly help to appease pre- and post-attack LUNA holders. Token inflation is in place as well to incentivize network security with a target staking reward of 7% p.a. The community airdrop, as described in Proposal 1623, will follow the new chain’s Genesis token on May 27.
Some crypto exchanges have shown their support for the rebranding to Terra 2.0 and the airdrop campaign. They include Binance, FTX, Huobi, OKX, KuCoin, Upbit, and Gate.
Meanwhile, staking service provider, Chorus One, is among those that say they will not participate in Terra 2.0 for the time being.
Demand for Crypto Continues to Rise in Europe Despite Risks, ECB Says
Up to 10% of European households may own crypto-assets, a new European Central Bank (ECB) report finds. It says despite the risks, the EU investor demand for crypto-assets has been increasing owing to, among other things, perceived opportunities for quick gains, crypto-assets uniqueness such as the programmability, and institutional investors’ usage of these assets for portfolio diversification.
Mostly young adult males and highly educated are more likely to invest in crypto-assets in the countries surveyed while respondents with scores either at the top or bottom levels in terms of financial literacy were highly likely to hold crypto-assets.
Most owners hold less than €5,000 in crypto-assets (slightly predominant holdings at below €1,000) while about 6% of owners hold more than €30,000 worth.
The rise of crypto-asset demand from EU institutional investors has been further aided by the increasing availability of crypto-based derivatives and securities on regulated exchanges which have increased in popularity over the last few years in Europe and the United States.
Mexican Peso-Pegged USDT Debuts
Tether launched the Tether MXN₮ token which is pegged to the Mexican Peso. The stable digital asset is pegged 1:1 to the Mexican Peso to provide a store of value for users and minimize volatility when converting their assets and investments from fiat to digital currencies, the company says.
Bitcoin Now Riding on New Friendly Waves?
The past week saw the Bitcoin market record its “longest continuous string of red weekly candles in history” according to crypto analytics firm Glassnode.
Digital asset management firm Coinshares puts total inflows into digital asset investment products last week at US$87m to push year-to-date inflows to US$0.52bn, a stark contrast from the US$5.9bn YTD flows during 2021.
Bitcoin accounts for US$69m and year-to-date inflows of US$369m while North America leads regional inflows with US$72m and Europe at US$15.5m.
The week also marked the ninth consecutive week as the top crypto continues to stumble, but some believe the bottom may be in with an established support level holding firm at $29,000.
Amidst the rubble and chaos were several positive developments for the space with the Thai government announcing a value-added tax-free regime on the transfer of cryptocurrencies till December 31, 2023.
The move, geared toward efforts to regulate the country’s cryptocurrency industry, coincides with Paraguay’s lower chamber passing a bill that could see crypto regulated in the South American country.
If and when it is granted into law by the Senate and the President, the bill approved by the Paraguayan House of Representatives will grant Bitcoin mining as well as industry players like cryptocurrency exchanges legal recognition.
Congressman Carlitos Rejala tweeted that the proposed mining operations will use 100% hydroelectric renewable energy.
U.S. venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced its earmarking of $4.5 billion in capital to back crypto and blockchain companies as it sought to take advantage of bargains in the asset class market. The latest fund marks its 4th overall, raising its total crypto-related investments to $7.6 billion.
Vitalik Takes Part in Introducing SBT Token
Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin and two other authors have introduced Soulbound (or SBT) non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that would function in accordance with one’s reputation and accomplishments.
The non-transferable SBT tokens would be like an extended resume representing “Souls” and their commitments, credentials, and affiliations, their paper says.
Quite useful in a pluralistic “Decentralized Society” (DeSoc) ecosystem where Souls and communities come together bottom-up, SBT aims to address the lack of a native web3 identity for the DeFi ecosystem among other things. It comes with the ability to enable verifiable credentials as well as a property like revocability — allowing an issuer to burn the token and re-issue it to a new wallet — among other capabilities.
The emerging DeSoc is at the intersection of politics and markets where they both augment with sociality. In the process, the token will serve Souls as they encode the trust networks of the real economy to establish provenance and reputation, the paper states.
As part of the main idea to bolster people’s social identities by customizing them with unique, non-exchangeable badges, the SBT would also help to solve some of DeFi’s problems like scams and theft.
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