$BTC 24 Hour High $23,366.49
$BTC 24 Hour Low $23,167.21
$ETH 24 Hour High $1,658.99
$ETH 24 Hour Low $1,589.99
Happy Monday folks, and Kung Hay Fat Choy! Highlights from the week:
- BNY Mellon eyes digital asset custody services for Asia
- South Korea to deploy cryptocurrency tracking system in 2023
- Swiss private bank Cité Gestion tokenizes own shares
The $BTC and $ETH market
Last week’s crypto market prices rose slightly by 1.97%, with BTC and ETH up by 3.9% and 0.3% respectively. AVAX and Polygon were the top performers among the top-cap tokens.
Bitcoin started a leg up on last Friday and tapped $23,500. However, it failed and returned to familiar ground. The primary cryptocurrency skyrocketed to a multi-month high last week, with BTC jumping to $23,800 for the first time in 4 months.
Investor’s confidence has been building up with BTC’s 2-week stupendous rally. The confidence got another boost after the U.S. core personal expenditures (PCE) data for Dec showed the slowest annual rate of increase since Oct 2021. In general, BTC’s price spent most of the week in a range between $22,000 and $23,000, aside from a couple of brief price pumps. The most notable one took the asset to $23,800, which became the new highest price point since September.
Shanghai upgrade
The first set of testing has commenced for Ethereum’s much anticipated Shanghai upgrade. Developers said they successfully created a copy of the blockchain – known as a “shadow fork” – to provide a testing environment.
Mainstream adoption & What’s in the news…
The Ministry of Justice in South Korea announced plans to introduce a crypto-tracking system to monitor transaction history, extract information related to transactions and check the source of funds before and after remittance.
As it expands in Asia and the rest of the world, the Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon) plans to offer a custodial service for tokenized securities and crypto assets, its President and CEO Robin Vince told Nikkei. BNY Mellon is said to be the oldest bank in the U.S., its precursor having set up shop in 1784. In the field of custodial services, it is the world's largest player, with $44.3 trillion in assets under custody or administration.
The sad saga of Sam Bankman-Fried continued on Friday with Federal prosecutors asking U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan to ban the former CEO of FTX from communicating privately with current and former employees of the embattled exchange and its investment arm, Alameda Research. Prosecutors said Bankman-Fried had reached out to one former FTX employee in what they described as a thinly-veiled attempt to “influence potential testimony."
Cité Gestion bank has tokenized its shares using the Taurus digital asset platform. The Swiss private bank has CHF7 billion in assets under management. While it claims to be the first private bank to tokenize its shares, it is not the first Swiss bank to do so. Credit for that goes to Sygnum, which tokenized its shares in late 2020.