$BTC 24 Hour High $15,637
$BTC 24 Hour Low $14,919
Happy Monday from HKbitEX! An very exciting week would be an understatement for what just happened in the past week, US Elections – Democracy 1 Trump 0, failed Ant Group IPO, ETH 2.0 development and market movements.
The BTC and ETH market
The market continues its bullish run for last week. BTC reached an all time high since Jan 2018, up to $15,903, then slightly pulled back to around $14,500, and back up to $15,500 at the time of writing. More interestingly, we see some of the highest trading volumes in the recent weekends - around $35B. The overall market cap of global digital assets increased from $400B to $442B, a 10.5% growth over the week. While we continue to see some sell-side pressure in the past 48 hours, it seems that the upside potential is still there whilst the uncertainty of US elections is resolved. That being said, traders may expect a short-term fluctuation at around $15,300 - $15,800, and if there is a breakthrough and resistance at these levels, we might expect another all-time .
For those with a passion for ETH, enthusiasts put a strong focus on ETH 2.0. The Ethereum Foundation, published ETH 2.0 specifications last Wednesday, explaining how the genesis phase will be invoked. 3200 ETH are being sent by Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin to the genesis phase deposit contract to start the staking procedure which we expect it to begin around December 1, 2020. At the time of writing, 48K ETH are now being staked. Following the ETH 2.0 updates, together with the bullish market, ETH went up around 12%, with a weekly high of $465, catching the trend of BTC, though still slightly below the 2020 record high of $487 resulting in the previous DeFi boom.
Mainstream adoption
Crypto Asset manager Grayscale’s Ethereum Trust is now managing $1 billion in AUM after becoming a registered reporting company under the SEC.
Mobile payment service provider Square Inc.’s Cash APP generated more than $1.63 billion in BTC revenue in Q3, 2020, which is a more than 1000% increase compared to the same period of 2019. Aligning with their early decision of putting 1% of their total assets (~50 million) into the digital asset.
PayPal confirmed an increase of digital asset buying limits from $10,000 to $15,000, after seeing a waiting list being “two to three times of what our expectations were.”, said Schulman, President and CEO of PayPal.
DeFi
Quick update on the DeFi market, Defi Tokens did make some good moves during the week, at the time of writing, YFI back on trading at $14,000 from $8000, AAVE at $54 from $26, SNX at $4.5 from $2.5, UNI at $2.7 from $1.8, COMP at $98 from $81 and LINK from $9.8 to $12.
One issue might be worth mentioning related to the freezing of $1M of user funds from Percent Finance - Compound Finance’s fork, due to a smart contract error (an error in the interest rate model update). Currently users of Percent Finance still cannot supply, borrow, repay or withdraw from the USDC, WBTC, and ETH markets. The team is now requesting assistance from Circle/Coinbase and BitGo to help releasing the funds, but the locked ETH might be irretrievable.
About traditional markets
No doubt, last weeks biggest cloud is the suspension of the world’s largest IPO – Ant Group IPO. Last Tuesday, the Chinese regulators called a stop on what would have been the world’s largest IPO – “the Ant Group IPO” in both the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock markets, with regard to some significant changes in fintech regulations in China. Following these new regulations on microlending, it seems that Ant Group’s IPO would have to stay on ice for quite a while and even after all dust settles, there will be an inevitable impact on the re-valuation of the Ant Group. It might be a game of wait and see here.
Regulatory updates
Ashley Alder, CEO of the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) announced a new regulatory regime for virtual asset service providers (VASPs) on the 2nd day of the 2020 Hong Kong FinTech Week. Within his keynote speech, he announced that the Financial Services and Treasury Bureau (FSTB) would be issuing a consultation paper for this new licensing regime, which seeks to regulate all the virtual asset service providers (VASPs), no matter whether the virtual assets fall under the definition of “securities” or not under the Securities and Futures Ordinance, to be under SFC’s regulatory perimeter.
#happytrading