Wed Apr 05 2023
ETH has outperformed BTC and other altcoins as the Shanghai upgrade approaches. It spiked to $1940 before settling down. Also for gold, the physical type has been reaching ATH, pushing the volumes for tokenized gold to over $1 billion. Dogecoin soared (30%) after the normal Elon-Twitter-related activity. Other coins that were dark green were the ADA and the STETH. By the way, Twitter also released the code of its algorithm.
https://mrktkap.substack.com/p/wed-apr-04-2023
Yesterday’s JOLTS data came below expectations, and the pivot crowd went into overdrive, tightening the UST by 15 bps. The banking crisis has crossed borders with news that the Chinese Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the State Supervision Commission has launched a probe against the state-owned asset management group. On this side, TD has become the most shorted banking stock.
Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, of 3AC fame, have launched the crypto exchange OPNX, which uses FLEX as its token to trade bankruptcy claims. Paxful is the latest to shut down operations in the USA. The MT Gox repayment deadline is on April 6th for the September settlement. Dubai is asking Binance for more documentation as it tightens the scrutiny of digital players.
There are lots of upgrades and expansions in Defi World this month. Ethereum is focused on April 12 for the Shanghai upgrade. Aave continues to expand on different blockchains, including BNB, zkEVM, and Startknet. Uniswap and Balancer are both looking to expand to Avalanche in a few weeks. Optimism gets a bedrock upgrade this month. Pancakeswap is already live with V3. Aura is supposed to go live on Arbitrum soon. JOE is too on track to launch the efficient V2.1.
LayerZero has a valuation of $3 billion as it raised another $120 million in Series B. It’s an omnichain interoperability protocol as compared to hack-prone bridges. Delphi Labs also raised $13.5 million for the Web3 accelerator.
Staking protocols will be in focus as April 12 approaches. The protocols are already rivaling the lending protocols in daily volumes. Macro-wise, it’s still a numbers game as the labor markets show pockets of cooling.
