1️⃣ L2 Token Reckoning
While altcoins across the board have had an abysmal month, there's been some severe reshuffling of L2 native tokens specifically, with a number of ETH's major ecosystems getting their market caps slashed this week.
Optimism's OP is down 23% week-over-week and 45% on the month. Arbitrum's ARB has fallen 19% this week and 43% over the past 30 days. Meanwhile newer entrants like ZKS and STRK have fallen 43% and 59% respectively in the past month.
What's to blame for the reshuffling? A rush of new L2 token entrants certainly hasn't helped.
Starknet $STRK and Wormhole $W
— badenglishtea (@badenglishtea) July 4, 2024
Both launched <4 months ago
Both launched $2b+
Both now down >-75%
This is what venture capital looks like in crypto pic.twitter.com/9OzKy7JVot
2️⃣ Bitcoin Blows Up
BTC's price fluctuated as much as $10K this week, as Mt Gox redemptions going live and the German government's market sales sent traders rushing to the exits.
The worst of the market action took hold over Independence Day as wallets associated with the defunct Mt Gox exchange moved 47,229 BTC as they geared up to repay depositors. As if a sizable chunk of $9 billion in looming BTC potentially hitting the market soon wasn't daunting enough, German authorities have begun making regular sales of their multi-billion dollar tranche of BTC, which was seized through various criminal cases.
Nearly 1B of liquidations over the last 3 days pic.twitter.com/flzVdnBAdP
— jay (@0xjaypeg) July 5, 2024
3️⃣ MiCA Goes Live with Circle
The EU's Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulatory framework went live this week, and Circle became the first stablecoin issuer to earn a license under the new regulation.
Circle will now be able to mint the USDC and EURC stablecoins, and the EU is urging EU-based traders to convert non-compliant stablecoins. This could prove to be a boon to Circle, which still lags behind Tether in circulated stables.
BREAKING NEWS: @Circle announces that USDC and EURC are now available under new EU stablecoin laws; Circle is the first global stablecoin issuer to be compliant with MiCA. Circle is now natively issuing both USDC and EURC to European customers effective July 1st.
— Jeremy Allaire - jda.eth (@jerallaire) July 1, 2024
Details… pic.twitter.com/isNBumoi3e
4️⃣ EigenLayer Competitor Shows Traction
The much-hyped EigenLayer competitor Symbiotic just surpassed $1 billion in deposits after less than a month, flipping the Karak restaking protocol and earning the second-place spot among restaking protocols.
Symbiotic's close relationship with staking heavyweight Lido and EigenLayer's perceived vulnerability after a poorly received "stakedrop" token launch has left plenty of market excitement for Symbiotic and its associated Mellow Finance LRT protocol. All that said, there's still a long way to go to catch up with EigenLayer's $19B in deposits.
With more players, the restaking wars is getting intense.
— Viktor DeFi 🛡🦇🔊 (@ViktorDefi) July 5, 2024
Symbiotic just flipped Karak to become the second major contender to EigenLayer.
Curious to see how it plays out, not just on Ethereum but also on Solana. pic.twitter.com/TYs4U5Rfmu
deposits aft
5️⃣ Silvergate Pays Up
The crypto-friendly Silvergate Bank settled charges with a litany of government agencies and paid $63 million in fines over suits that it had not sufficiently monitored nearly $1 trillion in crypto transactions, including those from FTX. Further, regulators had argued that the bank had misled the public as to the effectiveness of its internal compliance programs for crypto customers.
Today we charged Silvergate Capital Corp, its former CEO Alan Lane, and former CRO Kathleen Fraher with misleading investors about the strength of the BSA/AML compliance program and the monitoring of crypto customers, including FTX. https://t.co/r7s8lVKJjR pic.twitter.com/Z3UR42swbb
— U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (@SECGov) July 1, 2024