23 August 2024

Macro/TradFi

  • Brazil’s second Solana spot ETF has been approved and will be offered by US$970M+ Brazil-based asset manager, Hashdex, in partnership with local bank BTG Pactual. 

  • Eurozone CPI inflation came in as forecasted at 2.6%. This is significantly lower than the 5.3% this time last year, although it is up 0.1% month-on-month.

  • BlackRock’s ETHA became the first spot Ethereum ETF to cross US$1B in net inflows, although overall flows remain negative, impacted by the continued Grayscale ETHE outflows. 

  • Bitcoin ETFs saw a positive week, recording US$255M in inflows so far. Bitcoin ETFs have only seen two days of net outflows in the last two weeks, and have been gaining momentum through August, now with over US$17.6B in total assets. 

  • Bitcoin miner, Bitfarms, is set to acquire competing firm, Stronghold Digital, in a US$175M deal. The deal comes in a difficult period for many Bitcoin miners, following the fourth Bitcoin halving in April, which significantly reduced miner revenues. 

Crypto

L1/L2:

  • Sonic Labs, previously Fantom, has announced a bounty program called Sonic Boom to help fuel the growth of dApps within the ecosystem. At the end of the 13-week program, up to 30 winning projects will be rewarded with Gems (points), which they can distribute to their users, with 37.5% of Sonic’s planned airdrop set to be allocated to them. 

  • Upcoming L1, Story Protocol, has raised US$80M in a Series B round to build its intellectual property (“IP”) chain. This raise brings their total funding to US$140M. 

  • Sony, the Japanese tech conglomerate, has announced Soneium, an Ethereum L2. Testnet is expected to go live in the next few days for the OP Stack-based L2 chain. 

  • Web3 credentials and reward platform, Galxe, has launched the alpha mainnet of their Gravity Chain. Gravity is an L1 omni-chain smart contract platform designed to solve Web3 fragmentation, and will bring all of Galxe’s products on-chain. 

  • Grayscale has launched its Avalanche Trust to offer investors exposure to the AVAX token. 

  • Optimism has introduced SUNNYs - an award ceremony for Optimism Superchain projects, with 540K $OP in prizes. 

DeFi:

  • Babylon has launched the first phase of its Bitcoin staking mainnet, with initial staking limits between 0.005 BTC to 0.05 BTC, to prevent whales from dominating. 

  • Tether has been natively launched on the Aptos network. Tether is also expected to launch a UAE Dirham-pegged stablecoin shortly.

NFT

  • Leading NFT marketplace, Magic Eden, has announced the upcoming launch of its ME token, set to be released in the next few months. 

Others:

  • HashKey Group, a digital asset services provider, has announced a partnership with TON mini-game, Catizen. The entities will cooperate to develop GameFi products and digital entertainment infrastructure. 

  • Bitcoin restaking platform, SatLayer, has announced an US$8M pre-seed round. 

  • Sorella Labs, working on solving Ethereum’s MEV issue, has raised a US$7.5B seed round. 

  • Corn, an Ethereum L2 that uses a tokenized version of Bitcoin for gas and incentives, has completed a US$6.7M funding round.

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