Bitget Weekly Newsletter (June 20 - June 26)

As your most credible source of crypto news and knowledge, Bitget Academy is proud to release our Weekly Newsletter Series, the 360-degree onboarding guide for all crypto enthusiasts.

Central Themes

• BGB’s weekly return rose by almost 30%, the highest with regards to exchange tokens, three times as good as BTC and four times as good as ETH.

• Bitget announced expansion with an increase of over 1,000 positions by this year’s end.

• BTC has been oscillating around $20K. Trusts tracking BTC price remain popular.

• NFTs are going strong.

• Tether announced its new stablecoin, pegged to the British Pound Sterling.

BGB’s Outstanding Performance

Despite last week’s volatility, BGB had successfully outperformed various exchange tokens as well as crypto’s essentials: Bitcoin and Ethereum. As shown in the chart below, BGB price appeared to be much less volatile than the two major cryptocurrencies. BGB inves´´ß0ors must’ve really enjoyed the last 7 days as BGB managed to end the week at an epic 27.8% growth in comparison to BTC’s 4.3% and ETH’s 9.5%.

In general, the volatility of exchange tokens was at lower levels than BTC and ETH. BGB, BNB, FTT and KCS had a serious competition over the last week, with BGB again claiming the first place in terms of cumulative return.

Here is the summary of the percentage weekly growth. The whole market has been going up, hence the overall signal was rather positive, especially for BGB.

Bitcoin’s Mixed Signals

Bitcoin has been trading more or less around $20K, which small investors may find encouraging. A spike in public interest in Bitcoin, demonstrated by the number of Google Searches, was recorded on June 19.

Source: The Block

However, it is unlikely that many other investors can heartily agree with that. We’ve known that Bitcoin had a green week with a 7-day growth of 4.3%, but when zoom out, statistics show a rather disappointing situation.

Kaiko Analytics compared Bitcoin returns and trading volumes of the last three years. Halfway through 2022 and Bitcoin’s registered tumbling volumes and most negative returns (on Thursday and Friday).

Source: Kaiko Analytics

Adding the new 12-month high volatility to the mix, that’s definitely not good news.

Source: Skew Analytics

The network has reached the year’s low in power demand, mostly due to the falling hash rate (-14%). That didn’t help much with the loan repayment pressure miners are facing: although few miners have actually defaulted, decreasing value of mining machines in combination with Bitcoin’s price drop over the last few weeks have forced miners to sell their Bitcoin reserve, further contracting the asset’s price.

Everything considered, Bitcoin still holds its appeal to institutional investors. Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) Premium recovered from a negative 34% last week to -27%, while its daily volume climbed to a 7-month high at $426M on June 20.

Source: Skew Analytics

Not necessarily an optimistic option but ProShares’ BTCUSDT">BTCUSDT">Short Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITI) capitalised hugely on BTC declines, attracting $35 million in BITI shares on its second day of trading. Meanwhile, its sibling - ProShares’ Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO) - has become the largest exchange-traded BTC fund with the massive inflow of 4,115 BTC recorded in a mere 4-day course from June 13 to June 17.

Source: Arcane Research

Aiming to reach retirement investors, the Nevada-based Prime Trust had received $107 million in its Series B funding on the 22nd of June. A coalition between the multi-disciplinary Deloitte and NYDIG was formed earlier in the week, making Bitcoin available for more businesses. This is completely justified, though, particularly when Bitcoin is highly undervalued. Bitcoin Mayer Multiple has hit one of the lowest points since the first commercial transaction in 2011 at 0.684. As inferred from the chart, this bear market should prepare us for another Bitcoin rally.

Source: BuyBitcoinWorldwide

Troubles Continued

We talked about the “too big to fail” in last week’s issue: Celsius, Three Arrows Capital (3AC) and Babel Finance. They were all taken far down the rabbit hole, causing worry about extended contagion across the market:

- Babel Finance hasn’t resumed withdrawals yet, even after the firm claimed to having eased its liquidity crisis. It denied linkage with 3AC.

- Voyager Digital, a mobile-based crypto platform, disclosed their investment of 15,250 Bitcoin and 350 million USDC in 3AC and considered issuing a “note of default” to 3AC regarding the latter’s inability to make debt repayments. Its shares (VOYG) fell by 60% afterwards.

- Word on the Street says Goldman Sachs is preparing to acquire Celsius’ assets in case of bankruptcy. A few days earlier, Celsius had hired restructuring attorneys and more advisers to prepare for the scenario.

Around The Ethereum Universe

DeFi activities on Ethereum have fallen prey to market distress caused by Celsius, with the TVL on Ethereum plummeting to $48.86 billion - a 70% decrease from the ATH of $160.78 billion on December 01, 2021.

Source: DeFi Llama

Moreover, Ethereum now deems greatly inferior to Bitcoin as its value has shrunk by 35% against Bitcoin since the December 2021 TVL peak.

Source: TradingView

In an attempt to reduce the systemic risk stemming from Lido’s dominance in Ethereum 2.0’s staking pools, Lido DAO has opened their voting portal on Friday the 24th of June at 9AM (UTC) so that community members can decide on scaling back. According to Dune Analytics, Lido currently accounts for 31.66% of the staking on Ethereum Beacon Chain.

Source: Dune Analytics

The depegging problem of Lido staked ETH (stETH) has led to the notable MakerDAO’s decision to halt lending activities related to Aave. With stETH being one major collateral asset for borrowing the stablecoin DAI, the current situation put DAI under enormous pressure.

After some quiet time, Axie Infinity is back, announcing a reimbursement plan for victims of the March hack and the restart of its Ronin-Ethereum bridge on June 28.

NFT Unstoppable?

Amid “Extreme Fear”, the NFT sector has seen constant growth in the last 7 days. Football’s Super Star Cristiano Ronaldo agreed on an exclusive partnership with Binance for his NFT collection release. For their new music video, Eminem and Snoop Dog teamed up with Bored Apes Yacht Club, which publicly rejected the conspiracy theory about its logo.

The aggregated volume of Top 5 largest NFT Marketplaces for last week has surpassed $363 million, where the 4-month old X2Y2 usurping OpenSea’s throne.

Source: DappRadar

A familiar name in the Top 5, Magic Eden has raised $130 million in its Series B funding round. That put a $1.6 billion valuation on the project, which makes Magic Eden definitely comparable to the Ethereum-based OpenSea’s $100 million Series B last year.

Big names are showing promising signals for widespread NFT adoption:

- Ebay acquired UK-based NFT Marketplace KnownOrigin after its debut NFT collection last month.

- Shopify supported “tokengated commerce” by validating users’ NFT ownership so that they get access to merchants’ pre-sales and other events.

- Crypto payment firm MoonPay released a new utility NFT minting platform.

- Tech giants, including Meta and Microsoft, are working on a standardised framework for metaverse. However, Apple and crypto platforms such as Decentraland or The Sandbox were missing from the participant list.

The Latest Bitget News

Despite massive position cuts in the crypto sector, Bitget is staying strong, announcing a “double workforce” plan for the next 6 months.

New Listings in Innovation Zone

Cube Network (CUBE): $25K in CUBE to be won

Inu V2 (VOLT): $13K in VOLT for grabs

Fight Of The Ages (FOTA): 20K USDT prize pool

New Events

The Mega SWAP Summer Carnival: 10 Days To Participate

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Bitget Launches Flexible Savings, Up to 5.6% APY

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