Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

The US dollar has hit a temporary low and is gradually recovering, which is hurting risk assets. During the last 3 pre-halving years, $BTC tested the lows in Aug/Sep and it seemed to be following its typical cycle pattern. The third LTC halving, which reduced the current 12.5 LTC subsidy to 6.25 LTC, was a ‘sell-the-news’ event and $LTC dropped 12.1% this week. Several Curve pools were exploited and $CRV hit its YTD support zone of $0.5. $USDC’s market cap was down over 40% since the beginning of the year and at a 2-year low.

Options Market

BTC and ETH have been decoupling from external events, including traditional factors such as the US dollar and equity markets. This can be learned from their low long-term volatility despite recent major events like the hacking of Curve. BTC and ETH seem to be more focused on idiosyncratic aspects like regulatory risks and rulings. However, the options market suggests an optimistic outlook for a big price rise, especially in BTC, by year-end. The change in skew implied a shift in sentiment away from bullish expectations at least in the short-term.

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• On July 30, due to a potential vulnerability in the Vyper compiler, multiple Curve liquidity pools were exploited. The vulnerability has been fixed and tested in v0.3.1.
• Since August 1, Curve founders have sold 142.65 million CRV in total through OTC to 30 investors/institutions for $57.06 million in repayment of debt.
• HashKey Capital officially announced that it will launch a liquid (secondary) crypto asset fund product regulated by the Hong Kong Securities Regulatory Commission on September 1.
• According to OKLink browser information, LTC completed the block reward halving at block height 2,520,000, from 12.5 LTC to 6.25 LTC.
• According to Dune data, the number of World App wallets has exceeded 1 million, of which the number of Optimism wallets holding WLD tokens is 337,444.
• OKX announced that it has officially launched the AA smart contract wallet. The first phase of the function will support users to create AA smart contract wallets on the 7 public chains and use stablecoins directly to pay Gas.
• Binance Launchpool has launched CyberConnect and Sei.
• According to Techcrunch, open source software security solution Socket has completed a $20 million Series A financing led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

Macro

The major indexes closed the first week of August lower with an unexpected downgrade of the U.S. government’s credit rating: the DJIA ended -1.17%, the S&P 500 -2.3%, and the NASDAQ -2.8%. The 10-year Treasury yield rose to a fresh high of 4.2% for the year, after Fitch downgraded the U.S. debt rating from AAA to AA+ on Tuesday.