This week, Saylor’s MicroStrategy makes ~$600mm Bitcoin purchase, the largest since February 2021, Grayscale Investments hires former Invesco ETF lead John Hoffman to take on managing director role, and Bitcoin hits an 18 month high at $38.8k.
This week, Saylor’s MicroStrategy makes ~$600mm Bitcoin purchase, the largest since February 2021, Grayscale Investments hires former Invesco ETF lead John Hoffman to take on managing director role, and Bitcoin hits an 18 month high at $38.8k.
🌞 Circle partners with SBI Holdings Partners to Push Digital Currency Innovation in Japan with USDC Services
🌞 Institutional Flows into crypto products hits YTD weekly high
💫 Artemis Data Insights:
The crypto ecosystem saw L1 / L2 ecosystem continue to move upwards with average and median WoW increases of 1.7% and 2.9%, respectively. This week saw a divergence in price action across the token universe, with declines in L2s / alternative L1s such as OP, APT and EGLD (down 7.7%, 5.3% and 3.3% WoW, respectively). Meanwhile, the rest of the crypto ecosystem continued to see positive price pressure led by tokens in the Cosmos ecosystem (ATOM and OSMO up 6.4% and 7.3% WoW, respectively). Meanwhile, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Index increased 0.9% and 0.5% WoW, respectively, with the S&P 500 setting a new high for the year on December 1st after seeing the best month of 2023 in November.
This week, SBI Holdings, a major Japanese financial conglomerates (~$6bn USD market cap) entered into an agreement with Circle to deliver USDC distribution, banking and blockchain technology for the Japanese market. SBI Holdings serves as the largest online retail brokerage and one of the largest digital banks in Japan, and already operates digital asset trading, brokerage and cross-border payments solutions.
Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, stated in a post on X that the partnership intends to bring USDC into the Japanese digital asset market and allow it to be used in the on-chain economy and across “consumer-led web3 product categories.” He also notes that the robust cross-border payments, FX and trading markets in Japan could also extend the adoption of digital dollars utilized on blockchain networks.
As a part of this initiative, Jeremy also expects that Circle’s USDC treasury and settlement operations can be utilized for direct liquidity between JPY and USDC within Japan’s domestic banking system, similar to the recent launch of the same system in Singapore.
At this time Japan is the only major government in the world that has stablecoin laws for both domestic and foreign-issued stablecoins. Only stablecoins that met the regulatory hurdle set out by the Japanese Financial Services Agency (JFSA) will be able to circulate on Japanese markets, which will likely limit the number of stablecoins to a small number that are highly regulatorily compliant.
This partnership is an incredibly exciting step forward for the integration of stablecoins within the broader financial ecosystem. We will continue to monitor the deployment of stablecoins into consumer-facing applications and financial products.
Based on Coinshares and Bloomberg data, the week of November 24, 2023 saw the highest levels of weekly institutional capital deployment in 2023 with $346mm of inflows.
Bitcoin remains the most allocated-to asset, with $312mm of inflows over the week, bringing YTD inflows to ~$1.5bn YTD. The second most allocated-to asset is Solana, with ~$138mm of YTD flows, eclipsing Ethereum ($21mm in YTD outflows) and XRP (~$13mm of YTD inflows). With that said, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana have all seen upticks in volume over the past month with ~$940mm, $100mm and ~$40mm of monthly inflows, respectively.
Interestingly, in the past week Canada and Germany comprised 87% of total inflows (~$200mm and ~$102mm, respectively), with continued low participation from US investors (~$30mm over the past week). Short-sellers continue to yield, with short-selling products seeing ~61% decline in AUM since peak volumes in April 2023.
Since dYdX and Celestia launched as Cosmos Appchains in October 2023, trading volumes on Osmosis, the primary DEX in the Cosmos ecosystem has seen weekly volumes grow from ~$50mm to ~$100mm+ (peaking at ~$140mm). The growth in trading volume was partly driven by Celestia, a modular blockchain architecture, launching a highly anticipated token, TIA, on the Cosmos network at the end of October.
dYdX appears to have hit ~$100mm of daily volume after launch, which has further pushed up usage for the Osmosis platform as more liquidity flows into the Cosmos ecosystem.
This jump in trading volumes has coincided with a run-up in price, with the OSMO token trading up from ~$0.35 up to ~$0.70 (~100% increase MoM).
Detailed dashboard for people who love more numbers in smaller font:
Note: Revenue represents fees that go to the protocol’s treasury or are returned to tokenholders via a burn mechanism (source: Token Terminal). Weekly commits and weekly dev activity as of 11/13/23.
The content is for informational purposes. None of the content is meant to be investment advice. Use your own discretion and independent decision regarding investments.
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