Bitget Hot Takes (August 08 - August 14)

Bitget Hot Takes is the exclusive weekly newsletter series by Bitget Academy, the 360-degree onboarding guide for all crypto enthusiasts.

Bitget Hot Takes last week can be found here.

Central Themes

• Weekly returns of BGB and BNB hit parity.

• July CPI for the U.S. confirms that price increases have eased.

• Bitcoin soared to the good ol’ US$25,000 and Ethereum to US$2,000.

• Tornado Cash faced sanctions.

• CEXs in turmoil, DEXs in havoc.

• BlackRock announced its first BTC spot trust.

BGB and BNB Hit Parity

The week was full of positive news - CPI July Release is lower than expectations, and Ethereum's last merge testnest has been successfully completed. Ethereum obviously remains the gang leader; however, BGB’s weekly growth of 2.59% is roughly on the same level with BNB’s 2.65%. The negligible 0.06% difference between these two figures indicates that BGB has, in fact, hit parity with BNB not just in less favourable market conditions, but also in the next positive cycles.

Nearly US$10 million in BGB changed hands in the last seven days, thus scoring a 6.63% increase in Bitget Token’s weekly volume. Need to check on BGB’s self-sustained growth? Here are our BGB Report for the last three months:

BGB Sail: July Edition

BGB Sail: June Edition

BGB Sail: May Edition

Back to US$25K and US$2K

The Bureau of Labour Statistics has released the July CPI numbers on August 10, 2022, which records inflation in the U.S. during July at 8.5%. This figure is slightly lower than the expected 8.7%, breathing a breeze of optimism in almost all markets. Bitcoin jumped to US$24,000 right after the release; the momentum has paved the way for BTC to cross US$25,000. Ethereum prices also benefited from the news. Moreover, the final testnet merge on Goerli has pushed ETH price further up to end the week at 16% growth. We can bet on another upsurge in ETH price as Ethereum Foundation suggested tentative dates for The Merge on September 15 and September 16.

Pressure On Decentralised Bodies

Last Monday, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) announced the blacklisting of crypto-mixing service Tornado Cash, saying ‘Tornado Cash has repeatedly failed to impose effective controls designed to stop it from laundering funds for malicious cyber actors on a regular basis and without basic measures to address its risks’. Following the sanctions, Circle has frozen USDC funds in all related wallets, whereas Infura, Alchemy and dYdX have blocked access of any kind to Tornado Cash. To join the force later were Aave, Uniswap, MakerDAO and Balancer.

Tornado Cash’s users are also flocking out, with US$62 millions already withdrawn from the protocol as of August 12. That is approximately 15% of the TVL on Tornado Cash.

Source: The Block

On Friday the 12th, a developer suspected to be involved with Tornado Cash was arrested by the Netherlands’ Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD) in Amsterdam. Around the same time, Tornado Cash’s Discord server, governance forum and Github page were taken down.

The disarray of Tornado Cash splits the decentralised world in half, one believes that cryptocurrency markets are better off in the long run with regulations and the other holding on to the notion of utter decentralisation. A research by Delphi Digital shows that prices of governance tokens of decentralised stablecoin projects have increased by 40% over the week as a result.

Source: Delphi Digital

The whole situation took an ironic turn as blocked Tornado Cash addresses began to send 0.1 ETH to wallets of crypto influencers as a form of protest, including ETHHub Co-founder Anthony Sassano, Crypto Trader Loomdart, Coinbase CEO Brian Amstrong and Tron Founder Justin Sun.

Source: Justin Sun’s personal Twitter.

Rough Week For Crypto Exchanges

The fallout between Binance and India-based WazirX escalated as Binance disables off-chain bilateral transfers. Last week, both Binance CEO and WazirX Founder turned to Twitter for clarification on the issue, but of different minds.

Other crypto exchanges facing financial hardships were Nuri, CoinFlex, Hotbit, BitMart and Huobi. Nuri, previously Bitwala, filed for insolvency in Germany on August 9, while CoinFlex filed for restructuring in Seychelles to resolve its US$84 million shortfall.

On August 10, Hotbit suspended trading, deposits and withdrawals after the exchange’s funds were frozen as part of the investigation into its former employee. Also under investigation is BitMart, which would become the first cryptocurrency probe of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

A Bloomberg report on Friday reveals that Huobi Founder Leon Li is selling 60% of his take in the exchange, eyeing an exit of ca. US$1 billion. Rumours said Sam Bankman-Fried and Justin Sun joined the talk, but Tron Founder shut down the story publicly via his Tweet.

Centralised exchanges are not the only ones to face growing problems. Curve Finance’s front-end was compromised on August 9, resulting in an exploit of over US$612,000 in stablecoins. The issue was quickly addressed and reverted afterwards. The attacker swapped all into Ethereum and attempted to launder the stolen funds via Fixed Float and Binance, but didn’t succeed: Fixed Float helped seize US$200,000 and Binance US$450,000 in ETH, which will be returned to users.

Just a couple of hours ago, a minting error occurred on the Polkadot and Kusama-based financial hub Acala Network, causing its stablecoin aUSD to depeg.

Source: Twitter

Acala has rectified the misconfiguration, but announced a temporary pause of its functions ‘via urgent governance vote’ ‘until further notice’.

The Latest Bitget News

Determined to bring our users the best crypto experience, Bitget constantly adds new trading pairs each week alongside the interesting, bountiful events. Don’t forget to register your Bitget account here to join the weekly, exclusive Live Trader AMA in our community group!

Moreover, as pressure mounts on crypto firms, many exchanges have shut down or are about to, and you know that millions were drained from crypto wallets over the last seven days. That is to say how timely the launch of Bitget Investor Protection Fund is; with more than US$200 million available for any emergency compensation, Bitget is showing that nothing can stop us from providing an impeccably safe and reliable environment for crypto traders! To find out more about Bitget's Protection Fund, please visit here.

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Good Reads

Bitget Semi-annual Report 2022

Things you need to know about the ‘Merge'

A Compendium Of Crypto Important Milestones

What Is Bitget’s Trial Fund? How To Claim and Use It?

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