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Weekly Market Update - Friday, April 28, 2023

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Welcome to our Weekly Market Update.* Explore weekly crypto price movements, read a quick digest of notable market news, and dive into a crypto topic — this week we discuss the origins of Bitcoin.

Crypto Movers
Crypto News: What Happened This Week?
Crypto Topic of the Week: the origins of Bitcoin

Frame 1

Bitcoin (BTC) Price | ⬆️ 4.00% | $29,141

Ether (ETH) Price | ⬇️ 0.93% | $1,885

Maple Finance (MPL) Price | ⬆️ 61.50% | $7.717

Render Token (RNDR) Price| ⬆️ 43.40% | $2.478

Civic (CVC) Price | ⬇️ 10.50% | $0.1046


Crypto prices as of Friday, April 28, 2023, at 11:55am ET. Percentages reflect trends over the past seven days. Check out the latest crypto prices here. All prices in USD.

Frame 2

Takeaways

  • Crypto prices had a wild week, with bitcoin (BTC) dropping almost 8% in the span of an hour at one point before rallying back to hover around $29k USD.
  • Celsius went up for auction and a deal for Voyager was canceled. Coinbase sued the SEC in an effort to compel regulatory clarity.
  • In the wider economy, trouble at First Republic Bank has reignited concerns across the banking system.

Bitcoin Rises Again During a Rollercoaster Week

Bitcoin (BTC) rallied to $30k USD early this week, with new signs of strain in the U.S. banking system spurred by concerns at First Republic Bank potentially acting as a catalyst. Ether (ETH) prices rallied in sympathy, closing in on $2,000 USD once again.

On Wednesday, a fast and furious selloff in the afternoon Eastern Time saw BTC drop almost 8% within an hour. Traders pointed to a notification sent by Arkham Alert noting activity in crypto wallets belonging to defunct exchange Mt. Gox and the U.S. government, inducing fears of supply flooding the market. Arkham later tweeted that the notification was sent in error.

Following the selloff, BTC rose off the week’s lows and is trading around $29k USD as of Friday morning. ETH’s price action responded similarly, trading around $1,900 USD on Friday. This past week’s price moves were reflected in BTC’s realized volatility, which hit as high as ~73%. BTC and ETH prices whipsawed and are +4% and -1% this week as of Friday morning, respectively.

Defunct Crypto Lender Celsius Goes Up For Auction

Crypto lender Celsius, which declared bankruptcy in the summer of 2022, went up for auction in New York this week. According to reports, two new consortiums have entered the fray. Under an existing bid for the crypto lender, customers may get up to 70% of their funds returned.

Previous court filings show that Celsius was facing a $1.2 billion USD shortfall, with liabilities of $5.5 billion USD and assets amounting to $4.3 billion USD.

Binance.US Terminates Deal to Buy Voyager’s Assets

Voyager, another victim of crypto’s rocky 2022, said Binance.US pulled the plug on a deal to purchase its assets for $1 billion USD. Voyager said it was disappointed in the outcome, but clarified that its existing bankruptcy plan would allow for customers to receive crypto and cash that had been tied up.

Binance.US suggested that an unclear regulatory regime in the U.S. around crypto played a role in its decision to cancel the deal. The U.S. Department of Justice had also weighed into the deal in March, seeking to block it. The government ultimately withdrew its opposition to the deal.

Coinbase Sues SEC Asking for Regulatory Clarity

On Monday, Coinbase sued the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in federal court hoping to compel an answer on whether the rule-making process governing securities applied to the crypto industry as well. This sets up the potential for Coinbase to challenge that the SEC has failed to provide a well-defined regulatory framework for U.S.-based crypto companies.

First Republic Bank Reignites U.S. Banking Concerns

First Republic Bank, the 14th largest bank in the U.S. at the end of 2022, revealed this week that it saw net outflows exceeding $100 billion in Q1. The bank’s stock hit a new all-time low, dipping ~55% this week. Just this year, its stock price is down ~95%.

The troubled bank has since been said to be considering up to $100B in asset sales in an attempt to right the ship. In March, major U.S. banks gave First Republic $30 billion USD in hopes that it could avoid a similar fate to SVB, Signature, and Silvergate.

-From the Gemini Trading Desk

Frame 3

The Origins of Bitcoin

Most of us think of Bitcoin as the original cryptocurrency, as it spawned an entirely new asset class. While its impact on the financial system and the wider world has been profound, there were a few much lesser known precursors that laid the foundation for the crypto universe. Today, we look back to the roots of Bitcoin. To read more deeply about this topic check out this article on Cryptopedia authored by our founders.

What came before Bitcoin?

Bitcoin has played a unique role in creating a movement to decentralize existing, centralized financial services, but it was not the first attempt at creating digital money.

The notion of scarcity with respect to digital money was famously envisioned by Nick Szabo when he proposed Bit Gold in 1998. B-Money, another conceptual precursor to Bitcoin proposed by Wei Dai, a computer engineer, Cypherpunk, and cryptographer, arose around the same time and is referenced in the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Going even further back, the idea of building cost (or digital scarcity) into a system using proof of work (PoW) was first conceptualized by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in 1993 as a way to protect Internet services from abuse such as spam. In 1997, an English Cypherpunk named Dr. Adam Back implemented this concept into his project Hashcash, a service aimed at limiting spam and denial of service attacks by requiring a sender to generate a Hashcash token by solving a PoW puzzle.

Read more about Bitcoin’s precursors here.

Together, Bit Gold, B-Money, Hashcash, and other early examples of digital money and consensus mechanisms set the stage for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin arrives on the scene

The Bitcoin white paper was published by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 and the network launched in January of 2009 upon the mining of the “Genesis Block” — the first block of the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin created a digital currency that operates in a fully-decentralized, trustless manner that allows users to send monetary value to each other through the Internet without the need for trusted, financial intermediaries.

This was made possible by a major breakthrough in its PoW consensus mechanism. Instead of relying on a majority of nodes (known as “miners”) to reach consensus, Bitcoin relies on the majority of hashrate — the network’s processing power — to reach consensus.

Read more about PoW here.

Acquiring a majority of the network’s hash rate is expensive, making it costly for a miner to tamper with the ledger. Moreover, in doing so, a dishonest miner would forgo the handsome bounties of newly minted bitcoin (known as the “block reward”) that are awarded approximately every 10 minutes to the “winning” miner who correctly solves the PoW puzzle. Therefore, it is assumed that a rational, economically-motivated miner will commit her processing power toward securing the integrity of the blockchain instead of trying to manipulate it and cheat the system.

This incentive structure has turned digital money, a movement once made up predominantly of computer scientists and cryptographers, into an increasingly mainstream phenomenon.

Check out more about the history and culture of Bitcoin, its technical structure, and how it's secured by the blockchain.

See you next week. Onward and Upward!

Team Gemini

*This material is for informational purposes only and is not (i) an offer, or solicitation of an offer, to invest in, or to buy or sell, any interests or shares, or to participate in any investment or trading strategy, (ii) intended to provide accounting, legal, or tax advice, or investment recommendations, or (iii) an official statement of Gemini. Gemini, its affiliates and its employees do not make any representation or warranty, expressed or implied, as to accuracy or completeness of the information or any other information transmitted or made available. Buying, selling, and trading cryptocurrency involves risks, including the risk of losing all of the invested amount. Recipients should consult their advisors before making any investment decision. Any use, review, retransmission, distribution, or reproduction of these materials, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited in any form without the express written approval of Gemini.

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