SimpleCryptoNews

2023 was a bull year for digital assets, with Bitcoin's market cap increasing at a peak of +172%. The rest of the cryptocurrency ecosystem also had a decent year, with Ethereum seeing a +90% increase in capitalization. This highlights the growing dominance of BTC, which is often seen as a recovery from a prolonged bear market such as 2022. The ETH/BTC ratio has fallen to multi-year lows of ≈ 0.052, despite the successful Shanghai upgrade and the growth of the L2 ecosystem. Minimal Pullbacks One of the standout features of 2023 was the surprisingly shallow depth of all pullbacks and price corrections. Historically, periods of recovery from bear markets and the beginning bull markets for BTC regularly see a pullback of at least -25% from the local high, in many cases even -50%. (think 2021) However, the deepest correction in 2023 closed just -20% below the local high, suggesting that buyer support and the overall balance of supply and demand were in favor of the bulls throughout the year. Bear market 2022 was a little less violent than the 2018-20 bear year. Major cryptocurrencies are currently trailing their ATHs by -40% (BTC), -55% (ETH) Volumes and Captions It was the October rally breaking through the $30,000 resistance that played a key role in the continuation of the uptrend. The rally doubled transfer volumes on the Bitcoin network from $2.4 billion per day to over $5 billion per day, the highest level since June 2022. Transfer volumes to crypto exchanges BTC and ETH increased throughout the year, indicating an overall increase in interest in spot trading. Number of transactions on the network Bitcoin has reached new all-time highs this year, largely due to the unexpected rise in popularity of ordinals and inscriptions. 🟠 Total number of transactions (unfiltered)🔵 Regular transactions, which reached highs of 372.5 thousand per day🔴 Inscription transactions, which added another 175 thousand transactions per day in addition to classic transactions Interestingly, while inscription accounts for about 50 % of confirmed transactions, they surprisingly only take up 10% to 15% of block space. This is a result of the small size of the text files that are attached to the satoshi (1 BTC = 100 mln sat) Ethereum and its derivatives Activity on the Ethereum blockchain has been a bit sluggish this year, with October again being a notable turning point.Active addresses were relatively constant at 390K per day Transactions increased from 970K per day to 1.1 million per day ETH sending volume increased from $1.8 billion per day to $2.9 billion per day The key growth area for Ethereum was general the amount of ETH locked through Proof-of-Stake. The amount of ETH staked has increased by 119% since the beginning of the year, reaching 34.64 million ETH ($77 billion). Long-term view Despite the incredible rise in the price of Bitcoin, the majority of BTC remains dormant and held by long-term holders. Of the total circulating supply of 19.574 million BTC, more than 14.9 million (76.1%) are held on exchanges and have not moved for 155 days. This figure has increased by 825 thousand BTC since January 2022 Blue curve - change in BTC supply among long-term holders; the red curve is for short-term holders. The chart below shows BTC price cycles for each calendar year since 2015.🟠 End of the bear and gradual recovery🔵 Early bull market🟢 Euphoria and the last gasp of the bulls🔴 Beginning of the bear after the peak Derivatives Markets 2023 turned out to be a big year for options markets , as they outperformed the futures markets in open interest.Derivatives exchange Deribit continues to dominate (90% open interest) in the options space. This hints at growing institutional interest in Bitcoin as traders use options for their more complex trading, risk management and hedging strategies. The futures market has also seen a notable shift in dominance open interest to regulated exchange, CME surpassed the amount of open interest on Binance for the first time in history. October played a major role here as well, hinting at an influx of institutional capital. Futures trading volume for both BTC and ETH increased in October, totaling daily volume of $52 billion per day. Bitcoin contracts accounted for 67% of trading volume, compared to 33% for Ether contracts. Stablecoins Stablecoins have played a huge role this year, becoming the currency of choice for traders and a major source of market liquidity. Stablecoin capitalization has been declining since March 2022, falling by 26% from peak This is due to a combination of regulatory pressure (the SEC designated BUSD as a security), capital rotation (preference for US bonds over low-interest stablecoins) and waning investor interest during the Bear Market.October turned the situation around 180 degrees, when the MCap of stablecoins bottomed out at 120 billion, and after that the supply began to grow at 3% per month. This is the first increase in the capitalization of stablecoins since March 2022 and a likely sign of returning investor interest. Dominance between stablecoins has also undergone significant changes from 2022 to 2023. Previously rising stablecoins such as USDC and BUSD have significantly reduced their dominance, with BUSD going into redemption-only mode (Paxos said in January it would stop minting) and USDC dominance falling from 37.8% to 19.6% Tether (USDT) has once again established itself as the largest stablecoin, with the total supply growing to more than 90.6 billion and taking 72.7% of the market share. Results 2023 could not have gone better for crypto. how it came about. From a long decline and downtrend in 2022, 2023 has brought renewed interest in digital assets. The lion's share of BTC is held by long-term holders, and most investors are currently in profit, as a Bitcoin spot ETF will almost certainly be approved in January 2024. In addition, halving is just around the corner in April, so the crypto community is ready for a new, exciting year

The summary shows only those metrics that have shown significant change over the past month. To simplify the perception of a large amount of information, I chose the “short comment + graph” format.
Centralized exchanges
In June, the total trading volume on all crypto exchanges decreased by 11% and amounted to $1.11 trillion. After reaching a 28-month high in March 2024 ($2.49 trillion), trading volume continued to decline for the third month in a row.

⏰ There wasn’t much news over the weekend, so I combined it into a single summary:

🔶 Binance отпразднует its 7th anniversary on July 14th
In honor of the birthday, the crypto exchange is organizing beach and street parties in the UAE, Australia, New Zealand, Bulgaria, Spain and Benin. There will also be a raffle for $7,000 worth of BNB vouchers for the most loyal users on Twitter, Telegram and Discord

Mt.Gox exchange moved 47,229 BTC to a new address.
Coins worth $2.7 billion were sent to a wallet that had not previously appeared with the bankrupt exchange.

On June 24, the exchange announced that it would begin paying off debts in BTC, BCH and fiat currency in early July.

🔥 Consequences of panic:
• Fear and Greed Index: For the first time since January 2023, it fell below 30 points, although a month ago it was at 77

🤑 Coinbase Derivatives has filed with the CFTC to list regulated futures contracts on Chainlink (LINK)
The document filed states: “Coinbase has spoken with market participants who support the decision to launch Chainlink contracts.”
Coinbase Derivatives currently trades futures on five cryptocurrencies recognized as commodities by the CFTC: BTC, ETH, BCH, LTC and DOGE

❗️ The SEC filed a lawsuit against Consensys, the developer of MetaMask

🤡 In the submitted document, the Commission claims that MetaMask acts as an intermediary in transactions with securities [MetaMask Swaps] and itself participates in the offer and sale of securities [MetaMask Staking]
According to the SEC, in addition to acting as an “unlicensed broker,” Consensys also offered and sold tens of thousands of “securities” from two issuers: Lido and Rocket Pool, both liquid staking protocols.

Blast is an L2 network created by the founder of the NFT marketplace Blur and launched on February 29 of this year. Blast uses optimistic-rollup transaction processing solution for Ethereum scalability
In the first 100 days of its existence, the total value locked (TVL) in applications built on Blast reached $2.9 billion. No other L1/L2 network was able to achieve this figure in a similar period

Originally known as Ribbon Finance, the exchange launched in 2021 and specialized in trading options and perpetual futures on its proprietary optimistic-rollup L2. In August 2023, there was a rebranding, a change in tokenomics and the development of a new platform, now known as Aevo
The AEVO token performs two main functions: voting on DAO proposals and staking. But staking is not in the usual sense: stakers receive discounts on trading commissions and can participate in airdrops of AEVO and partner project tokens

❌ Tether will stop issuing new USDT on the EOS and Algorand networks starting today, citing a “re-evaluation of the network security architecture” as the basis for this decision.
Although USDT will no longer be minted on EOS and Algorand, existing coins will be redeemable within 12 months
However, the total circulating supply of USDT in these blockchains is slightly more than 90 million (75 million – EOS; 17 million – Algorand)

😎 The Winklevoss brothers, the founders of the Gemini crypto exchange, were returned part of the funds that they donated in bitcoins to the Trump campaign due to exceeding the established limit
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who made a fortune of $5.4 billion by buying BTC at $10 back in 2012, have repeatedly stated their strong support for Trump, believing that “Trump is a choice in favor of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and business.”

💵 The total outflow from Bitcoin funds over the past two days amounted to $246 million
The trend continues: new IBIT (BlackRock) shares are not created or repurchased; largest sources of outflow GBTC & FBTC
Total assets under management of 11 funds – $55.5 billion; decrease since June 6 (when BTC ≈ $71k) by $6 billion

🦘Around Australia:

✅ Ether.fi Liquid Restaking Protocol DAO is voting on a proposal to allocate 5% of the protocol's monthly revenue to purchase the ETHFI governance token
According to the plan, part of these tokens will be sent to the DAO treasury, and the other part will be sent to the Curve liquidity pool
The main goal of this proposal is to increase the confidence of new users and increase the liquidity of the token

🔷 Sources told TheBlock that issuers of ETH ETFs are working on “light and acceptable” SEC comments
Issuers received feedback from the Commission last week asking them to submit updated S-1s by this Friday.
“I suspect you'll see companies filing pretty quickly this week, and then we'll see how many more rounds of comments there are,” one source told TheBlock

💰  Coinbase International has launched a pre-launch market giving traders the opportunity to take perpetual futures positions on tokens that are not yet traded on the spot market
For now, the possibility of such speculation is available to institutional traders and Coinbase Advanced users outside the US, Canada and Britain

🫣 The SEC published a press release following the verdict against Terraform Labs and its leader Do Kwon

“The economic substance of a product, not the label, propaganda or hype, determines whether an asset is a security under the law,” said Gary Gensler

The director of the SEC enforcement department in his speech accused the company of manipulating facts and subsequent scam of investors:

😶 During yesterday's congressional hearing to discuss next year's budget for the SEC and CFTC, Gary Gensler again avoided answering the question about ETH's status as a commodity (at least he did not state that all cryptocurrencies are securities 🥳)
In contrast, CFTC Chairman Rostin Benham answered the same question clearly and clearly: “Yes.”

💰 According to sources familiar with the situation, the Biden campaign is in negotiations to accept donations for his election campaign through Coinbase Commerce (Trump already began accepting crypto through Coinbase last month)
This move is aimed both at attracting the crypto electorate and generating additional money:

🗓 The Fed has kept the rate at 5.25-5.50% for a whole year
The central bank decided to leave interest rates unchanged for the seventh time in a row, noting “modest” progress towards achieving its 2% inflation target.

Jerome Powell said the Central Bank sees only one cut in 2024, which differs from March expectations of three cuts