This week was an emotional rollercoaster ride. BTC$ rallied until mid-week to over 32k but then dropped sharply. Currently, BTC$ is trading at 30.5k, up roughly 4% over the past 7 days. This marks the first positive week since the breakout of the war in the Ukraine.
ETH$ has been trading 1% higher over the past week at 1.82k. There have been some positive news regarding the merge: on Tuesday, the ETH2 Beacon Chain launched Ropsten, the first out of three public testnets. The merge needs to be successful on all three testnets before the actual go-live can occur. It is expected that the merge on Ropsten will take place at end of next week.
On Wednesday night, block validation for Solana halted completely, leading to a global outage of the network: no more transactions could be processed. The reason for the interruption was a bug in the verification of a Solana-specific concept called “durable nonces”, which enables transfers with human verification that take longer than 2 min (cold storage transfers).
The Solana Foundation has temporarily disabled this functionality to restart the network. A fix for re-enabling cold storage transfers is currently being reviewed by Solana officials and the community.
We are following the situation closely. SOL$ is currently trading 5.9% lower over the week at 40.90.
This week we also saw volume picking up at certain instances, especially during the weekly lows. However, on the way up, buying interest quickly faded and it seems that crypto investors are still not fully convinced that we have seen the final lows of the current bear market.
On the macro side, there were some positive news from China, where cities are reopening and restrictions in Shanghai are being lifted. Although this will help the Chinese economy recover, it is only a matter of time before we see new lockdowns if the zero Covid policy remains in place.
While there are signs of a peak in inflation in the US, it is still accelerating in Europe: German Harmonized CPI for May surprised on the upside with 1.1% (MoM) vs. an expected 0.5%, and 8.7% (YoY) vs. an expected 8%. Very similar figures were published for Italy, Spain, and Switzerland.
Lastly, we want to reiterate that we recently started offering trading and custody of TRX (TRON). TRX is the 2nd best performing asset among the top 100 coins, having increased by 18.2% in the last 30 days. The total-value-locked on the chain increased 44.37% over the same time period.
