Market Summary

Bitcoin Price: US$19,401.63 (+5.09%)
Ethereum Price: US$ 1,326.46 (+6.48%) 

X2Y2 Volume Surges Despite Downturn Due To Wash Trading

• Nova Labs and T-Mobile announce a partnership to launch Helium Mobile, a 5G wireless service that will offer crypto rewards to users.
• Creators of the Azuki NFT collection plan to raise $30m in Series A funding. The collection’s floor price is up 55% in the last 7 days.
• FTX is looking to raise up to $1b at a valuation of $32b.
• Kraken’s Jesse Powell will step down as CEO to become Chairman.
• Maple Finance is launching a $300m lending pool, managed by Icebreaker Finance, that will offer secured debt to mid-size BTC miners.
• Prior to the LooksRare and X2Y2 launch in Q1 2022, OpenSea virtually had a monopoly in the NFT marketplace sector. However, transaction volume on X2Y2 has regularly surpassed OpenSea since late July, primarily due to wash trading.
• Wash trading occurs when the buyer and seller in a transaction are the same person or two people colluding. These types of transactions lead to inflated volume statistics, and are conducted to earn trading incentives or drive up an NFT collection’s volume or price figures.
• Since X2Y2 reimburses trading fees to users in X2Y2 tokens, traders are incentivized to conduct transactions to earn the token incentives. X2Y2 charges 0.5% in trading fees, while OpenSea charges 2.5% and LooksRare charges 2%.
• X2Y2 has also made it optional for users to pay royalties on certain NFT purchases. This allows users to trade at lower costs. This also allows X2Y2 to compete against other marketplaces and win market share.
• The “Dreadfulz” and “More Loot” NFT collections are notorious for wash trading transactions. These two collections alone comprise 59% of X2Y2’s all-time volume.

Ethereum Miners’ $319M Crypto Hoard Hangs Over Market After Merge

• In the years and months leading up to the Ethereum blockchain’s historic shift last week to a more energy-efficient system, data miners working for rewards on the network had accumulated nearly $341 million worth of the cryptocurrency ether (ETH).
• Now, a week after the Merge, crypto analysts are warning that miners’ sales of their hoards could become a source of near-term, downward pressure on the cryptocurrency’s price, with the market already sinking by 19% in the past month.
• “Miners dumping their ETH is an overhang that we’ll have to get through over the coming months in order to resume up-only mode, but it will happen,” Lucas Campbell, editor of the Bankless newsletter, wrote Monday.
• Blockchain data assembled by OKLink appears to show miners starting to sell down their stashes over the past week.
• Ethereum miners dumped over 16,000 ETH from Sept. 12 to Sept. 19. (The Merge took effect on Sept. 15.) The decline reduced the miners’ combined balance to about 245,000 ETH, or about $319 million worth.

Cardano’s Vasil upgrade triggers after a 3-month delay

• Cardano’s long-awaited Vasil upgrade has triggered, enabling increased network capacity, higher throughput, and lower transaction costs on the peer-reviewed, proof-of-stake blockchain platform.
• The Vasil hard fork is part of Cardano’s Basho era — one of the key development phases on the Cardano roadmap — focusing on optimization, scalability and interoperability.
• Binance has produced the first block of the new era. 
• Vasil required no action for regular ADA holders using Cardano for transactions and dApps, with the transition happening behind the scenes.
• The upgrade, originally planned for June, also activates Plutus v2 enhancements to Cardano’s smart contracts. This brings it closer in line with the capabilities of the largest smart contract platform, Ethereum, and opens up the potential for current and new Cardano DeFi projects to create more powerful, efficient, and cost-effective applications.

Russian officials could approve cross-border settlements in crypto: Reports

• Russia’s finance ministry and central bank reportedly have agreed on a bill to allow cross-border settlements in crypto, reversing the Bank of Russia’s previous opposition.
• The bill could give Russian citizens the ability to access crypto wallets and use cryptocurrencies under supervision of the central bank to ensure compliance with anti-money laundering legislation and to ensure crypto is not used for illegal transactions, Deputy Finance Minister Alexsey Moiseev told state news agency RIA Novosti. The news was first reported by Russian business newspaper Kommersant.
• This is a reversal for Russia’s central bank, which Moiseev earlier this month said was “too rigid” in its rules governing crypto. Moiseev noted that people are creating crypto wallets outside of the Russian Federation, and that “it is necessary this can be done in Russia” and supervised by its central bank.

Celsius Network Might Be Planning to Turn Its Debt Into Crypto ‘IOU’ Tokens

• Bankrupt crypto lender Celsius Network appears to be considering a plan to turn its debt into crypto “IOU” (“I Owe You”) tokens.
• Celsius filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July, a month after halting withdrawals because of a liquidity crisis it blamed on “extreme market conditions.” Subsequent bankruptcy proceedings in the Southern District of New York have revealed the depths of Celsius’ financial troubles: The lender owes 500,000 creditors nearly $5 billion.
• Even if Celsius sold all of its assets – including its mysterious, half-finished mining subsidiary, Celsius Mining that Celsius’ executives and bankruptcy lawyers have pinned their hopes on to get out of debt – it would still be left with a $1.2 billion hole in its balance sheet.

Ethereum Token Issuance Plummets 95% Following Merge

• Ethereum’s (ETH) annual token supply change has dropped from 3.79% to 0.20% post-merge, per data from ultrasound.money.
• Following the network’s upgrade on September 15, Ethereum shifted from a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus, helping the network cut its carbon footprint by 99.95%.
• Alongside cutting its energy use, Ethereum’s daily token issuance has also plummeted. Daily issuance refers to the total amount of new tokens created to reward a network’s block miners or validators.
• Following the merge, the network has created 4,581.26 new Ethereum, marking a massive 95% issuance reduction compared to the deprecated PoW chain. 

JPMorgan Sees Concerns for Ethereum Blockchain After the Merge

• JPMorgan spelled some concerns about the Ethereum blockchain following the network’s transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, a process that was called the Merge.
• The change earlier this month spurred a hard fork, splitting the blockchain in two and giving rise to an offshoot chain called Ethereum PoW. Some exchanges and platforms have shown support for the forked version, which still uses proof-of-work (PoW) verification, and at least 19 former ether mining pools are active on it, JPMorgan said in a research note on Wednesday. The forked chain could divide the Ethereum community, the firm said.
• A second concern is that the blockchain has become less decentralized, the bank said, “as [just a] few entities command the majority share of staked ETH.”
• JPMorgan noted that the price of ether (ETH) has declined sharply. This drop was probably caused by a combination of “buy-the-rumor/sell-the-news flows specific to Ethereum’s Merge event,” together with widespread weakness in risky assets as a result of more hawkish central banks, the report said.

Helium Ditches Own Blockchain in Favor of Solana After Community Vote

• Helium community members have voted to move the decentralized Wi-Fi network from its blockchain, officially known as HIP 70, to the Solana blockchain.
• The HIP 70 proposal concluded voting early Thursday morning, with some 81% voting in favor of migration in early Asian hours. Participants staked the helium token (HNT) to participate in the on-chain vote. In order for a vote to migrate the network to pass, a two-thirds majority was needed.
• Some 6,177 community members voted in favor of the move by staking over 12 million HNT. Just 1,270 voted against it.
• Developers behind Helium proposed the migration to Solana to help scale the protocol through more efficient transactions as well as interoperability. The move will transfer all tokens, applications and governance to the network.
• “Solana has a proven track record powering some of the world’s most important decentralized initiatives and they were an obvious choice for us to partner with,” Scott Sigel, COO of the Helium Foundation, said in a statement. “Moving to the Solana blockchain allows us to focus our efforts on scaling the network as opposed to managing the blockchain itself.”