Market Summary

Bitcoin Price: U$50,471.19 (-0.23%)
Ethereum Price: U$4,436.91  (+3.03%)

Stablecoin Inflows, zkSync Soars, & Loan Trends

• Stablecoins grew substantially the past month, with the Top 5 Stablecoin Marketcap growing from $129B to just under $150B.
• USDT and USDC were responsible for most of the supply growth, with USDC growing by $7.8B and USDT by $6B. Stablecoin supply growth, especially for centralized collateralized stablecoins like USDT and USDC, is a positive sign indicating money is entering the markets.
• Also relevant is the fact USDC has been slowly growing against USDT in market share. The USDC/USDT ratio has grown from 0.19 at the start of the year to 0.53 today, a sign of market preference for USDC which is considered to have less risk compared to USDT.
• With the ZK-Rollup narrative popping off the past few weeks, we can see that users are moving funds over to ZK-Rollup projects like Loopring and zkSync to test it out.
• On zkSync, the 2 main live projects now are ZigZag Exchange (Orderbook DEX) and Gitcoin (Funding Platform). According to L2fees, token swaps through ZigZag on zkSync have the lowest fees.
• MakerDAO has seen consistent loan growth (~$1B) since the beginning of November while Aave and Compound have been generally flat over the same period.
• Interestingly, Aave had $30M in liquidations over a few day span in May on the back of the last major leverage-driven sell off. But compared to this most recent pullback, it only did ~$3M in liquidations.
• 1inch has been one of the go-to DEX aggregators on Ethereum since last year. Being an aggregator, using them will automatically route your DEX swaps to the best rate available.
• Bancor has been more reliant on having its volume referred by 1inch, floating between 15-30% of volume daily; Sushiswap and Uniswap were on the lower end at 5-10%.
• This doesn’t come as a surprise as Uniswap and Sushiswap are the top few DEXes where users go to swap or list their tokens.

Bitcoin holds $50K as analyst says weekly timeframes confirm bull market remains intact

• Bitcoin (BTC) retained $50,000 as support overnight into Dec. 8 amid confidence that the 2021 bull market was not yet over. 
• Significant buyer interest in an area around $43,000 added to the bullish prospects.
• Multiple correlations, meanwhile, hinge on the last few weeks of the year, among them Bitcoin versus 1970s gold and, of course, its own 2017 performance.

Binance to acquire 18% stake in Singapore-based private securities exchange Hg

• Binance Asia Services, the Singapore entity of Binance, announced on Wednesday that it is acquiring an 18% stake in Hg Exchange, a Singapore-based private securities exchange.
• Hg Exchange (HGX) is a private securities exchange built on the Zilliqa blockchain, which facilitates trading in tokenized shares of private companies. HGX is also working on listing alternative digital assets, including wine, art, and real estate, said Binance

Crypto CEOs request Congress provide regulatory clarity at hearing on digital assets

• The House Committee on Financial Services heard from several CEOs of major crypto firms in the United States, some of whom seemed to present a united front in urging lawmakers to provide a clear regulatory framework for crypto.
• In a written statement released prior to the hearing, Allaire said Circle supported Congress’ efforts for “national licensing and Federal supervision” of stablecoin issuers, given many were now “too big to ignore.” Cascarilla seemed to echo this sentiment, describing the U.S. financial system as “inadequate” for handling the emerging digital economy, but blockchain technology may offer a possible solution

Hong Kong-based Chiron Partners launches $50M Terra fund

• Hong Kong venture capital firm Chiron Partners has launched a new ecosystem fund dedicated to Terra (LUNA), opening the door to new innovations for the layer-one decentralized finance, or DeFi, protocol.
• The Chiron Terra Fund I, also referred to as CTI, will deploy $50 million in capital to support innovative projects building on top of the Terra ecosystem. Projects at the intersection of decentralized finance and “metaverse-linked” nonfungible token platforms are eligible for support, the company announced Wednesday.

Central Banks of France and Switzerland announce successful trial of digital Euro, Swiss Franc

• On Wednesday, the Banque de France (BdF), the BIS Innovation Hub (BISIH) and the Swiss National Bank (SNB) announced the success of a pilot run of a wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC), titled Project Jura. The project, which aimed to investigate cross‑border settlement with euro and Swiss franc wCBDCs, was launched on a third‑party distributed ledger technology platform.
• The experimental technology explored in Project Jura consisted of a decentralized peer‑to‑peer network of computer nodes (Corda) to validate transactions while simultaneously ensuring that all legal, regulatory and business rules of governing nations are satisfied. Then, there was the tokenization of the aforementioned fiat currencies and the Negotiable European Commercial Paper, a short-term maturity (one year or less) debt instrument denominated in euros. Finally, Project Jura looked into infrastructure networks that enable real‑time gross settlement of transactions, bond digitization and a digital assets registry.

Messari launches new governance aggregator facilitating DAO participation

• The crypto research firm Messari released a new, free-to-use governance aggregator called Messari Governor that creates a framework for proposal information, voting and other key aspects of user participation in multiple decentralized automatic organizations (DAOs). 
• DAOs enable members to make decisions as a group. Contributors’ usually receive tokens that allow them to have a say in what the group does, including with its funds. Since DAOs have no central leadership, they require democratic collaboration of its token-holding community members to pass proposals on actions the DAO might take.

US is ‘unquestionably’ behind the curve on crypto ETFs, says Brian Brooks

• Bitfury CEO and former Acting Comptroller of the Currency Brian Brooks has hinted the regulatory environment in the United States could drive many crypto firms outside the country, and has already stymied companies attempting to offer a variety of financial products.
• Speaking at a Wednesday hearing on Digital Assets and the Future of Finance with the House Committee on Financial Services, congressperson Ted Budd said he feared the current policy of regulation by enforcement in the U.S. could “force the next generation of financial tech to be created outside of our country.” Speaking on behalf of Bitfury, Brooks said

SushiSwap’s CTO resigns amid infighting

• SushiSwap CTO Joseph Delong has resigned from the decentralized exchange effective immediately. Delong tweeted the news on Wednesday.  
• Delong’s resignation comes amid growing tension within the SushiSwap team. Former team members claimed 0xMaki — a key developer who took over the project after founder Chef Nomi took and later returned funds intended for the project’s development team — was forced out. At the time of his departure, 0xMaki’s post indicated he himself was the driving force behind the decision, but team members claim this wasn’t the case.