BTSE Weekly Digital Asset Industry Report – Nov 10th.

This Week’s Big Movements

Welcome to the latest edition of our newsletter, where we cover the highlights of the past week in the rapidly evolving world of blockchain and decentralized technologies. Traders were seeing green this morning, as large market cap digital assets saw significant upticks across the board. Ethereum (ETH) was the star of the show, shooting up to above $2.1K, its highest level since April 2022. Analysts attribute this spike to BlackRock’s Ethereum ETF application on a NASDAQ filing last night, which comes in addition to its Bitcoin ETF application. It’s no secret that the sector was tainted by the downfall of a few major platforms, with bearish sentiment that lingered for many months – could the conviction of FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, and positive news for digital asset ETFs in the US bring this chapter to a close, allowing the market to move on? 

This Week in the Business

• USDC stablecoin issuer Circle is weighing the prospects of an initial public offering in 2024, according to a report by Bloomberg. It tried to list by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in 2022, but this did not come to fruition, leading the company to explore other options for 2024. 

• In a significant security breach, Monero’s community crowdfunding wallet was emptied of 2,675.73 XMR, equating to nearly US$460,000. The attack occurred on September 1 but only came to light recently when disclosed by Monero developer Luigi. 

• South Korean mobile carrier SK Telecom is working with Aptos and Atomrigs Lab to develop T wallet, its first non-EVM Web3 project. T wallet is specifically designed to be used on phones, and incorporates blockchain data and analytics platform CryptoQuant to give users the information they need to make decisions about market activities. 

• Aave supporters are voting on a plan to remedy the DeFi lending protocol’s security vulnerabilities and restart markets that were paused last week. The weakness was originally reported by a whitehat hacker, leading to Aave pausing its v2 Ethereum market and some assets on its Avalanche v2 deployment. 

• The Bank of England published a paper outlining a framework for stablecoins to be part of the country’s economy. This involves providers of self-custodial wallets to adhere to regulatory requirements in order to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing. 

• While it isn’t clear when (or if) spot digital asset exchange-traded funds (ETFs) will launch in the United States, regulators in Hong Kong are considering making the instruments available to retail investors in the city. The chief executive officer of Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC), Julia Leung, told Bloomberg that the regulator is “happy to give it a try as long as new risks are addressed.”