6/17/22 FAL Weekly Digest
The FAL Weekly Digest is a source for this week’s biggest cryptocurrency-related news and updates. This newsletter features excerpts and links to this past week’s biggest news articles written by members of FAL Consulting’s writing team or gathered from other listed sources.
Exchanges
Crypto.com follows other crypto exchanges and lays off 5% of its staff
CEO of Crypto.com Kris Marszalek announced in a tweet on Saturday, that the company will sadly be laying off 5% of its workforce, due to current downtrodden conditions in the market.
This equates to roughly 260 people, Marszalek details these layoffs as a "difficult and necessary" decision to "ensure continued and sustainable growth for the long term."
The CEO called on the community to remember the 2018-2019 crypto winter where the company's "focus on building" led to its success in 2020-2021.
Binance, however, will continue to hire
With most crypto exchanges seeing a period of layoffs, one would expect the world's biggest, Binance, to follow suit, but according to its CEO, the company is doing the opposite.
In a report put out by Fortune magazine, Binance is apparently making the most of this crypto winter, with CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) saying the exchange would be “expanding hiring right now.”
“If we are in a crypto winter, we will leverage that, we will use that to the max,” CZ was quoted saying at the Consensus 2022 conference in Austin, Texas last week.
NFTs
Mastercard partners with myriad of NFT marketplaces
According to Mastercard, the company is just giving “exactly what people want” with its new feature of directly buying NFTs.
This is not Mastercard's first foray into crypto, specifically NFTs, as back in May the banking corporation teamed up with Coinbase to help simplify the purchasing process on its newly minted NFT marketplace.
This is quite the shift from the Ethereum-only classification of NFTs we remember, but change is needed. We may even need an evolution for this technology to thrive, and the easing of the process will only help boost its decreasing popularity.
OpenSea is migrating to Seaport Protocol
OpenSea announced earlier this week on their blog that they would be migrating to Seaport, “a new web3 marketplace protocol designed for safely and efficiently buying and selling NFTs.” They have also announced a few additional features.
The new protocol is estimated to save users 34.8% on gas fees. It will also allow users to make offers on entire collections or on multiple items filtered by attributes or traits.
Seaport is open source which benefits projects in many ways including abundant community support, increasing scaling capabilities and security, freedom/flexibility/decentralization, and lowering costs.
Bored Ape NFT floor price drops to new all-time-low
The Bored Ape Yacht Club was pivotal during the rise of NFT the market, with celebrities from across all mediums coming out in support of the newfound technology, leading to a rise in the project's popularity and price. But now as the rest of the market begins to see the effects of this crypto winter, the demand for the blasé monkeys has seemed to fall.
The current floor price of a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT (The least expensive NFT being sold on a secondary market) is currently around $96,469, or 80 ETH, according to NFT Price Floor. Sliding down to around $91,741 last night, as per the site's data.
Converting their price to dollars, the cheapest Bored Apes have fallen a hefty 78% in less than two months. The floor price just a couple of months ago in April sat around 152 ETH (a record at the time), and just days before the launch of their controversial virtual land sale for Otherside, an upcoming game.
Cardano (ADA) continues to build & grow
Cardano has reached a new milestone as the number of projects building on the platform has exceeded the 1,000 mark. According to recent data shared by Cardano's parent company, IOHK, the number of projects building has reached 1,003, up from 992 reported over the weekend.
In its most recent weekly report, IOHK supplied the latest network growth statistics, in which it indicated that a total of 89 projects have recently been launched on Cardano, while the number of NFT projects has climbed to 5,796. Cardano native tokens have also surpassed 5 million.
Cardano is also seeing inflows of funds from institutional investors as the demand for the network is on the rise ahead of the Vasil Hard Fork slated for June 29. Over the weekend, on-chain analytics firm Santiment reported that large whale transaction counts have begun to appear on the ADA network, leading to a rise in ADA prices.
Cardano Is Gearing Up For A Big Update
Cardano node and pool operators haven’t seen any updates since March 7 (Cardano Node 1.34.1). The last few version updates occurred every month or so.
The last three version updates:
Version 1.34.0 released 02/28/2022
1.33.0 released 01/07/2022
1.32.1 released 12/13/2021
While no version updates have been released since March, the GitHub repository for the project has been seeing constant updates.
Two of the most important folders/packages in the repo include the cardano-node and cardano-cli tools, both of which have been updated to version 1.35.0 yesterday. Two other packages were also updated to 1.35 yesterday: cardano-node-chairman and cardano-testnet.
Liquidity Concerns
Liquidity concerns grew this week as the overall crypto marketcap dropped under $1 trillion and paused withdrawals across lending and trading platforms. The overall marketcap has dropped to levels that we haven’t seen in over a year.
Celsius and Binance announced that they had to pause certain withdrawals. Quickly following these announcements, BTC and ETH dropped to 18 month lows.
Celsius Network is a cryptocurrency lending platform and announced on their blog that “due to extreme market conditions, today we are announcing that Celsius is pausing all withdrawals, Swap, and transfers between accounts.” They also assured users that they would continue to accrue rewards throughout the pause.
Gemini, the largest crypto exchange. announced on Monday morning that they were temporarily pause bitcoin withdrawals due to a stuck transaction causing a backlog.
Market
Market Cap: $895.93 B
24h Volume: $73.294 B
BTC Dominance: 44.1%
ETH Dominance: 14.7
None of our posts or newsletters are meant to be taken as financial advice.
