Daily Digest 9/9

Insight on the biggest news and charts that provide context for whats going on in the market today.

The acquisition of CipherTrace opens up the door for MasterCard to be able to track 900+ cryptocurrencies across their blockchains to point out illegal activities.
For crypto to be adopted users need to know their money is safe and on top of that many people already trust their daily payments to MasterCard.
MasterCard is already piloting the use of USDC for transfer between buyers and sellers. By the end of the year they want to allow merchants to be able to accept crypto payments.
If MasterCard and Visa want to be the ones facilitating massive amounts of crypto transactions they will need a technology, like CipherTrace, to know who’s doing what on their platform.

The anticipation of Cardanos smart contracts has pushed the price to all time highs even though there are some people that are skeptical after some issues on the testnet.
The issue that was noticed was that only one user could interact with a smart contract per transaction which caused the Minswap dex to get backed up.
Another Cardano based dex, Sundae swap, said they have already worked around the issue.
Once the hard fork goes live on September 12th Binance will be one of the first to support it. This will allow Binance users to interact with Cardano based tokens.

Fantasy Soccer NFT game Sorare has signed a partnership with one of the biggest pro soccer leagues in LaLiga.
This will allow users to compete in head-to-head tournaments as well as allowing the clubs to generate royalties based off the NFT sales.
Sorare currently also has partnerships with AC Milan, Juventus, Real Madrid, and Paris Saint-Germain.
The sports world has been getting into NFTs a lot recently with NBA Top Shots, DraftKings, and of course FTX who has signed deals with NBA, MLB, and NFL teams or players.

While there has been a rise in both retail and institutional investors over the past year it is the institutional investors that continue to buy more. Retail investors have been trending downwards as a part of Coinbase’s total volume since q4 2020. This past quarter retail investors made up 30% of Coinbase’s volume and institutions the other 70%.
Some of these big institutional buys by companies like Microstrategy have been conducted through Coinbase. In the future, if institutions continue buying, this could be positive for the price action of BTC as it will be less volatile since large amounts are being held by these companies not only to offer to their customers but to even out their balance sheets.

9/9 Chainlink ($LINK) Analysis