🎢 Weekly Recap: Markets Rollercoaster

Happy weekend Defiers!

It was a rollercoaster week for digital assets markets. Bulls drove an early-week rally in response to a U.S. judge ruling on Tuesday that the SEC’s decision to reject Grayscale’s proposed Bitcoin ETF was “arbitrary” considering the agency’s approval of similar ETPs last year. U.S. courts also provided a boon to DeFi when a district judge dismissed a class action lawsuit claiming damages from Uniswap Labs suffered at the hands of scam tokens on the Uniswap decentralized exchange. The judge said the developer and lead investor behind the protocol should not be held accountable for the actions of third-party token issuers.

However, the week’s gains have since been erased and then some, with crypto markets selling off in response to the SEC delaying the deadline for it to deliver a verdict on Bitcoin ETFs proposed by BlackRock, Valkyrie, WisdomTree, and Invesco.

In other news, X, formerly Twitter, announced it received a currency transmitting license in Rhode Island, paving the way for the firm to launch crypto payment services for its $450M users. However, mainstream name value is rarely sufficient to guarantee the success of a new product in crypto, with PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin suffering from weak adoption and low value three weeks after launching.

USDC announced native launches on top Ethereum Layer 2s Base and Optimism slated for next week. The networks are two of six new USDC deployments scheduled to take place before November. Base also unveiled its profit-sharing agreement with Superchain sister network, Optimism.

Swift, a major interbank transfer network, published the findings from a pilot program trailing the transfer of test-net CBDCs between more than half a dozen global banks.

Plus, OpenSea, the NFT marketplace, put forward proposals for “redeemable NFTs” providing tokenholders with on or off-chain perks in exchange for burning their tokens.

And in this week’s podcast, Tether CTO, Paolo Ardoino, attempts to justify why crypto’s largest stablecoin is still yet to produce a formal audit of its reserves.

Enjoy!