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Now Baithe Baithe kya krre? Krna hai kuch kaam. Let read The Web3 Watch 3rd edition le krr ‘Satoshi’ kaa naam!!
Market Watch ⌚
$BTC is down, $ETH is down, $SOL is Down... The Whole Freaking crypto market is down. But my friend no need to panic. This fall was expected by the market experts and some are expecting to see more drop in prices. Remember: Buy the Dip, Because Dip is the gift of GodNOTE: DON'T ALL IN WHILE TRADING THIS TIME IS TO WATCH AND LEARN FROM THE MARKET
Digital Assets Fund Manager Survey 📜
This survey drew 64 responses from investors who cover US$600bn of assets under management. This survey was done by Coinshare.com in which they asked some questions from the investors.
$BTC to the moon, Bitcoin claims the top spot with Ethereum takes the 2nd spot but investors looks more bullish on Solana. Little change was seen in other assets while bitcoin and Ethereum comprise 72% of the total.
The chart above shows the increase in the weightage of Digital Assets. It rose to 3% from 1.3% since Nov 21.
Unsurprisingly, some of the largest contributors to this were allocations from institutional investors who finally had the ability to gain exposure to Bitcoin via the US ETFs.
Investors have been broadening their exposure to altcoins, with Solana seeing a dramatic increase in allocations. Looking through the survey responses, this is due to a few large investors allocating, carrying more weight in the survey.
XRP has seen a significant decline, with none of the survey respondents holding it now.
Of those survey respondents who do not have digital assets in their portfolio, the reasons are as follows:
Regulation remains stubbornly high
Although the custody concerns saw a significant decrease but at the same time we can observe a massive increase in Corporate Restrictions
We can see that holding digital assets is clearly a social status based on the drop in reputational risk that has resulted from holding them
As more audiences understand the fundamentals of digital assets there is still a wide audience that faces this as a major barrier
We have seen the reasons behind not having Digital Assets in your portfolio, Now let’s see why investors are adding Digital Assets to their portfolio
1. The primary reason for adding digital assets is for exposure to distributed ledger technology. Surprisingly, despite price rises since January, an increasing number of investors see digital assets as good value.
2. Speculation has decreased While investing for diversification has declined.
Hong Kong gives green signal to 6 Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs…🤑
Six new ETFs based on Bitcoin and Ethereum products were listed on the Hong Kong Exchange this Tuesday, providing investors with an alternative to purchasing and storing these virtual currencies directly. Managed by China Asset Management (HK) Ltd, Harvest Global Investment, Bosera Asset Management, and HashKey Digital Asset Group, these ETFs allow investors to invest in Bitcoin and Ethereum directly.
Why to care?
The listing of these ETFs is seen as a significant step towards the acceptance of cryptocurrencies by the international financial market and regulatory authorities.
The ETFs reached $11.2 million in funds and generated a trading volume of over HK$87.5 million on their debut, indicating strong investor interest.
The China Asset Management Bitcoin ETF had the highest trading volume, reaching HK$37.16 million, showcasing the demand for these products.
US ETF >>> Honk Kong ETF ?? 🤔
In contrast to the US market, where 11 Bitcoin ETFs had over $4.6 billion in volume in one day in January, the Hong Kong market saw a smaller but still significant demand for these ETFS
The differences in market dynamics and investor bases between the two regions contribute to these varying levels of demand.
Challenges
One challenge faced is the absence of staking rewards in Ether ETFs, which could impact long-term investor interest. Staking rewards typically offer around a 4% annual percentage rate, providing additional incentives for investors. This absence highlights the need for further discussions with regulators to address this issue and ensure the attractiveness of these ETFs to potential investors.
Payment giant Stripe is back in the Crypto game after announcing that it will allow merchants to receive funds in USDC stablecoin.
Stripe is a B2B-focused payment processing platform that plans to support USDC to empower their merchants by helping them expand their global reach and give their customers access to easy, fast, and trustworthy transactions even if they don’t have a bank account or credit card.
Stripe was one of the first major company to accept bitcoin payments in 2014, however it had to opt out in 2018 due to rising transaction costs on the bitcoin blockchain.
In March 2022, Stripe also made its payment platform available for NFT purchases.
If something in crypto can be sold, there’s a good chance it will be.
This week, a yellow legal pad with “Buy Bitcoin” scribbled on it sold for 16 bitcoin, worth over $1 million.
The legal pad was held up behind the then-Federal Reserve Chair during a 2017 Congressional hearing in an episode that’s become iconic in the Bitcoin community.
Christian Langalis, the then-intern on Capitol Hill who flashed the Buy Bitcoin sign, took home most of the auction’s proceeds.
Also this week, the crypto exchange CoinEx auctioned off the first satoshi of a block mined after Bitcoin’s recent halving event. Satoshis, or sats, are Bitcoin’s smallest unit and have been popularized recently by Ordinals being inscribed on them. CoinEx got access to the satoshi by way of a partnership with mining pool ViaBTC.
The sat netted double what the “Buy Bitcoin” sign did, selling in the end for $2.1 million.
Liquid Staking: 💸💰
Liquid Staking is a revolutionary tool that allows users to access their staked tokens for earning extra returns through DeFi activities.
Before diving deep into Liquid Staking, let’s learn what staking is?
Staking is a very essential mechanism for all the Proof-of-Stake blockchains like Ethereum, Avalanche, Polkadot, etc which involves validating transactions. Proof-of-Stake is a consensus mechanism used by chains where the validator stakes a native token to the blockchain for a chance to be randomly chosen to validate the next block, in return for the reward. Compared to Proof-of-Work that BTC follows, where all the validators compete with each other to validate the block.
Staking in the POS blockchains comes with 2 major conditions:
All the staked tokens are locked in, leaving no liquidity for the validators
A minimum stake of 32 Eth (~3000 USD) is required, leaving very few to participate and earn staking rewards.
And that’s exactly what Liquid staking tackles.
In Liquid Staking, native tokens are deposited to a staking provider, the staking provider pools the tokens and further delegates them to one of the many validators participating in staking. The service provider in return issues synthetic staking tokens as a receipt, the tokens can be used in other on-chain activities.
This solves the above-mentioned problems:-
Synthetic tokens provided by the staking provider can be used
Lesses amount can be staked to earn the rewards, unlike the minimum cap of 32Eth.
Centralization: Staking services pool the tokens and delegate the stake to their own set of delegators. This results in staking services holding a majority of stakes. For example, nearly a third of staked ETH is in Lido: if the protocol is impacted, validators will be affected, which can negatively impact the wider ETH network.
Slashing: While the staking incentives are attractive, validators can also be penalised for bad behavior that may negatively affect network performance. This penalty is called ‘slashing’, which results in the validator’s removal from the network and a portion of their staked tokens taken away. As users stake their crypto assets to validators, their funds can also be exposed to slashing risk if validators are not chosen carefully.
Meme of the week
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