Crypto Market Weekly Summary: August 23 - August 27, 2021

Crypto Market Highlights

• Crypto ‘not protected by law,’ rules Shandong provincial high court in China

• China’s central bank: Virtual currencies such as Bitcoin aren’t legal tender, have no actual value

• Grayscale Tops Up Ethereum Investment To $10 Billion

• Stablecoin USDC to consolidate reserves into cash and US treasuries

• OpenSea NFT Platform Eclipses $1.5B in Monthly Trading Volume

• MicroStrategy Acquires Nearly 4,000 Bitcoin for $177 Million

• Japan’s Financial Services Agency Considering Stricter Crypto Regulations

• CFTC Commissioner Stump: Digital assets not regulated by the CFTC even if they are a commodity; rather CFTC regulates derivatives

• Infrastructure bill set for a House vote by Sept. 27 with no changes to crypto tax provisions

• Banking Committee's Senator Toomey calls for suggestions on US crypto legislation with window to provide feedback to run until Sept. 27

• Galaxy Digital partners with Alerian to launch eight passive crypto indexes

• Cardano Foundation Implementing AML Analytics

• dcSpark Builds Cardano’s First Ethereum-Compatible Sidechain

• UK’s Financial Conduct Authority: Binance has complied with requirements

• Citigroup considering bitcoin futures trading for some institutional clients

*The crypto events from the past week, as well as many more were detected by Crowdsense hours or days before reaching the market…

Markets

• The entire market value of all crypto assets has moved in a range from $1.97 trillion to $2.17 trillion over the past seven days and as of this writing is sitting near $2.04 trillion, about flat for the week. The highs were reached earlier in the week and since then the gains have steadily been reversed.

• BTC-USD has gained just under 1% for the week with the high point being on Monday when it breached the $50K level, only to give it back later in the day. It has been in a downtrend since, even hitting a low of $46,400 before recovering slightly with the current price trending around $47K. Strong fibonacci retracement support is believed to be at the $42,400 area. The past 24 hours has seen little action as the market is waiting to digest news from the Fed’s Jackson Hole Symposium. Today is also the end of the month options expiration, so some volatility would not be unwarranted.

• ETH-USD lost slightly over 2% on the week as it strongly followed bitcoin’s lead. It reached a high of $3,360 on Monday before dropping to below $3,100. However it has since recovered slightly and is hovering near the $3,150 mark.

High Flyers

• Privacy focused cryptocurrency XMR-USD (Monero) rallied 13% on the week, furthering last week's gains on continued momentum due to the atomic swap with bitcoin announcement. With the new atomic swap, users can now swap their BTC and XMR without any intermediaries. In more bullish news, data from analytics platform Messari showed a notable increase in Monero transactions during August, signaling growing demand from users.

• XTZ-USD (Tezos) also was a winner in a choppy week for the crypto market with weekly gains of 28%. XTZ was buoyed by the news that three top Swiss banks chose Tezos to enable smart contract development, specifically focusing on asset tokenization.

• AVAX-USD (Avalanche) continued its bullish run from the previous week, gaining 25% over the past seven days likely due to a continued string of good news stemming from its recently announced $180 million liquidity mining incentive program, Avalanche Rush. The incentive program has already attracted three top-tier DeFi protocols, Aave, Curve, and SushiSwap (all known for their close ties with Ethereum). This alternative layer one blockchain has definitely won the hearts, minds, and fiat, of many in the crypto world.

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