August 8, 2023

Amberdata Crypto Snapshot: SEC Charges and Market Shifts

The SEC continues its regulation-by-enforcement rampage through the cryptocurrency industry with the latest charges against Richard Heart (founder of Hex Protocol), PulseChain, Hex, and PulseX for “unregistered offerings of crypto asset securities that raised more than $1 billion in crypto assets from investors.” Richard Heart was also charged with misappropriation of $12M in funds. To clarify, this case is much different from Ripple's, though the SEC appears to be learning from previous cases. Their current language is primarily focused on the raising of funds – not programmatic sales as they alleged in the Ripple case.

Coinbase’s L2 blockchain Base, though not officially launched yet, emerged from beta in a big way with several memecoins launching just hours after the network went live. One of those memecoins: BALD, whose market capitalization rose over 40,000% in just one day to ~$80M. The token has since crashed in price around claims of being a rug (despite the deployer’s denial) and rumors that the token deployer is related to Alameda Research and FTX.

Curve is in turmoil after an exploit in Vyper (EVM compiler) caused an estimated $70M loss in funds. Curve founder Michael Egorov has famously been using CRV as collateral for several on-chain loans, including over $100M on Aave. Several X (formally Twitter) users have been calling for the liquidation of CRV to force the liquidation of Michael’s loans despite the likelihood of a large number of industry downstream effects.

Some other quick highlights:

Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t want to go to jail.
Securitize launches real-world tokenization in Europe. Meanwhile, the US debates staking taxes.

Crypto Spot Markets

Centralized Exchange (CEX) comparisons between this and last week

Centralized Exchange (CEX) USD trading pairs’ overall trading volume

BTC and ETH pairs remain dominant for USD trading pairs on centralized exchanges in August. XRP trading was high in July after the summary judgment was reached from the SEC lawsuit, though trading volumes on non-key pairs (i.e., tokens that are not ETH or BTC) appear to be flattening across the marketplace. The narrative in the ecosystem continues: the bear market has brought low trading volumes and few new entrants across retail trading. There is an undertone of growing pains with some tokens failing to find their user base and use case.

Binance binanceUS Bitfinex Bithumb Bybit coinbase gemini huobi kraken OKX. BTC/USDT trading volume market share Overall trading volume market share (left) vs BTC/USDT trading volume market share

An interesting point here is how the centralized exchange landscape appears to be shaping around which trading pairs exchanges become proficient in. Between the overall market share and BTC/USDT pair charts, Binance’s market share has been fairly steady throughout the month, ranging between mid-50 and mid-60 basis points. However, we’re seeing a recent decline in BTC/USDT trading volumes on Binance. USDT pairs have historically been (and continue to be) Binance’s key trading pairs and absorb the most volume week-over-week. If USDT pairs become more popular on other exchanges (such as OKX, which is gaining in market share for BTC/USDT) – and Binance pushes their own stablecoin BUSD more heavily – we could see a shift in traffic towards other centralized exchanges.

DeFi DEXs

Decentralized Exchange (DEX) protocol comparisons between this and last week

Decentralized Exchange (DEX) trading volumes by pool between 07/02/2023 & 08/02/2023

DEX volumes continue to favor stablecoin and base currency (i.e., WETH, wstETH) trading pairs, which seem to signal that the market is still “risk-off.” As traders move away from these tokens they take a “risk-on” approach, which signals that they believe the tokens will appreciate in value or there are more yield-generating opportunities with the increase in price volatility risk.

DeFi Borrow/Lend

DeFi Lending protocol comparisons between this and last week

Amberdata DeFi Lending protocol comparisons for deposit and withdrawals DeFi Lending protocol comparisons for deposit and withdrawals

As mentioned earlier, CRV liquidation concerns after the exploit have prompted many to move funds out of DeFi (or back in to add additional collateral). The fear of systematic failures in the event of a mass liquidation has not been lost on many. In the last three days, we’ve seen multiple days of large net withdrawals from DeFi Lending protocols.

DeFi Lending protocol comparisons for deposit and withdrawals DeFi lending USD Aave v2 Aave v3 compound v2 makerDAO DeFi Lending protocol comparisons for deposit and withdrawals

Unsurprisingly, almost all of the activity on July 31st was dedicated to Aave, which is where most of the loans for the Curve founder originated.

Blockhain Networks

Network comparisons between this and last week

Network transaction counts comparison

On-chain we see a wide stabilization in transaction count across many of the networks. Bitcoin has steadily grown in transaction count since April 2023, likely due to the growth in ordinals, and appears to be in a new “steady-state” range in transaction volume.