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24 Feb, 2023

Bitcoin sturdy near $24,000

What's being bought and sold

TOP TRENDING ASSETS

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Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform as of 8 a.m. EST 24th February 2023

All investments and trading are risky and may result in the loss of capital. Cryptoassets are largely unregulated and are therefore not subject to protection.

What’s up

Invincible Crypto At Rest; Optimism Rising

Regulators keep dropping hammers and not-subtle hints: they're coming in hot. However, crypto isn’t flinching.

At $23,900, Bitcoin is unmoved overnight. The largest crypto has notched a 0.5% gain since last Friday. Ethereum's stubborn seven-day return: 0.0%. Big Ten coins are mostly flat over the past 24 hours, almost stoically shrugging aside the latest Sam Bankman-Fried-related news; yeah, turns out that cauldron of hot water in which the former FTX CEO sits just got even hotter with newly filed charges.

Meanwhile, ice buckets have been hurled by federal banking officials. The Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., in a joint statement issued Thursday, once again warned banks that crypto poses significant liquidity dangers. This is the latest in a series of formal cautionary declarations and further reinforces the centralized banking system’s campaign to turn digital assets into a leper colony. “Any lender dabbling in crypto will have a lot of explaining to do," CoinDesk said.

Within crypto’s Top 100, there is at least one impressive gainer on Friday, and it is No. 79 Optimism. The layer-2 network saw its OP token jump 7% to above $3 after Coinbase announced an Ethereum scaling product that will leverage Optimism's technology. Seems the entire OP ecosystem is crackling with life of late.

Take a look at VELO, the native token of Velodrome Finance, an Optimism-run DEX. CoinGecko's 618th-largest coin gained as much as 20% in 24 hours as of early this morning. The token has nearly doubled in the past seven days.

Meanwhile, Optimism-native lending protocol Sonne Finance's SONNE token (No. 964) has rocketed 58% in the past day.

What's down

Go Figure – VC Funding Plunges

No one can say the fourth quarter of 2021 wasn’t a boom time for digital assets – and for venture capital investments in the space.

As for VC activity in Q4 '22, it fell off a cliff. A new report from Blockdata shows $3.7 billion in VC funding showered crypto seedlings during the final three months of last year. That’s a 60% drop compared to the $9.6 billion in VC funding that came into play in Q4 '21.

Despite the pullback, Blockdata said investors are still looking to bankroll blockchain-based startups.

VC investments are shifting toward “non-volatile innovations,” including cross-chain bridges, payments, lending, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), asset management and digital identity management (Cointelegraph).

What's next

A Safe Space For Finance’s Future

Coinbase's newly announced layer-2 network, Base, is playing well in an Ethereum community that views the move as a massive vote of confidence.

Base, secured on Ethereum and powered by Optimism, is currently in its testnet phase. It aims to eventually become a network for building decentralized applications (dApps) on the blockchain, according to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.

"Base aims to be decentralized, permissionless, and open to anyone with the vision of creating a standard, modular, rollup agnostic Superchain powered by Optimism," the exchange said in a statement. "We're working to create a thriving community of other developers."

The Optimism ecosystem is sure thriving in terms of the rallies happening with OP-connected coins.

What’s this all about then? One theory being bandied about on Twitter puts forth speculation about Coinbase's end game – that the large exchange is using Optimism to establish a KYC-rules-compliant DeFi portal, paving a path for more institutional participation.


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