Kaspa hits new ATH
What's being bought and sold*
TOP TRENDING ASSETS
*Customers buying or selling the asset as a percentage of all customers who have traded the asset in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. EST 3rd August 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
Ethereum Rival Kaspa Climbs To Record High
Shortly after 1 a.m. (EST), per CoinGecko, Kaspa's native asset KAS reached $0.04829236, a new all-time high.
KAS has gained about 18% since last Thursday, with a lion's share of those gains coming in the past day or so, a truly August performance for a digital asset that dominated July. KAS has gained 90% over the past month.
NewsBTC reports of a recently completed Kaspa-led crowdfunding campaign to raise USDT and KAS to pay fees required to list on a top-tier centralized exchange, resulting in a buying trend, according to a microblog post by Martin Hiesboeck. "Folks are literally selling BTC to buy KAS," Hiesboeck, Uphold's research chief, said Aug. 2 on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Kaspa is a blockchain workhorse marked by a distinct stripe – it's a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-powered proof-of-work (PoW) platform – and it has gained a following among developers smitten with its high throughput rate. The project has pitched a sturdy tent in the Ethereum rival camp and reportedly has teed up a series of upgrades and dApps for its 3Q pipeline (U.Today).
What's down
DeFi Coins Dented
The Curve situation continues to warrant a close watch. Definitely, some damage to the DeFi sector has been done.
Curve DAO (CRV) has lost 20% of its value in the past seven days. Although, it's worth mentioning CRV, 82nd-largest coin, has gained 4.3% in the past 24 hours.
As for a slew of major contemporaries, such as Aave, Synthetix Network and Compound, each of their governance tokens have declined by at least 15% in the past seven days.
The DeFi Pulse Index (of the top ten DeFi coins by market cap) sank 7.3% since last week, according to Decrypt.
What's next
Curve Founder Crawls Across Hot Coals; Counterparties Contemplate Their Next Move
More legal headaches for Binance, a white-knuckle DeFi debacle, the downgrade of America's credit rating, a Wall Street sell off, an ever-escalating Russia-Ukraine war, deadly heatwaves, wildfires and the criminal arraignment of a former president – so much for August being a slow news month.
We're striving to keep up with the Curve saga (if not stay ahead of it); be sure to keep an eye on a proposed move by Abracadabra to try to reduce its overall CRV exposure, a byproduct of having lent to Curve Founder Michael Egorov. The game plan from here, depending on what the project decides, could involve an adjustment to the rates associated with pools of CRV belonging to Egorov, with the introduction a sky-high hike (from 18% to 200%) followed by a gradual reduction, as Egorov's Abracadabra obligation ($18 million) is met, creating a kind of controlled burn (CoinDesk).
The Sunday night hack of Curve liquidity pools nearly ignited a dangerous conflagration. It immediately put pressure on the CRV token – it hit a recent low of $0.50 on Tuesday and at last check CRV was about $0.59 – undermining loans that Egorov took out with CRV as collateral. Lenders include Abracadabra, Aave and Fraxland.
“There’s bit of interesting gamesmanship or game theory right now since these DeFi lenders all have exposure and whoever liquidates first obviously loses less,” LedgerPrime CIO Shiliang Tang told Bloomberg. “But if no one pushes, then they all win, because he can repay over time.”
