Bitcoin Bloodbath | Binance Loves Twitter

BLOODBATH CONTINUES

Stocks and cryptocurrencies moved sharply lower this week as investors continue to remain nervous about a slowdown in economic growth and experts warn of more market downturns ahead. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost more than 1,000 points on Thursday and the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 5%, marking the worst single-day drops since 2020. The selloff resumed on Friday following new data from the Labor Department that showed that the U.S. economy added back 428,000 jobs last month, higher than the 400,000 expected by economists, which suggested further inflationary concerns. Bitcoin, whose price action remains highly correlated to stock market moves, plunged below $36,000 on Friday morning as liquidations on crypto-tracked futures exceeded $400 million according to data from Coinglass. Other major digital assets including ether, solana and cardano have also taken a beating. As of Friday noon, the market capitalization of cryptocurrencies stands at $1.65 trillion—the lowest level since February.

NFTS: GLASS HALF-EMPTY OR HALF-FULL?

NFTs had a rough start to this year with transaction activity dropping to less than $1 billion in March, according to Chainalysis, but the recent $285 million sale of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs and several other data points lead experts to believe the industry is shaking off some dead wood, consolidating around the strongest brands and slowly finding legal and regulatory clarity. The latest bottom of daily NFT sales occurred the day before the Bored Ape auction on April 29, with only about 17,000 sales totaling $3.5 million. However, the total daily volume at the beginning of this week showed the market recovering to a total of 98,000 sales worth $369 million, according to industry tracker NonFungible.com” 

BINANCE JOINS MUSK’S TWITTER BID

The world’s largest crypto exchange has committed $500 million in equity financing to fund Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter. Part of the $7.1 billion in new capital that Musk has secured for his proposed $44 billion takeover of the social media juggernaut, the move would see Binance* take a stake in Twitter should Musk succeed in taking it private. Patrick Hillmann, chief communications officer for Binance, said the company is creating an internal team to focus on how blockchain could be helpful to Twitter and other social platforms, and has brought up BNB Chain, the distributed ledger Binance helped build, to Musk. On May 4, France's capital market regulator, the AMF, announced that Binance secured regulatory approval to operate as a digital asset service provider in the country.

*Binance plans to make a major investment in the parent company that will own Forbes following Forbes’ previously-announced public listing transaction. 

Source: Forbes Digital Assets, powered by Nomics.  Prices as of 4:00 p.m. on May 6, 2022.

BLOCKCHAIN 50 SPOTLIGHT

Marathon Digital Holdings: Five years ago, Marathon was mostly known as a patent troll, filing a raft of lawsuits (most settled out of court) against corporate giants like Apple, Amazon, Dell, Yahoo, Pinterest and Twitter. In 2017 the operation had annual revenues of less than $1 million and a market cap of less than $10 million. It aggressively pivoted toward bitcoin mining in 2017, and the Nasdaq-traded company now has a market cap of $2 billion on revenue of less than $100 million. A big beneficiary of China’s bitcoin-mining ban, Marathon currently holds at least 8,133 bitcoin worth $300 million. The company intends to put to work 70,000 more servers in early 2022, increasing its computers devoted to crypto mining to 199,000, good for approximately 1.2% of total global bitcoin mining activity.  

ELSEWHERE

Jane Street Uses Decentralized Finance To Borrow Crypto [Bloomberg]

SEC To Hire More Crypto Cops To Fight Digital Frauds [The Verge]

Luna Foundation Guard Acquires $1.5B In Bitcoin To Reinforce Stablecoin Reserves [CoinDesk] 

Steven Ehrlich
Editor 
Forbes CryptoAsset & Blockchain Advisor

Nina Bambysheva
Reporter
Forbes Money & Markets

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