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Bitcoin’s price continued to hover just below $30,000 on Wednesday as recent miner sell offs and the expiration of derivative contracts kept the digital asset from breaking out.

The price of the world’s largest cryptocurrency was up 0.1% to $29,876 at 11:48 a.m. in New York, according to CoinGecko.

“Some miners are selling their bitcoin as the mining profit margin increased recently,” Youwei Yang, chief economist at BTCM, told The Block. “Natural market corrections and the expiration of derivatives contracts around the $29K range towards the end of the month may have also contributed to the dip.”

CryptoQuant data showed bitcoin miner reserves have dropped by around 5,000 coins since the beginning of June, indicating a transfer to exchanges. This corresponds with this week’s Bitfinix market report that highlighted a surge in miners sending large volumes of BTC to exchanges.

“We believe this activity indicates potential de-risking or hedging strategies adopted by miners, and it is notable that bitcoin mining stocks have soared recently as institutional interest in bitcoin rises,” the report noted.

Bitcoin’s historic correlations

Yang added that bitcoin’s historic correlations tend to hold true during crypto bull cycles, but are less reliable during bear cycles.

“The historical correlation between bitcoin and the U.S. Dollar Index is mixed, similar to its correlation with the SP500, Nasdaq Composite Index, and major financial indices. While some consider bitcoin a safe-haven asset during periods of opposite movement with the DXY, this is not always the case,” he added. 

Bitcoin historically presents an inverse correlation with the U.S. Dollar Index, but it has failed to appreciate in the wake of DXY’s recent decline of around 2.3%. 

The economist said many indicators point toward a bull market starting in mid-2024. He noted the bitcoin halving, expected to occur in April 2024, could coincide with the SEC’s timeframe to make decisions on whether to approve multiple spot bitcoin ETFs.

Yang said that a potential Federal Reserve rate cut may occur as early as January or March, based on the CME FedWatch Tool’s probabilities for rate changes.

“However, considering sticky inflation, my bet is that the Fed may not cut rates until May 2024,” he said. “This is when a full-fledged bull cycle is expected to begin, prompting long-term players to hold and accumulate bitcoin from now to then.”

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX is expanding its partnership with the Italian soccer giant AC Milan. 

BitMEX will transition from a sleeve sponsor on the team’s playing kits to becoming AC Milan’s official cryptocurrency trading partner, aiming to boost BitMEX’s brand presence by tapping into the club’s global fan base, according to a statement. The value of the deal was not disclosed.

“We are thrilled to reinforce our partnership with AC Milan. Beyond the philanthropic projects we have worked on together, we both appreciate and applaud the spirit of competition and the sense of connection that comes from it,” BitMEX CEO and Group CFO Stephan Lutz said. 

Lutz highlighted BitMEX’s new Guilds social trading feature as an example of the products aimed at the club’s fans. Guilds allows traders to team up and trade together to compete against other groups. 

Collaboration dates back to 2021

“We are happy to continue our journey alongside a partner such as BitMEX. We intend to take further steps forward in the path of digitalization, innovation and growth of the club and also support many charitable initiatives promoted by Fondazione Milan,” added AC Milan Chief Revenue Officer Casper Stylsvig.

BitMEX and AC Milan’s collaboration dates back to 2021 when the crypto exchange scored the initial multi-year sleeve deal. The pair have worked on a range of initiatives since, from celebrating AC Milan’s first Italian Serie A title in 11 years to organizing various charitable events. While the duration of this extended deal was also not disclosed, BitMEX said it remains committed to organizing similar events in the years ahead.

Last month, crypto exchange OKX expanded a similar sponsorship deal with the treble-winning English soccer champions Manchester City.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Imagine you buy a sports car, like a Ferrari F40, or a lavishly expensive watch, like a $195,000 Rolex, but you aren’t ready to shoulder the responsibility of caring for either item.

Altr, a company which aspires to become a hub for the buying and selling of luxury items authenticated on the Polygon blockchain with NFTs, believes it might have the answer. And with the sale of a Ferrari F40 for $2.5 million, the firm hopes to have demonstrated how such a high-priced transaction facilitated by Altr works.

When a luxury item is sold via its platform, Altr said it not only “issues a digital proof of ownership in the form of an NFT” minted on the Polygon blockchain, but also promises to take care of the physical asset until the new owner decides to claim their item.

“All collectibles are safely stored and maintained by Altr’s Oracles in safe storage facilities until the NFT holder decides to redeem the physical collectible,” the company said in a statement.

Altr’s governance application Lucidao said the Ferrari sold in less than 48 hours, according to a post to Twitter. Transactions are carried out in USDT stablecoin, according to the company’s website.

“The speed with which the car sold is a testament to the confidence that the community has in Altr and the technology on which it is built” said Davide Rovelli, who, according to the statement, is “one of Altr’s initial supporters.”

Rovelli added he’s confident that “there is a growing market for collectors to buy physical assets using blockchain technologies, enabling a secure and transparent solution for acquiring, owning, exchanging and storing high-value assets.”

Part ownership and storage

While the sale of the Ferrari appears to be the biggest transaction Altr has handled thus far, the company says it was not its first sale of a big-ticket item. In January, Altr sold a Rolex Daytona for $195,000, according to the statement.

Altr, however, did not sell the Rolex to one buyer, but instead to a group of buyers. The company has introduced what it calls “fractionalized” ownership that entitles would-be collectors to a piece — essentially a share — of a luxury item. People who own a fraction of an item receive an NFT.

The company’s “Oracles” are employed to certify the authenticity and safeguard luxury assets, according to Altr. It said “renowned experts” are able to both appraise and secure storage of the valuable items sold through the platform.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Senior Republicans on the committees in the U.S. House of Representatives that are drafting legislation to create comprehensive frameworks for digital assets pressed Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler to work with Congress on the legislation.

“Legislation would do far more to prevent future collapses of digital asset firms than enforcement actions,” said Reps. French Hill, R-Ark, and Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., subcommittee chairs on the House Financial Services and Agriculture Committees, respectively. “A statutory framework would establish a process for firms to come into the regulatory parameter and comply with consumer protections, rather than relying on enforcement actions to punish a bad actor after the damage has already been done.”

The pair borrowed language from an October 2022 report on digital asset policy issued by senior regulators that identified three areas where legislation could help close “regulatory gaps” with “clear rules of the road.”

House wants ‘productive engagement’ from Gensler

Though not a lawmaker, Gensler holds a significant position to affect how legislation moves forward, with many congressional Democrats deferring to the SEC over its view on the bills. The chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, told The Block earlier this year that he and his staff were in frequent touch with the SEC chair on digital assets. Any effort to create new laws for the sector would likely end up at the Banking Committee at some point.

The House Financial Services Committee is currently scheduled to debate and vote next week on comprehensive regulatory bills for stablecoins and cryptocurrencies that represent the legislation with the greatest chance of creating digital asset-specific rules since the inception of bitcoin, with particular bipartisan support for the stablecoins bill. The House Agriculture Committee, which shares jurisdiction over the market structure bill because it oversees the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is also expected to mark up its portion of that bill next week.

In a letter to Gensler, Hill and Johnson expressed concern over recent SEC rule proposals around digital assets as well as some of the commission’s enforcement actions against the industry. They noted the pattern of major enforcement actions seeming to happen around the time of House hearings focused on digital assets.

Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested and simultaneously civilly and criminally charged by the Justice Department and SEC the night before he was due to appear before the House Financial Services Committee to testify about FTX’s collapse last December, and last month’s Binance and Coinbase enforcement actions were announced shortly before legislative hearings on the digital assets bills under consideration.

“This approach does not result in compliance and customer protection, but instead creates further confusion, as demonstrated by the recent summary judgement,” the Republicans wrote, alluding to last week’s split decision in federal court over whether sales of XRP violated securities laws. “This concern is exacerbated by certain Commission actions, seemingly timed to coincide with related Congressional activity, which appears calculated for maximum publicity and political impact.”

The pair concluded the letter by asking Gensler for “productive engagement” with the commission on passing new laws for regulating digital assets.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Nasdaq is no longer pursuing plans for a crypto custody service, citing business and regulatory concerns, CEO Adena Friedman said in an earnings call on Wednesday.

“This quarter, considering the shifting business and regulatory environment in the U.S., we have made the decision to halt our launch of the U.S. digital assets custodian business and our related efforts to pursue relevant license,” Friedman said. 

The exchange operator had been awaiting approval from the New York Department of Financial Services by the end of June to begin offering custody services to clients. Nasdaq announced its intention to move into the space following the collapse of Three Arrows last July and had forged forward, despite a slump in the crypto market. 

ETF front

Friedman said the exchange plants to keep building out technology to “position Nasdaq as a leading digital assets software solutions provider to the broader global industry.”

Nasdaq partnered with BlackRock for a spot bitcoin ETF that’s currently awaiting approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC has yet to greenlight such a product, previously citing concerns of fraud and manipulation. 

“More broadly, we remain committed to supporting the evolution of the digital assets ecosystem in a variety of ways, among them, through our ongoing engagement with regulators, the delivery of comprehensive technology solutions across the trade life cycle, and through our partnerships with potential ETF issuers to support tradable exchange listed products,” Friedman said. 

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Solana Labs has unveiled Solang, a new compiler designed to smooth the transition for Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) developers into the Solana ecosystem.

With the launch of Solang, developers familiar with Solidity, Ethereum’s primary smart contract programming language, now have a tool that enables them to delve into and write apps on the Solana network.

This unveiling comes just a day after Neon EVM’s release of a similar tool, highlighting the continual efforts to enhance compatibility between Solana and existing Ethereum development approaches.

Among the features Solang offers are compatibility with Ethereum Solidity version 0.8 and integration of Solana SPL tokens with Solidity. Moreover, it grants EVM frameworks on Solana access to the network’s core features.

Traditionally, Solana development has been centered around using languages like Rust or C for scripting smart contracts. However, the team emphasized development was evolving toward greater accessibility via Solidity and EVM.

“Solana Labs is thrilled to announce that today you can now build on Solana with Solidity using Solang, a new compiler that helps bridge the gap between EVM developers and the Solana ecosystem,” it stated.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Blockchain tools and infrastructure developer Nethermind announced a partnership with EigenLayer, a restaking platform that leverages Ethereum’s security. 

The collaboration seeks to drive permissionless innovation within the blockchain ecosystem by combining their respective Ethereum infrastructure and restaking capabilities, according to a statement.

“Through strategic collaboration with EigenLayer, Nethermind will help design and explore what is possible to build with restaking on Ethereum and other chains,” Nethermind CEO Tomasz Stańczak said. “The Nethermind team, always caring about sustainability and security of the Ethereum protocol, is excited about the opportunity to ensure alignment of safety, censorship and attack-resistant chains and creativity when bringing restaking to the Ethereum ecosystem.”

The partnership has already borne fruit with Nethermind’s restaking dashboard for users and helping to establish specifications for node operators within EigenLayer.

“The vision of EigenLayer is to empower protocols and developers with the ability to borrow the security guarantees of Ethereum,” Sreeram Kannan, the founder of EigenLayer developer EigenLabs, added. “Through our partnership with Nethermind, we are confident in realizing this vision and propelling unprecedented innovation within the blockchain space.”

Future initiatives include Nethermind’s participation in the governance community multisig for EigenLayer’s core protocol, helping to distribute the decision-making process and encourage a more decentralized ecosystem.

Restaking benefits and risks

EigenLayer allows users to harness Ethereum’s security and restake their already-staked ether or Ethereum liquid staking tokens (LSTs) — such as Lido’s stETH, Rocket Pool’s rETH and Coinbase’s cbETH — on other protocols. Restaking enables holders to double down on their staked assets for additional yield, albeit trading off additional risk.

EigenLayer went live on Ethereum last month with an initial $17 million LST deposit limit. The project previously raised $64.5 million, including a $50 million Series A funding round in March backed by Blockchain Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Polychain Capital.

However, restaking has also drawn criticism from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and others in the ecosystem, with Buterin noting that while re-staking could be used for low-risk purposes, it could also compromise the mainnet’s security in some situations.

“We should tread lightly when application-layer projects aim to extend the ‘scope’ of blockchain consensus beyond the validation of essential Ethereum protocol rules,” Buterin stated in a May blog post.

Swapnil Raj, head of the EigenLayer efforts at Nethermind, is delivering a presentation on EigenLayer nodes at the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in Paris tomorrow.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.