The latest price moves in bitcoin (BTC) and crypto markets in context for April 19, 2023. First Mover is CoinDesk’s daily newsletter that contextualizes the latest actions in the crypto markets.
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Author: Lyllah Ledesma, Omkar Godbole
The companies are looking to make it easier for institutions to hold digital assets and bolster investor confidence in the market.
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Author: Elizabeth Napolitano
Fetch.ai’s aim is to facilitate peer-to-peer trading between DeFi users using AI-powered software “agents.”
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Author: Jamie Crawley
The ruling would give Hong Kong liquidators more clarity on how to treat crypto assets caught up in winding down procedures, law firm Hogan Lovells said.
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Author: Sandali Handagama
CoinDesk set up its own Ethereum validator, fondly nicknamed “Zelda,” in 2020 to witness firsthand the blockchain’s landmark shift to an energy-efficient proof-of-stake consensus mechanism from its original proof-of-work – the same one used by Bitcoin.
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Author: Bradley Keoun
Almost one week after Ethereum’s Shapella upgrade went live — effectively allowing for the withdrawal of staked ether for the first time — deposits have begun to outpace withdrawals and the rate at which ether is burned has increased substantially.
Yesterday, approximately 91,500 ETH was deposited and 64,830 ETH was withdrawn, creating a positive net staking balance of roughly 26,680 ETH ($53 million), according to data from token.unlocks.
This follows the first positive net staking flow since Shapella went live. The Block reported yesterday that, over the previous 24 hours, 95,000 ETH was deposited against 27,000 ETH withdrawn.
Since Shapella activated, staking APR has decreased alongside a general increase in the price of ether. Source: token.unlocks
The overall net staking balance since Shapella is still largely negative, however.
Since the upgrade was activated shortly before 6:30 p.m. EDT on April 12 at block height 6209536, approximately 1.08 million ETH has been withdrawn. Over the same period, less than 600,000 ETH was deposited — creating a negative net staking balance of roughly 486,150 ETH.
Some 945,370 ETH (worth about $1.9 billion) is still queued up for withdrawal.
The price of ether, meanwhile, has fallen back below $2,000 — in line with the broader crypto market — after spending much of its post-Shapella life around $2,100.
Ethereum is burning more ether since Shapella
Over the last seven days — almost mirroring the time since Shapella was activated — the ether supply has decreased at a rate of 0.502% per year, according to ultrasound.money. This nearly doubled the burn rate of the past 30 days and is significantly more than the post-Merge burn rate of 0.134% per year.
Ethereum has burned roughly 11,600 ETH in the last seven days, worth roughly $23 million at current prices.
Ethereum has been burning ether at an increased rate over the past seven days. Source: ultrasound.money
Ethereum began burning ether 621 days ago when it implemented Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559, which burns a portion of fees generated through transactions.
© 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.
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Author: Adam James
Andreessen Horowitz’s web3 investment arm, a16z Crypto, is working on something.
The venture capital giant’s crypto arm teased a launch on Twitter yesterday, starting with engineering partner Noah Citron posting a picture of an orange ball and the words “coming soon.” The brief tweet prompted a bout of speculation on the social media platform, with some likening the mystery to similar buzz-building tactics employed by Coinbase ahead of its Layer 2 launch in February.
A16z Crypto Chief Technology Officer Eddy Lazzarin appeared to shut down the possibility of a new Layer 2, tweeting “not an L2.” Despite this, the native token of the Optimism blockchain, OP, rose a little as Coinbase’s Layer 2, known as Base, is built on the open-source OP Stack.
The OP price has since dipped, in line with the broader crypto market.
Lazzarin responded to The Block’s request for more info via Twitter direct messages with the orange ball emoji. a16z’s comms team declined to comment.
A16z’s orange ball
Andreessen Horowitz is one of the highest profile investors in crypto, with more than $7 billion in funds dedicated to investments in the sector. The California-based firm has been involved in 11 fundraisings for crypto startups so far this year, according to The Block’s Deals Dashboard.
Lazzarin later shared more tweets with the orange ball, adding, “We need more TUIs and data dense displays.” TUIs might reference Text-based User Interfaces (or Terminal User Interfaces), giving rise to speculation that the fund is working on some terminal for developers.
He followed the tweet by adding, “What’s the best Rust (or Crab) TUI framework?” Rust is also one of the most popular programming languages used by blockchain developers — and its (sort of) mascot is an orange crab named Ferris.
That said, there is no certainty as to what the team at a16z is teasing right now, and the answer might not live up to the speculation.
© 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.
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Author: Adam Morgan McCarthy
Open interest in CME futures has risen to the highest level since March 2022, indicating an influx of institutional traders to the crypto market.
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Author: Omkar Godbole
Episode 37 of Season 5 of The Scoop was recorded with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Stephanie Murray and The Moskowitz Law Firm Managing Partner Adam Moskowitz.
Listen below, and subscribe to The Scoop on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Feedback and revision requests can be sent to podcast@theblockcrypto.com.
Adam Moskowitz is the managing partner of Moskowitz Law Firm and one of the attorneys spearheading a class action lawsuit against 16 different FTX celebrity ambassadors.
In this episode, Moskowitz breaks down the legal argument underpinning the class action lawsuit and explains why he thinks FTX’s various celebrity ambassadors could be on the hook for billions of dollars.
During this episode, Chaparro, Murrary and Moskowitz also discuss:
- Trying to serve Shaquille O’Neal
- How Taylor Swift did due diligence
- Ambassadors versus influencers
This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Circle and CleanSpark.
About Circle
Circle is a global financial technology company helping money move at internet speed. Our mission is to raise global economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value. Visit circle.com/Scoop to learn more.
About CleanSpark
CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK) is America’s Bitcoin Miner™. Visit cleanspark.com/theblock to learn more about the CleanSpark way.
© 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.
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Author: Davis Quinton and Frank Chaparro
Pictures of coffee cups are changing hands on Starbucks’ NFT marketplace for around $1,000.
No actual coffee comes with the offer.
We all know that Starbucks has somehow made us pay extravagant prices for what is, fundamentally, flavored hot water. In New York, a “venti toasted Graham” currently goes for $6.88. But we comfort ourselves with the thought that even though we might be overpaying, we were still getting some actual caffeine in actual coffee in an actual cup.
Starbucks’ is so expensive — compared to regular coffee — that giving up your daily Starbucks habit has often been touted as a way to get rich. Shawn Carter, a writer for Forbes, once calculated that Starbucks costs him $2,300 a year.
But now, Starbucks is offering you a much faster way to get rich: if you were lucky enough to obtain a “Holiday Cheer Edition 1 Stamp” last year — there were only 5,000 of them! — you could expect to sell it on for $1,000, according to Starbucks’ Odyssey NFT marketplace. There have been 210 sales in the secondary market since the collection launched four months ago, with the most recent deal closing at $901 today.
To be clear: Starbucks is not selling these NFTs. This is simply the price they are fetching on the secondary market as owners trade them amongst each other on Starbucks’ NFT platform. On the much larger trading platform OpenSea, one coffee cup was sold for 0.99 ETH in March, worth about $2,000 at the time.
Crypto natives will yawn at all of this. They regard it as normal. Infamously, the more popular NFT collections are driven by outrageous ideas. Someone once paid $3.4 million for a Bored Ape. Donald Trump has made up to $1 million from a set of pictures in which his head is crudely edited onto the bodies of various action heroes.
Starbucks’ new NFT collection starts at $100 each
The Holiday Cheer Starbucks stamp was released last December and features a generic picture of a seasonal coffee cup with whipped cream on top and the year, 2022.
Starbucks initially offered the NFTs for free as a loyalty marketing gimmick that offered rewards to anyone willing to complete various interactive journeys, games, and virtual tours related to coffee and the corporate history of Starbucks. Consumers earned Odyssey Points, which qualified them for an NFT.
The program was a success and Starbucks now has six different NFT collections available. Its next one will be “The Starbucks First Store Collection,” which highlights the company’s first location, which opened in 1971 in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, as my colleague Yogita Khatri reported. Prices for those will start at $100.
Now those earlier NFTs are available for sale to anyone on Starbucks Odyssey. And despite the fact that none of the NFTs will get you an actual coffee at an actual Starbucks, prices have gone up.
It’s not clear whether the market is driven by demand from Starbucks fanatics or clever “investors” who are artificially hyping the price through wash trading (the practice of repeatedly selling a token through a series of wallets all owned by a single person to make it appear that demand is brisk).
Either way, if you want to buy someone a very expensive and mostly impractical Christmas gift, Starbucks Odyssey has got you: And it’s only April!
© 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.
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Author: Jim Edwards
