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El Salvador bought 500 BTC on Monday, according to its president, Nayib Bukele. 

“El Salvador just bought the dip,” Bukele said in a post on Twitter. “500 coins at an average USD price of ~$30,744.”

El Salvador just bought the dip!

500 coins at an average USD price of ~$30,744 🥳#Bitcoin

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) May 9, 2022

The South American adopted bitcoin as legal tender last year and has since accumulated the cryptocurrency through a series of announced purchases. Based on past announcements, El Salvador has bought more than 2,000 BTC. 

Bitcoin’s price has fallen sharply in the past 24 hours. At press time, the cryptocurrency is trading at $31,780 on Coinbase, according to TradingView data. 

© 2022 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.

Coinbase’s stock price fell to fresh lows Monday amid broader declines in US equities.

At press time, $COIN is trading at $82.31, having hit a low of $81.84. This represents a decline of more than 20% since the start of the session. 

Source: TradingView

The development comes a day before Coinbase reports its first-quarter earnings for 2022. The Q1 results will be released after the close of market on Tuesday. 

Coinbase is far from alone with respect to market volatility during Monday’s trade, with major US indices all reporting declines.

The Nasdaq Composite is down just over 4% at press time, having lost 493 points since the open. The S&P 500 and DJI are down 3% and 1.8%, respectively. Today’s market action builds on declines seen last week, which observers have attributed to macro factors such as the war in Ukraine and last week’s interest-rate raise from the US Federal Reserve. 

The crypto market, too, is seeing significant volatility, with particular action happening around the algorithmic stablecoin UST, which has fallen below $1 parity. Bitcoin is trading down more than 10% in the last 24 hours, and is trading at $30,560 per coin, according to TradingView. 

© 2022 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.

The price of algorithmic stablecoin UST fell to a new low on Monday amid continued volatility in the broader cryptocurrency market.

According to market data from Binance, which hosts the most voluminous market pair for UST against USDT, the stablecoin hit a low of $0.9202.

The price has since regained some ground and is trading at $0.948, market data shows. UST had begun to lose renewed ground against the dollar earlier Monday, as The Block reported. 

Source: TradingView

The tumultuous period kicked off on Saturday, triggered by a series of market events that led UST to struggle to hold parity against the dollar. An algorithmic stablecoin, UST utilizes market incentives in order to maintain its $1 peg. 

Monday’s fall is significant as it represents a new market low for UST, which fell to $0.96 in May 2021 amid “extreme volatility,” as the Terra team said at the time.

The development came hours after the Luna Foundation Guard, a Singapore-based nonprofit intended to support both Terra-based stablecoins and the broader ecosystem around that network, announced a plan to lend $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin and UST to third-party trading firms, with the intention of providing support for UST’s peg.

Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon alluded to this support in a 2:36 p.m. ET tweet, writing: “Deploying more capital – steady lads.”

The moves also come amid broader volatility in the crypto market. Bitcoin’s price fell to a low of $30,311 .99, building on an earlier decline that began Monday, as reported by The Block. Bitcoin is currently trading hands at approximately $30,670 on Coinbase, according to TradingView data. 

Equities are also seeing declines, with the Nasdaq Composite down roughly 3.5% as of press time. 

© 2022 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.

New York-based economist and cryptocurrency skeptic Nouriel Roubini says he’s working on developing a tokenized asset offering to act as a store of value — potentially replacing the US dollar’s role in the global economy.

Rouibini, who is CEO of Roubini Macro Associates, is known for his bearish outlook on markets and on cryptocurrency in particular. Yet he told Bloomberg in an interview on Monday that he’s working on a tokenized dollar with the Dubai-based company he co-founded, Atlas Capital Team.

The tokenized dollar replacement aims to take advantage of growing concerns over inflation as well as the dwindling dominance of the US currency globally. However, unlike a typical cryptocurrency, Roubini says that the coin would be backed by real assets. 

“We recognized that America’s dollar reserve currency could be at risk and are working to create a new instrument that’s effectively a more resilient dollar,” Roubini told Bloomberg. 

Set to be released later this year, the token will be backed by a mixture of short-term US Treasuries, gold and US property less affected by climate change. The final bundle of assets will be made up in the form of real estate investment trusts, more widely known as REITs.

Roubini and the Atlas Capital team told Bloomberg that most cryptocurrencies “are not even assets as they are not backed by anything – only vaporware – and don’t provide either income or use or other utility services; so they are purely speculative asset bubbles.” 

The product is being offered as a tokenized security to broaden its reach by taking advantage of the “digital rail” as they look to reach people without access to stable currencies. Roubini told Bloomberg that he sees an opportunity for a product to offer value to people who can’t gain exposure to the dollar and whose own local currency has fallen in value.

© 2022 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.

This special bonus episode of The Scoop was recorded live at the Crypto Bahamas conference with Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, the digital payments and infrastructure company behind the popular stablecoin USDC.

As data from The Block shows, USDC is the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization, and its share of the total stablecoin supply has been steadily on the rise.

According to Allaire, a primary driver of demand for stablecoins comes from crypto native businesses:

“Basically any business that operates in the crypto economy wants to use stablecoins as working capital. Well, these are businesses that also have borrowing needs, these are businesses that want to borrow, and so you want to borrow stablecoins — so there’s inherent demand to borrow in that medium of exchange.”

It is this demand for stablecoins that creates lucrative yield opportunities for stablecoin lenders in crypto, in the same way that lenders in the world of traditional finance profit from the interest on the money they lend.

As Allaire explains, stablecoin borrowers are willing to pay to borrow capital:

“Banks get 17 or 20% from consumers for lending the money for credit cards, right? So people pay an interest rate to borrow. Working capital of crypto is stablecoins, there’s businesses that want to borrow it, and there you go.”

During this bonus episode, Chaparro and Allaire also discuss:

• Yield bearing products and US securities law
• “Centralized” vs decentralized stablecoins
• The future of stablecoins

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross River
Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.

About Coinbase Prime
Coinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.

About Cross River
Cross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

© 2022 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.

The algorithmic stablecoin UST briefly fell 2% below its peg to the US dollar on Monday, according to data from crypto exchange Binance — the fourth significant drop below its peg in the last two days.

UST is a stablecoin backed through its relationship with the LUNA token. A burning mechanism and the ability to always be able to sell $1 worth of LUNA for 1 UST are designed to keep it in check. Yet critics say the success of this operation depends on the strength of LUNA’s price and on its key DeFi platform, Anchor, continuing to produce a 20% yield to incentivize liquidity — something that’s on track to run out soon barring any fixes.

Evidence for traders selling UST can be seen in the Wormhole bridge, a platform designed to exchange assets across blockchains. The pool of stablecoins within the protocol was previously made up of 50% UST, with the remainder in various other stablecoins. UST now comprises 78% of the pool, implying that traders have been selling it for other stablecoins.

In light of such concerns, the Terra ecosystem has been stockpiling bitcoin to use as a backstop. On the back of the initial de-pegging from the dollar, Terra has said it will lend out $750 million of bitcoin to market making firms to buy UST and help return the peg to its $1 mark.

Yet there appears to be strong downwards pressure on the peg. After falling to $0.98 initially, the price of UST rose as high as $0.986 — before falling back down again.

As for the price of LUNA, it has fallen 14% today to $55 among a general crypto market downturn. It is now down 54% from its all-time high of $118 in April.

© 2022 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.

Otherdeed #59906, the eighth rarest virtual land piece from Yuga Labs’ Otherside metaverse project, sold for a record 625 ETH ($1.5 million) on the NFT marketplace X2Y2 on Sunday.

The buyer of the piece was “n0b0dy.eth,” an avid NFT collector. The seller goes by “brickandmorty.eth,” who booked a profit of over $1.49 million, having minted the NFT a week ago for 305 apecoin (worth around $6,000 at the time).

The Otherside

Yuga Labs unveiled details of Otherside, its gaming metaverse project, in late April when it sold 55,000 “Otherdeeds” — “unique plots of land” required to claim space in Otherside.

Yuga raked in over $320 million selling these Otherdeeds — the highest gross for an NFT project to date.

Another 45,000 Otherdeeds were also unveiled, with 10,000 claimable by Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) holders (1 BAYC = 1 Otherdeed); 20,000 by Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) holders (1 MAYC = 1 Otherdeed); and 15,000 reserved for Yuga and other project developers helping to create Otherside.

There will be a total of 200,000 Otherdeeds available. The remaining 100,000 will be rewarded to “Voyagers” who hold Otherdeeds and contribute to the development of Otherside.

Otherdeed NFTs are currently in the top 10 collections by sales volumes, according to data from CryptoSlam, clocking in around $833 million within days of launch. Its top 10 highest sales range between $700,000 and $1.5 million, according to The Block Research, citing data from Dune Analytics.

Source: The Block Research; Dune Analytics (@cryptuschrist) 

Massive Premium 

The current floor price of Otherdeeds is 3 ETH ($7,200), according to OpenSea. That means n0b0dy.eth bought the Otherdeed #59906 NFT at a massive premium.

This could be because the NFT is ranked 8th by rarity on Rarity Sniper and also contains a 1 of 1 artifact — mystery potion —which was also featured in the official trailer of Otherside, said The Block Research’s NFT analyst Thomas Bialek.

The high premium paid also suggests that n0b0dy.eth has a high conviction in the future of the Otherside project, added Bialek.

Details of Otherside remain scant, but Yuga Labs has said that it is working with gaming startups Improbable and Animoca Brands on the project.

“Otherside blends mechanics from massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and Web3-enabled virtual worlds,” Improbable said in its recent blog post. “In partnership with Improbable, the metaverse technology company, Yuga Labs aims to create a MetaRPG universe where the players own the world, where any NFT can become a playable character, and thousands of people can play together at the same time.”

© 2022 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.

Quick Take

• Founded in 2013, Bitmain is a market-leading cryptocurrency mining hardware manufacturer (ASIC miners) known for its Antminer series 
• In early 2021, Bitmain resolved a year-long power dispute between the two co-founders – the settlement included Jihan’s resignation, key spin off announcements and investor share compensation related to company adjustments  
• Starting to focus more on water-cooling technology, Bitmain released a series of hydro-cooling products in 2022: Antminer S19 Pro+ Hyd., Antminer S19 XP Hyd., and Antspace HK3, an Antminer hydro-container

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Bitcoin’s price hit its lowest level since July of last year on Monday.

At press time, bitcoin is trading hands at roughly $32,650 on Coinbase, having trended as low as $32,462, per data from TradingView. Bitcoin hit a low of $32,504 on Coinbase on July 22, 2021, market data shows.

On a broader scale, bitcoin’s price is now down more than 50% from the all-time highs seen in November 2021. Bitcoin reached $69,000 on Coinbase on November 7. 

Beyond bitcoin, crypto prices have fallen across the board since the beginning of May. Ethereum is down from $2,700 at the beginning of the month to $2,400 while SOL has fallen from $85 to $71, according to Coinbase data via TradingView. 

Bitcoin suffered its most dramatic loss on Thursday as it fell as much as  7% during the day, in line with declines in broader financial markets. On the same day the Nasdaq Composite, an index of the top technology companies in the US, experienced its sharpest daily drop in almost two years as it fell 5% during the Thursday session.

The Nasdaq Composite is down about 2.8% during Monday’s trading session as of press time.

Broader markets have been rattled amid a tough macroeconomic environment.

Record levels of inflation across the globe have resulted in governments and regulators tightening monetary policy in order to combat rapid economic growth. Last week the US Federal Reserve announced its biggest rate increase in almost twenty years as it hiked rates fifty basis points in order to combat rising inflation – which is at a forty-year high in the U.S. Chairman Jerome Powell said on Wednesday: “Inflation is much too high and we understand the hardship it is causing. We’re moving expeditiously to bring it back down.”

These factors, coupled with macro issues like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have caused global markets to experience extreme volatility throughout the year.

© 2022 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.

Galaxy Digital swung to a first-quarter loss as tumbling crypto prices forced the firm to book unrealized trading losses. 

The crypto-focused trading and investment firm reported a net loss of $111.7 million in the first quarter of 2022, compared to a profit of $858.2 million in the same period last year, according to a statement on Monday. The crypto market has had a rough ride over the past year, with bitcoin – the largest token – falling from a high of more than $60,000 in March 2021 to less than $40,000 12 months later.

Speaking about the market conditions during an earnings call, Michael Novogratz, founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital, said that his instinct was “there is more damage to be done.”

“We expect a tough market but we are unwavering that we’re going to see institutional adoption of crypto as an asset class,” he added.

Galaxy Digital Asset Management reported assets under management of $2.7 billion as of March 31, a 5% decrease over the previous quarter.

Meanwhile, its trading arm, Galaxy Digital Trading, reported growth in the number of clients and revenue from loan and yield portfolios, counterparty trading volumes decreased 30% compared to the previous quarter. And that’s at the same time as having onboarded 50 new counterparties to the platform, bringing the total to 800.That said, trading volumes were still up 50% compared to the first quarter of 2021. 

Last week, European digital asset manager CoinShares also reported a first-quarter profit decline due to drops in trading revenue. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (Ebitda) totalled $23 million, down from $36 million a year earlier.

Galaxy Digital’s losses were, however, partially offset by growth in its investment banking and mining businesses. The latter two saw record revenue and net comprehensive income in the quarter. Net comprehensive income in investment banking grew more than eightfold and mining more than fivefold compared to the same period last year.

The mining arm of the company earned a record revenue of $9.8 million and net income of $5 million. The company claims that its proprietary operations are able to “mine bitcoin at a marginal cost significantly lower than fair market value”, and it is on track to achieve a mining capacity of 2,500 petahash per second by the end of 2022 for both proprietary and miner-finance operations.

© 2022 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.