Etiket: Venusbet

Tokens worth over $587 million of Ethereum scaling protocol Optimism are set to be released into the open market on Tuesday as part of a planned unlock plan, leading to prices of OP tokens falling 7%.

When tokens are “unlocked,” their holders are then able to sell or swap that token if they wish to do so.

The more than 386 million optimism tokens are currently held by early contributors and investors, and the move will nearly double OP’s circulating supply – which stands at 335 million tokens on Tuesday morning.

Early investors are likely sitting on significant gains and could choose to take profits, contributing to immense selling pressure. As such, immediately available liquidity on OP token pairs across decentralized and centralized exchanges is under $10 million – and a single sell order of $600,000 could dunk prices 2% further on Binance.

The unlock comes as OP tokens have been on a general downturn since February this year, sliding from $3 to $1.5 even as bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) gained at least 50% in that period.

OP trades at $1.50 as of Tuesday, with a trading volume of $103 million over the past 24 hours.

Lybra Finance, a protocol built on liquid staking derivatives that aims to provide a decentralized interest-bearing stablecoin, has seen its total value locked (TVL) skyrocket nearly 400% in the past two weeks, nearing $100 million as of Friday.

Launched one month ago, Lybra’s surge in TVL coincides with Lido upgrading to its second version on May 15, which enabled Lido users to unstake their stETH and receive ETH. According to Lybra documents, the protocol “leverages Lido Finance-issued ETH proof-of-stake and stETH as its primary components, with plans to support additional LSD assets in the future.”

LBR, the native token of the Lybra Protocol, which gives holders governance powers and access to the protocol’s revenue, has jumped 33.8% in the past 24 hours and 173% in the past seven days, standing at $2.23, CoinGecko data shows.

Decentralized exchanges hold 9.61% of the total LBR supply, a steady decline from 23% two weeks ago, according to blockchain data firm Nansen. Nansen also reports that smart money wallets hold 4.74% of the total LBR supply today, an increase from 0.82% on May 16, indicating that savvy crypto investors are accumulating the token.

Nansen considers a wallet to be “smart money” if it has profited at least $100,000 by providing liquidity or made multiple profitable trades on decentralized exchanges.

Crypto-focused financial services firm Galaxy Digital (GLXY) has teamed up with asset manager DWS to develop a set of exchange-traded products (ETPs) for listing in Europe.

The two firms have formed a “strategic alliance,” according to an announcement on Wednesday, of which the ETP development is the initial aim.

The ETPs will give European investors cost-effective means of accessing digital asset investment through traditional brokerage accounts. Frankfurt-based DWS, which has 821 billion euros ($907 billion) in assets under management, will be Galaxy’s “exclusive ally” for crypto ETPs in Europe, the announcement said.

Galaxy has previously listed exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in Canada alongside CI Küresel Asset Management.

While the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)’s repeated rejection of applications to list spot bitcoin ETFs in the U.S. has been a source of ongoing frustration in the industry, similar products are now well established in Europe and Canada.

The significance of such investment vehicles lies in their providing institutional investors with an entry point to crypto investment while not requiring them to take direct control of the underlying assets, which could prove an impediment to adoption for such firms.

Vertex, a decentralized exchange (DEX) for the spot and derivatives trading of digital assets, has gone live on Arbitrum (ARB), a popular network built atop the Ethereum blockchain.

Vertex, which had been operating on a test network, combines an off-chain order book layered on top of an on-chain automated market maker on a decentralized, self-custodial exchange. The firm, which has bases in Singapore and the Cayman Islands, counts Jane Street, Dexterity Capital, Hudson River Trading, GSR, Collab+Currency, JST Capital, Big Brain and Lunatic Capital among its early backers.

The messy collapse of FTX and other centralized trading platform blowups last year has fueled a shift toward decentralized exchanges and self-custody. Ethereum layer 2 system Arbitrum is now the fastest-growing blockchain in total value locked and has surpassed Ethereum in daily transaction volume.

The Vertex team has been working on the protocol for about a year. Co-founder Darius Tabatabai said the platform has drawn interest from institutional traders and from retail traders who use Arbitrum.

“We built all the smart contracting ourselves, so we’re not forking anything,” Tabatabai said in an interview with CoinDesk. “The [automated market maker] is quite conventional, but we have a bunch of tech under the surface that enables you to do leveraged AMMs, to do looping, and we have an inbuilt money market. So you can think of it as a combination of Aave, dYdX and Uniswap, with an order book.”

Building Vertex on Arbitrum and using an off-chain sequencer for the order book has enabled the venue to process between 10,000 and 15,000 transactions per second with the ability to match orders in 10 to 30 milliseconds, a speed that rivals leading centralized venues and surpasses that on other decentralized exchanges, Tabatabai added.

DRW told CoinDesk it’s not an investor in OPNX, the bankruptcy claims exchange founded by the same people who founded failed crypto hedge fund Three Arrow Capital (3AC).

“DRW is not an investor in OPNX nor are any of its affiliates investors in OPNX,” a company spokesman said.

Earlier Friday, OPNX included DRW in a list of its “major investors.”