Listen to the Weekly Wrap on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. It is a summary with the help of AI-voices.
This Week's Top Stories
"Morgan Stanley will allow its financial advisors to offer Bitcoin spot ETFs to qualified investors"
- Morgan Stanley on Friday told its army of financial advisors that it will soon allow them to offer Bitcoin spot ETFs to qualified investors. The firm’s 15’000 or so financial advisors can solicit eligible clients to purchase shares of two BTC spot ETFs starting August 7, 2024.
- As we have mentioned before, many big traditional finance firms have not yet internally approved the Bitcoin spot ETFs. Morgan Stanley is now among the first major Wall Street banks to do so, a promising step worth observing.
"Markets give off ‘Black Monday’ vibes as stocks tank"
- Japan’s Nikkei Index experienced its worst day since the 1987 Black Monday crash. The VIX volatility index shot up more than 170% to its highest level since the COVID crash in 2020, while the S&P500 and Nasdaq fell between 4% and 5% before the market opened on Monday. Bitcoin and the crypto market took a hit as well, with Bitcoin trading below $50’000 for the first time since February 2024.
- The market crash on Monday was driven by several key factors, such as last week’s BoJ rate hike, the second hike in 17 years, U.S. unemployment numbers, geopolitical uncertainty in the Middle East, and last week’s drop in 10-year Treasury yields. Our Bitcoin Suisse Research Team published this ad hoc report on the recent price developments on Monday. You can read it here.
"Jump Crypto moves hundreds of millions in crypto as prices slide"
- Addresses tagged as belonging to trading firm Jump Crypto have seen an inflow of about $300 million since over the weekend. It seems that Jump Trading has redeemed wstETH worth $410 million and then transferred them to exchanges. As Jump was transferring their ETH, the market continued to drop sharply over the weekend and on Monday.
- While there was already a lot of uncertainty in the crypto markets due to the previously mentioned macro factors, the news surrounding Jump Trading likely added fuel to the downward movement, as many media outlets and accounts on X were talking about it.
"Japan’s Nikkei sees best day since October 2008; logs record single-day jump in points"
- Japan’s stocks rebounded sharply on Tuesday after the Nikkei 225 dropped over 12% in Monday’s trading session. Other Asia-Pacific markets were mostly higher.
- With Japan leading the rebound on Tuesday, U.S. markets also recovered most of their losses from Monday, starting on Tuesday. With the BoJ walking back on their talk of rate increases on Wednesday, some of the uncertainty in this regard was taken out of the market again.
"Ripple fined $125 million, court denies full SEC demand"
- Ripple has been fined $125 million as part of its years-long litigation with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which is a lot lower than the SEC's proposed $2 billion. Judge Torres also ordered Ripple on Wednesday to stop violating securities laws in the future.
- The market interpreted the news regarding Ripple as positive, as XRP jumped up by almost 30% right after the announcement was published. The ruling is seen as a win for Ripple as it clarifies that while some of Ripple’s XRP sales were found to be unregistered securities offerings, XRP itself is not considered a security. It will be interesting to see how this eventually unfolds, as the SEC will continue to fight some aspects of the case.
Chart of the Week
This week we are looking at the Solana vs. Ethereum chart, which, despite the launch of the Ethereum spot ETFs two weeks ago, indicates an outperformance of Solana. This week, it reached a new all-time high against Ethereum with a bullish structure in place. As we have mentioned in previous Weekly Wraps, Solana is outperforming Ethereum in various areas, such as monthly DEX trading volume or the number of tokens issued per month.
