The information in this message does not represent any financial or investment advice. They're just random thoughts in my head.
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MACRO - Not really much going on in the way of macro at the moment. Equities closed the day unchanged yesterday and futures are down about 0.2-0.3% as we await Friday's payrolls. Interest rates have barely budged with 2Y still at 4.88%. In July we saw the S&P 500 gain an additional 3.1% which marked its 5th consecutive monthly increase, the longest run since summer 2021. You really cannot fade US stocks and but to those that have been bearish I would say that we've seen this story before time and time again. Ultimately it feels like to me that there is just so much sidelined cash that wants to be invested and inevitably it must FOMO in at some point. Curious to see what happens here if we do get a good payrolls and CPI number this month, if we can breach ATHs and go even further.
CRYPTO - Not great with BTC falling to 28.9K and ETH down to 1834. This comes after Curve was expoloited for more than $70m which is yet another blow for the defi market. It appears that the founder of Curve, Michael Egorov also took out a $100m loan on AAVE to purchase a house in Australia, backed by the CRV token...this creates an increased risk for CRV and also AAVE (which he would have to sell to the tune of >$60m) should he be liquidated (it sounds like his liquidation price is around 38-40c). Although the specific repercussions to broader crypto such as BTC/ETH imo are limited, this kind of thing can have a big negative sentiment on the entire market should it go completely tits up; we always have to be cautious of black swan events in crypto and it seems they are forever on the horizon. Elsewhere there are rumours that the recent $BALD token on Base (which btw got completely rugged) has links to SBF/Alameda.
https://twitter.com/hype_eth/status/1686126115947941890?s=20
So yeah...shit is kind of kicking off again in crypto and not in the way we would like to see it!
NFTs - Things in NFT land continue to be rather quiet with BAYC dropping a touch further to 29.1 ETH and everything else staying rather stable. Market volumes in the last 24H were just $12m and it appears that most Blur farmers have pretty much given up at this stage with there being no real clarity over when the second airdrop will arrive. Despite that, Blur still dominates marketplace volumes with a 47.8% market share, albeit meaningfully lower than the 60-70% it was posting for much of this year. We saw two more Azuki spirit sales, one at 68.5ETH and another at 69.69ETH, a frightening discount to the 150ETH+ sales we were seeing just a few weeks ago.
REPORTS - This week we are revisiting the well known NFT project Renga. Many projects in the space have really quietened down and even left due to the brutality of the bear. However, this is not the case for Renga. Today they will be releasing a drop in collaborating with Haas (yes, the F1 team). In their own words ‘This partnership is where the adrenaline-fueled world of professional motorsports collides with the innovative realm of blockchain technology and premium digital art’. The price will be 0.088ETH and mints today at 9pm (BST).
GL out there today!