Bitcoin, Ether Rally Falters; Equities Advance: Markets Wrap

Ether and bitcoin slid on Wednesday following their recent week-long rally.

Bitcoin and ether fell 4% and 6%, respectively. BTC still has a return on investment (ROI) of 8.56% in the last week. Ether’s ROI is 7.86% as well.

Altcoins bled with ETH and BTC. Cardano and XRP decline following major gains on Wednesday, shedding 4.87% and 6.52% on-day. 

However, crypto’s total market capitalization stays nearing $2 trillion, according to Messari.

Signals of mainstream adoption continue as more funds offer exposure to crypto on their list of investment strategies.

• Cryptocurrency investment manager, Valkyrie, filed a proposal for a bitcoin futures exchange traded-fund (ETF) with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), Blockworks reported on Thursday. 

According to the August 11 filing, the fund would not directly invest in bitcoin, but would “seek to purchase a number of bitcoin futures contracts so that the total value of the bitcoin underlying the futures contracts” would be most if not all of the fund’s total assets.

• $400 billion investment manager, Neuberger Berman, also plans to allocate capital to bitcoin and ethereum future contracts (among others) without having to directly hold the digital asset, according to an SEC filing on Wednesday. 

In funding news, Dune Analytics, a crypto analytics platform, raised $8 million in Series A funding. Fred Wilson’s venture capital firm, Union Square Ventures, led the round. 

Funding will be used to expand staff and further the company’s mission, to make “every single interesting metric across every single crypto data source easily accessible for free,” Co-founder and CEO Fredrik Haga said. “While other data providers have pay-for-access business models at the core, we’ve flipped everything on its head and are building a community-first data tool with open collaboration and free access at its core.” 

DeFi

• Uniswap is trading at $27.94 with a total value locked of $4,826,483,281 down -6.68% in 24 hours at 4:00 pm ET. 
• Chainlink is trading at $24.84, declining -7.9% with trading volume at $1,270,418,559 in 24 hours at 4:00 pm ET.
• DeFi:ETH is 30.6% at 4:00 pm ET.

Crypto

• Bitcoin is trading around $44,448.37, down -4.09% in 24 hours at 4:00 pm ET.
• Ether is trading around $3,052.94, shedding -5.69% in 24 hours at 4:00 pm ET.
• ETH:BTC is at 0.068, down -0.78% at 4:00 pm ET.
• VIX fell -1.81% to 15.86 at 4:00 pm ET.

Major equities closed ahead on Wednesday as investors accessed producer price data and initial jobless claims. 

The producer price index (PPI), which some consider a key inflation gauge, increased 7.8% year over year, Blockworks reported. PPI data, an indicator of how much US citizens are paying for goods and services, rose the highest it has in a decade. 

Elsewhere, initial jobless claims fell from 387,000 to 375,000 last week, according to the US Labor Department. 

The Nasdaq Composite made the biggest gains (by a small margin) out of the three major indices by market close.

• Laggards in the index include Coinbase (COIN) whose shares fell 8% after posting solid earnings on Monday. COIN reported Q2 revenue at $2.23 billion, $380 million higher than Wall Street expected. The cryptocurrency trading platform, which went public in April, has increased revenue despite volatile trading sessions for the digital asset class at-large.

• Winners in the tech-heavy index were real estate firm Opendoor (OPEN) and dating app Bumble (BMBL) whose stocks hiked 24% and 7% intraday.

Equities

• The Dow was up 0.04% to 35,499.
• S&P 500 advanced 0.3% to 4,460.
• Nasdaq rose 0.35% to 14,816.

Insight

“[PPI data] underscores that commodity inflation is still quite high. It’s not really declining as much as people had hoped for. A lot of that is supply chain-related and a lot of it is related to Covid resurfacing in China,” President of Sevens Report Research, Tom Essaye said. “That’s going to keep overall inflation elevated. There’s no question about it, but at the time it is still likely temporary. I think that’s why the market is still taking it in stride.”

Commodities

• Brent crude fell to $71.15 per barrel, declined -0.42%.
• Gold advanced 0.09% to $1,754.90.

Fixed Income

• US 10-year treasury yields 1.362% as of 4:00 pm ET.

Currencies

• The US dollar strengthened 0.08%, according to the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index.

In other news…

• In other news, Singapore’s DBS Vickers brokerage, recently received approval “in principle” from the Monetary Authority of Singapore to start offering cryptocurrency services to institutional clients, Blockworks reported.

We’re watching out for…

• Investors will continue to look for tapering signals from the Federal Reserve.

That’s it for today’s markets wrap. I’ll see you back here tomorrow.

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