The Friday Focus: Issue 45
Welcome to our Friday newsletter. Here you find the most exciting crypto content from the previous week - curated for you by us.Weekly happenings in the crypto industry
(Jul 29th - Aug 5th)
Traditional finance firms continue their crypto push. BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, will now offer crypto trading on its institutional investor platform through Coinbase Prime. Financial services company Charles Schwab is the latest to launch a crypto-linked ETF. At the same time, asset manager Brevan Howard has pulled off the largest crypto hedge fund launch ever, with more than $1B in assets under management.Bitcoin-focused payment giant Block published its Q2 report, revealing falling revenues from its bitcoin segment. MicroStrategy's eternal bitcoin bull Michael Saylor moves from CEO to a chairman role to focus even more on bitcoin.The institutionally-focused derivatives market CME will soon roll out euro-denominated bitcoin and ether futures, while FTX US plans to launch options to complement its retail-focused stock trading offering.We have seen surprisingly low activity in the crypto capital markets this week. The most notable events are crypto firm Chiliz purchasing a $102M stake in FC Barcelona's Digital Studio and crypto wallet provider Ledger planning to raise $100M.2021 saw a boom of crypto SPAC mergers, but this activity has slowed drastically down in 2022. We might see at least one SPAC merger soon, as the crypto mining firm Tomorrow Crypto files to go public. Meanwhile, bitcoin miner Riot earned $9.5M in July for shutting down its machines during a Texas heatwave.Hacks continue to plague the crypto industry. This week hackers exploited blockchain bridge Nomad for $190M, the latest in a long streak of bridge hacks totaling more than $2B in 2022. Hackers also managed to breach thousands of Solana crypto wallets.If you haven’t already signed up, click here and subscribe to receive the newsletter in your inbox every Friday.
