Moonbeam News
Weekend Movers – Moonbeam (GLMR) and Quant (QNT)
Last week was a volatile one, with Bitcoin price starting above $26k only to fall under $25k. With this, it reached its lowest point since March, then climbed past $26.5k over the weekend. Throughout the week, the Bitcoin price traded in the $24,900 and $26,250 range.
As of writing, BTC is trading at $26,400 while Ether is at $1,725, which has a total crypto market cap of just above $1.1 trillion, according to CoinGecko.
The price action was driven by May's Consumer Price Index (CPI) data and discussions surrounding Monetary Policy. The Federal Reserve has decided to maintain interest rates unchanged between 5% and 5.25%, the highest rate since 2007. However, the Fed does project two additional interest rate hikes in the current cycle.
With this, “the environment appears supportive for crypto assets to start rallying again,” said Joe DiPasquale, the CEO of crypto fund manager BitBull Capita.
Still, the Fed's decision had the crypto market resume its ongoing sell-off for the past three weeks. But a big positive news in the form of BlackRock submitting a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) application has the market feeling good. The development came amidst legal actions initiated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against crypto exchange giants Binance and Coinbase.
Meanwhile, Binance's French unit is also under investigation for the “illegal” provision of digital asset services and “acts of aggravated money laundering.” Meanwhile, the exchange will quit the Netherlands after failing to secure a virtual asset service provider (VASP) license in the region.
Despite being down 2.4% in June, Bitcoin is still up 59% in 2023 so far. Meanwhile, Ether recorded an 8.1% decline in the month, while its year-to-date performance is 43.63%.
Interest in Crypto Still Strong
Last week, another piece of news came from Asia, where the Indonesian Commodities Bureau (BAPPEBTI) released an updated list of digital assets approved for trading in the country.
Interestingly, the tokens named by the US SEC as securities, like Solana (SOL), Cardano (ADA), and Decentraland (MANA), are also on this list as well as those that couldn't pass Hong Kong's 12-month track record or quality test of high liquidity.
But even more interesting is that professional investors still have an appetite for crypto. A survey by Nomura's digital assets subsidiary, Laser Digital, which was conducted in April, shows that as many as 96% of the 303 surveyed investors working for hedge funds, wealth managers, family offices, investment funds, and pension funds see digital assets as representing an investment diversification opportunity alongside traditional asset classes such as cash, fixed income, commodities, and equities.
These professional investors, which collectively manage $4.95 trillion in assets, said they were prepared to invest as much as 5% of their investments in digital assets.
About 82% of those surveyed had a positive outlook on majors: BTC and ETH. Meanwhile, an impressive 88% said they were considering investing in digital assets. However, the survey found a preference for regulated products such as ETFs.
90% of investors surveyed pointed out the need to have the backing of a large traditional financial (TradFi) institution for such an investment vehicle before they or their clients would consider putting money into it, a potentially bullish sign for BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF proposal.
“Our comprehensive study reveals that the majority of institutional investors surveyed saw a clear role for digital assets in the investment management landscape and the benefits they can bring,” said CEO Jez Mohideen.
The world's largest asset manager, BlackRock (BLK) iShares, has filed paperwork for the formation of a spot bitcoin (BTC) ETF, and if approved, it is expected to infuse fresh life into the crypto market.
BlackRock, which manages $9.5 trillion in assets, has picked the Nasdaq-listed Coinbase as custodian for its Bitcoin product. The asset manager giant further plans to use the CF Benchmarks Index, which the CME also uses to settle Bitcoin futures.
The SEC has approved Bitcoin futures ETFs in the past, but they hold Bitcoin futures contracts, and there are no spot crypto ETFs as of now. ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF (BITO) was the first Bitcoin-based ETF that started trading in October 2021 and became the fastest ETF across all categories to hit the $1 billion mark in assets under management (AUM) in history.
Many applications for launching spot crypto ETFs by asset managers, such as VanEck, Ark Invest, and Bitwise, have been filed, but the regulator has rejected them all.
Now in its application, BlackRock has included a “surveillance-sharing agreement” between exchanges, which is expected to help allay the SEC's concerns about market manipulation. This could potentially help the asset manager's application get approved. However, the final decision from the regulator won't come until February 2024.
Best Weekend Performer
This past week, the likes of Trust Wallet (30%), Akash Network (29%), Kaspa (26.7%), Sui (22.3%), GMX (16.8%), Maker (12.1%), and KuCoin (12%) emerged as the biggest gainers. Trust, Kava, and Maker are green on Monday, too, along with XRP, Stacks, Krypton DAO, FLEX Coin, and Theta Network.
Over the weekend, the crypto market went up nicely, and many coins such as Aragon (18%), SXP (16%), Kava (12%), Shiba (11.3%), Immutable X (7.7%), and Monero (5.3%) performed very well ahead of the new week.
Moonbeam (GLMR)
Among the top 200 crypto assets, the $165.5 million market cap GLMR went up the hardest, 28% over the weekend, to now trade at $0.250. With that, the coin's trading volume also surged over 300% to $38.1 million.
While the GLMR is also up in the past week by 11.1%, the coin is down by 23.74% YTD and a whopping 98.72% from its all-time high (ATH) of $19.50 hit in Jan. 2022.
GLMR is the native utility token of Moonbeam, an Ethereum-compatible parachain on the Polkadot network that makes it easy to build applications on the Polkadot blockchain.
The token is used for staking and on-chain governance, as well as to pay transaction fees and smart contract execution. Holders can also delegate their tokens to earn GLMR on the Moonbeam dApp.
Moonbeam was launched in Jan. 2022 and went on to win the second parachain auction on Polkadot. This specialized L1 mirrors Ethereum's accounts, keys, RPC, logs, subscriptions, and more.
The Moonbeam platform extends the base Ethereum feature set with additional features and helps projects expand their reach to new users and markets with a multi-chain approach. Applications built on Moonbeam make token governance, issuance schedules, economic models, or incentivizing nodes easy to execute and secure.
Last month, DEX Uniswap announced that it would soon be accessible on Moonbeam as it expands to other networks. Recently, the Prime Protocol was launched on the Moonbeam Network in an attempt to establish the first cross-chain (DeFi protocol, which allows users to manage their assets across multiple chains from a single location.
Click here to learn all about investing in Moonbeam (GLMR).
Worst Weekend Performer
While the crypto market has turned green, many coins still got dumped, with ApeCoin (14%), BiTorrent (12%), MX (10.7%), Cardano (8%), EOS (7.3%), Toncoin (7.2%), and Flow (6.9%) leading the losses this past week. Besides ApeCoin and BitTorrent, KuCoin, CyberHarbor, Blox, SafePal, Kaspa, and Pepe are also red this Monday.
Meanwhile, Blur (8.6%), BTT (8%), Fetch (5.2%), Audius (5%), Lido (4%), and Injective (3%) are some of the worst performers from this past weekend.
Quant (QNT)
Among the losses recorded by crypto assets, QNT went down the hardest among the top 200 cryptocurrencies by market cap. With a decline of 14.6% in its price, QNT now trades at $99.60, down 2.2% in the past 24 hours while managing $33 million in trading volume, which also dropped by 24.7%. The price of QNT is also down by 5.62% YTD and has lost almost 77% of its value since hitting its peak at $427.4 in Sept. 2021.
QNT is the native token of Quant Network, which aims to connect public blockchains and private networks. It allows the creation of decentralized applications (mDapps) that can simultaneously operate on multiple blockchains.
The platform has an interoperable system to connect various distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) efficiently and securely so that data can be moved across DLTs without any bottlenecks, which in turn would improve the adoption of DLTs.
For this, Quant has built an Overledger DLT Gateway that enables DLT integration without the requirement for additional infrastructure. Through this solution, users have the capacity to operate various types of DLTs and migrate data such as smart contracts, IDs, or digital assets between them.
QNT, which powers the Quant ecosystem, has three use cases; grant digital access to a particular service or application (MApp) on the Quant platform, pay annual license fees to use and participate in the network, and pay gateway operators that act as directors of transactional flow/traffic via Quant's treasury system. The tokens were issued through a token generation event (TGE) or crowd sale in April 2018. There are a total of 14.6 million QNT tokens.
Before the token's price fell hard, it pumped 20.69% going into the weekend on the back of the partnership announcement with the Bank of England (BoE) for Project Rosalind. It is a central bank digital currency (CBDC) initiative led by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the BoE.
Project Rosalind aims to explore the implementation of APIs in CBDC systems to facilitate retail payments and investigate innovative use cases for the technology. The project uses a collaborative model between the public and private sectors where the former provides the needed infrastructure, and the latter is responsible for developing consumer applications.
Quant designed and developed API functionalities for Project Rosalind that would enable programmability within the private sector.
