The Friday Focus: Issue 38

Jun 17

Welcome to our Friday newsletter. Here you find the most exciting crypto content from the previous week - curated for you by us.

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Weekly happenings

Chaos is unfolding in the crypto industry as several overleveraged market participants face financial difficulties. It started with crypto lender Celsius suspending withdrawals, followed by one of the biggest crypto VCs, Three Arrows Capital facing potential insolvency. Today the crypto lender Babel Finance also suspended withdrawals.

Regulators are keeping a keen eye on these developments, and several US states have already opened investigations into Celsius. Binance US also face legislative trouble as a class-action lawsuit was filed against the exchange for promoting UST and LUNA, which imploded in May.

Bitcoin has lost nearly one-third of its value since last Friday, fueled by the negative market impact of a higher than expected US CPI, and amplified by the following insolvency problems rippling through crypto markets. MicroStrategy is now down more than $1B on its bitcoin bet, but Michael Saylor is still bullish, saying that 'this is an ideal entry point to buy bitcoin'. El Salvador's finance minister also assured us that the bitcoin crash poses 'extremely minimal' fiscal risk to the nation-state bitcoin adopter.

Panama's process of implementing a very favorable crypto regulation has been vetoed by the country's president. Further north, NYC's mayor Eric Adams is attempting to stop the state's proposed 2-year ban on bitcoin mining using fossil fuels.

Russia's state-owned oil producer Gazpromneft plans to expand its bitcoin mining operations using stranded natural gas that otherwise would be flared. In the US, some public mining companies struggle financially, and better-capitalized companies like CleanSpark take advantage of that to cheaply acquire contracts for mining rigs.

Circle, the USDC stablecoin issuer, plans to introduce a euro-backed stablecoin. Meanwhile, Tron's stablecoin USDD, a copy of failed UST, has now stayed below its $1 peg for several days.