MARKETS

What a wild ride this week was. After three big bank failures, then Biden’s rescue, crypto and stocks got a sweet boost the last few days. Bitcoin soared 18% in 24 hours post-SVB news, even shaking off the Silvergate blues. But stocks? Not so much—they’re still feeling the burn from that Silvergate hit.

More on this below👇

FINANCE

Down go the banks, up goes Bitcoin

In case you’ve been off the grid, three big banks—Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature all went under last week.

The second largest U.S. bank failure in history: SVB, in particular, had $42 billion withdrawn in just one day, and earned the title for the second largest bank failure ever—second only to Washington Mutual’s 2008 financial crisis meltdown.

Stablecoins… not so stable? Stablecoins are meant to be tied to the U.S. dollar 1:1. When news broke that about 8% of USDC's reserve was held by SVB, the price of USDC, the so-called “safest” stablecoin under U.S. regulation, plummeted to an unprecedented $0.87. Obviously, not something that should happen to a “stable”coin.

Uncle Sam to the rescue : Fortunately, with the announcement of full deposit insurance by the U.S. government, SVB was bailed out, the price of USDC bounced back to $1, and the market started climbing.

But why the crypto pump? While there’s probably dozens of reasons why Bitcoin rallied this week, one possible explanation could be the collapse of these banking giants. When huge traditional banks like SVB and Signature fail, people freak out, worried that they won’t get their money back. What do they turn to? Something that doesn’t rely on centralized players like banks—enter cryptocurrency. Or at least that’s our take on it.

Whatever the reason, Bitcoin, Ether, and a bunch of other coins surged in the last couple of days, so that’s another win to share with your crypto-skeptic friend!

Is this just the beginning? : Three days after the SVB bankruptcy, Signature Bank was shut down, coming in after SVB as the third biggest bank failure of all time. Now things are heating up on the political front, and we'll likely have some intriguing updates on this story for you next week too. Stay tuned!

NFT

Yuga Labs makes Bitcoin even cooler (and banks $16.5M)

NFTs on Bitcoin? Basically, every famous NFT you’ve heard of until now lives on the Ethereum network or its stepchildren. Bitcoin Ordinals has made it possible to bring the concept of NFTs to live in the Bitcoin network, and it’s been getting a lot of buzz lately.

The latest to jump on this bandwagon was Yuga Labs, the cool cats behind blue-chip NFT projects like BAYC and CryptoPunks. They released their 300 Twelvefolds as Ordinal Inscriptions last week and people (literally) just couldn’t get enough of them.

Count it up. Despite the low number of items (most NFTs consist of 10,000 items), Yuga Labs raised a whopping 735.7 Bitcoins, or $16.5 million, from the auction. The highest bid for a single Twelvefold was 7.11 BTC ($160K) and the lowest bid was 2.25 BTC ($50,000).

Amidst all the hype, there’s some drama around Ordinals. 

The skeptics are like, "Hey, Bitcoin was made for payments, so using it for other stuff might mess with its value." But on the flip side, there are those who think it's cool to see new tech pushing the boundaries of what Bitcoin can do beyond just being a digital piggy bank.

You know how people call Bitcoin "digital gold"? Well, just like we use gold for bling, furniture, or whatever, the Ordinals fans think it's pretty nifty for our digital gold to find some fresh uses too.

DONUT HOLES

• Meta plans to lay off 10,000 more employees

• ChatGPT is old news, GPT-4 is here

• Facebook and Instagram shuts down its NFT project

• Legos 🤝 Epic Games = Metaverse

• Snoop Dogg’s new Web3 livestream platform

TWEET OF THE WEEK