Month: February 2022

  • Small Cap Index Lead Gains In February, But What Is Bitcoin Doing?

    Small Cap Index Lead Gains In February, But What Is Bitcoin Doing?

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    Altcoins have been bigger winners than bitcoin in the recent recovery. Even though the latter led the recovery, the smaller cap coins have been making all of the waves in the space, outperforming other indexes and bitcoin included. All of this has pointed to an altcoin season after a purported ‘crypto winter’ and the gains recorded so far in February are additional proof of this.

    Small Cap Index Takes The Lead

    The whole of the crypto market had suffered from the downtrend that began in December. However, the second week of February had come to some reprieve with double-digit gains across bitcoin and all of the indexes. The small, mid, and large cap indexes have all returned gains so far, but the small cap has taken the leading, showing increased bullish momentum in the smaller cap altcoins.

    Related Reading | Bitcoin Steadies Above $45k, US Inflation Comes In At 7.5% Year Over Year

    Just two weeks into February, the small cap index has seen gains as high as 19%. This is a huge step-up for the index after it closed out January as the worst-performing index, seeing accelerated losses compared to its counterparts. The tables have now turned as the gains for the small cap index have been 4% higher than all of the others.

    Small cap index returns highest gains

    Small cap index returns highest gains | Source: Arcane Research

    Bitcoin, the mid cap, and the large cap index all returned doubled-digit gains for January. Most of the gains recorded were from a single week that saw prices surge across the crypto market.

    What About Bitcoin?

    Bitcoin has no doubt also returned impressive gains for its investors in the same time period. It may not be as high as the small cap index but still remains one of the top gainers n the space. It follows the move of the market sentiment from extreme negativity back into the positive. Momentum picking up has also helped in this case.

    Related Reading | JPMorgan Puts Bitcoin At $150,000 In The Long-Term, But What About Its ‘Fair Value’?

    The Digital asset is now trading above its 20-day moving average but remains low on the 50-day average. At its current point, the next resistance for the asset to break lies at $45,240. However, a break above a second resistance point at $46,712 is what will really solidify its entrance into another bear rally. Until then, it will likely continue to hover between $43,000 and $44,000.

    Bitcoin price chart from TradingView.com

    BTC starts another recovery trend | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com

    On the support side, bitcoin’s break below $43,000 will see its next support at $42,790. Not a far-off point, but if it does not hold then another decline to $40,000 may be imminent.

    Nevertheless, the digital asset has shown strong sell signals around the 50 and 100-day moving averages. Unless buyers make significant headway in holding up the price of bitcoin, bears are more likely to take over, pulling bitcoin into another stretched-out downtrend.

    Featured image from Forbes, charts from Arcane Research and TradingView.com

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  • Coinbase Removes Crypto ‘Rug Pull’ Links from Its Platform

    Coinbase Removes Crypto ‘Rug Pull’ Links from Its Platform

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    Coinbase Global, a major cryptocurrency exchange in the US, announced on Wednesday that it has removed ‘how to buy’ instructions for at least three crypto tokens which have been identified as ‘rug pulls’ that could make investors lose their money.

    The three said tokens include ‘DeFi100’, ‘Mercenary’, and the ‘SQUID token’. Last week, Reuters media outlets brought attention to the tokens on Coinbase sales pages that were suspected to be rug pulls.

    Jaclyn Sales, a spokesperson at Coinbase, stated yesterday that the links associated with such tokens were removed from the crypto exchange’s website after they were brought into the limelight by Reuters.

    CoinMarketCap was identified to have automatically created the sales pages. Since its establishment, CoinMarketCap has had the goal of collecting all of the data about the crypto space and putting them in one, online location, so that anyone, anywhere can find out more about any particular crypto coin they are interested in.

    However, Shaun Heng, the Vice-President of Growth and Operations at CoinMarketCap, talked about the ‘crypto tokens’ in question, and stated that CoinMarket did not create the pages as there was no partnership with Coinbase.

    So, Coinbase pulled down the pages that featured ‘DeFi100’ ‘Mercenary’, and ‘Squid Game’ crypto tokens on its website.

    In addition, the Coinbase spokesperson said that the
     
     exchange 
    plans to conduct an upgrade to safeguard its auto-created webpages.

    Crypto Funds Go Missing

    Coinbase is the most popular consumer-facing cryptocurrency exchange in the US. Formed in 2012, the firm allows users to hold, purchase and sell crypto coins like
     
     Bitcoin 
    . The online platform has gained much popularity and turned itself into a reliable exchange for mainstream crypto investors. However, Coinbase said, as a disclaimer, that its online pages offering tips on investing in tokens are informational rather than investment advice and that the exchange is not liable for ‘errors and delays’.

    While the popularity of crypto adoption has significantly grown, scams in the industry have continued to make headlines. Chainalysis research company revealed that scams scooped over $7.7 billion from investors last year. The most common form of scam was the ‘rug pull’, where developers launch a scam project, attract investors and then abandon the project, escaping with the investors’ funds. Last year, Squid Game crypto token crashed to zero after the developers did a rug pull that robbed over $3.38 million from investors.

    Coinbase Global, a major cryptocurrency exchange in the US, announced on Wednesday that it has removed ‘how to buy’ instructions for at least three crypto tokens which have been identified as ‘rug pulls’ that could make investors lose their money.

    The three said tokens include ‘DeFi100’, ‘Mercenary’, and the ‘SQUID token’. Last week, Reuters media outlets brought attention to the tokens on Coinbase sales pages that were suspected to be rug pulls.

    Jaclyn Sales, a spokesperson at Coinbase, stated yesterday that the links associated with such tokens were removed from the crypto exchange’s website after they were brought into the limelight by Reuters.

    CoinMarketCap was identified to have automatically created the sales pages. Since its establishment, CoinMarketCap has had the goal of collecting all of the data about the crypto space and putting them in one, online location, so that anyone, anywhere can find out more about any particular crypto coin they are interested in.

    However, Shaun Heng, the Vice-President of Growth and Operations at CoinMarketCap, talked about the ‘crypto tokens’ in question, and stated that CoinMarket did not create the pages as there was no partnership with Coinbase.

    So, Coinbase pulled down the pages that featured ‘DeFi100’ ‘Mercenary’, and ‘Squid Game’ crypto tokens on its website.

    In addition, the Coinbase spokesperson said that the
     
     exchange 
    plans to conduct an upgrade to safeguard its auto-created webpages.

    Crypto Funds Go Missing

    Coinbase is the most popular consumer-facing cryptocurrency exchange in the US. Formed in 2012, the firm allows users to hold, purchase and sell crypto coins like
     
     Bitcoin 
    . The online platform has gained much popularity and turned itself into a reliable exchange for mainstream crypto investors. However, Coinbase said, as a disclaimer, that its online pages offering tips on investing in tokens are informational rather than investment advice and that the exchange is not liable for ‘errors and delays’.

    While the popularity of crypto adoption has significantly grown, scams in the industry have continued to make headlines. Chainalysis research company revealed that scams scooped over $7.7 billion from investors last year. The most common form of scam was the ‘rug pull’, where developers launch a scam project, attract investors and then abandon the project, escaping with the investors’ funds. Last year, Squid Game crypto token crashed to zero after the developers did a rug pull that robbed over $3.38 million from investors.

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  • Bitcoin Steadies Above $45k, US Inflation Comes In At 7.5% Year Over Year

    Bitcoin Steadies Above $45k, US Inflation Comes In At 7.5% Year Over Year

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    Bitcoin price recovered to within $45k after sliding below $44k as analysts indicated probable swings for the flagship cryptocurrency. The release of US inflation rates seems to have had no effect on the king cryptocurrency.

    Bitcoin’s price rose past a crucial barrier overnight Wednesday, reaching $45,300, before falling as the broader market dipped in early trades after US markets opened.

    Bitcoin Unaffected By Inflation Rates

    Over the last 24 hours, BTC/USD has moved in a range of $43,402.81 – $45,398.91, exhibiting high volatility. Trading volume has climbed by 16.21% to $28.8 billion, while the overall market cap is around $860.47 billion dollars, leading in a 42% market dominance.

    As investors analyzed new US inflation data, which came in at 7.5% year-over-year vs an expected 7.3%, the earlier decline took shape. Risky assets like crypto and equities have reacted negatively, with all eyes on the Federal Reserve’s upcoming rate hike in March.

    Bitcoin

    BTC/USD steadies above $45k. Source: TradingView

    Despite being 0.2% higher than predicted, rising inflation did not have the same favorable impact on risk assets like Bitcoin as it had in recent months.

    The S&P 500 fell 0.23%, the Nasdaq composite fell 0.18%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average remained barely above the flat line.

    According to analysts, the Federal Reserve may now have additional motivation to begin raising interest rates sooner due to the speed of year-over-year price increases.

    Crypto trader and analyst Michael van de Poppe observed:

    The Consumer Price Index (CPI) results for the U.S.A. are coming in at 7.5% year-over-year, the expectations were 7.3% year-over-year.$DXY is shooting up and risk-on assets are dropping down like Bitcoin & equities.Likelihood that the FED will start rate hikes in March.”

    However, for economist Lyn Alden, it was cash savers who had been losing the most from inflation. she noted alongside a chart:

    bitcoin and inflation rates

    U.S. CPI vs. effective federal funds rate chart. Source: Lyn Alden/ Twitter

    “Official inflation currently has its biggest gap over short-term interest rates since 1951. People holding cash in a bank or T-bills over the past year lost over 7% of their purchasing power.”

    Related article | Investors Take Refuge In Bitcoin As Inflation Rises

    BTC Will Hit $50k In Short term

    The Fed will be put to the test here, as they had hoped for a steady tightening cycle rather than a hasty tightening that would appear to be a policy blunder. The political pressure on the Biden administration and Democrats will increase as core inflation rises over the Fed’s objective and real average hourly earnings fall. Although November is still a long way off, this inflation report shows that price hikes are everywhere, and there is rising opposition to new fiscal stimulus measures that would exacerbate pricing pressures.

    As investors predict that pricing pressures may be peaking just before the Fed’s March policy meeting, US stocks have regained most of their inflation-related losses.

    Given the rise in global bond yields, Bitcoin prices are holding up well. Bitcoin’s optimal future environment is risk appetite, which may be tough to achieve until after the Fed’s first couple of rate hikes. Institutional investors in Bitcoin are focusing on Treasuries because the momentum trade appears to be quite simple. For the short term, Bitcoin appears to be settling in between $40,000 and $50,000.

    Cameron Winklevoss, co-founder of Gemini, feels Bitcoin is still the best inflation hedge, corroborating thoughts from the crypto community and even mainstream investors.

    Related article | Bitcoin Aims For $48K? BTC Reacts Upward To U.S. Inflation Report

    Featured image from iStockPhoto, Charts from TradingView.com



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  • 2022 Developer Grants Call for Applications | by Coinbase | Feb, 2022

    2022 Developer Grants Call for Applications | by Coinbase | Feb, 2022

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    By: Trent Fuenmayor, Program Manager, Coinbase Giving

    Coinbase’s mission is to increase economic freedom in the world through the crypto-economy. To achieve this, it is essential to develop common infrastructure that is transparent, safe, secure, and benefits all participants. The open source community has provided critical support for Crypto development, with some support from donations from industry organizations and academic institutions. Our goal is to similarly support developers who are committed to growing and maintaining the Crypto ecosystem.

    We launched our Crypto Community Fund in 2020 to aid this community effort, and in 2022 we’ve allocated up to $5M through Coinbase Giving, our philanthropic arm, to expand the program. Today, we have officially opened applications for our 2022 developer grants focused on blockchain developers who contribute directly to a blockchain codebase or researchers producing white papers addressing one or more of the following themes:

    Eligibility and Preferences

    Process

    We will consider these applications on a rolling basis. Proposals will be shortlisted by current crypto developers and important community members. Coinbase will make the final decision.

    We encourage all blockchain developers and prospective developers to apply for a Crypto Community Fund grant here.

    This website contains links to third-party websites or other content for information purposes only (“Third-Party Sites”). The Third-Party Sites are not under the control of Coinbase, Inc., and its affiliates (“Coinbase”), and Coinbase is not responsible for the content of any Third-Party Site, including without limitation any link contained in a Third-Party Site, or any changes or updates to a Third-Party Site. Coinbase is not responsible for webcasting or any other form of transmission received from any Third-Party Site. Coinbase is providing these links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by Coinbase of the site or any association with its operators.

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  • UN approves NFT standards initiative led by Tencent

    UN approves NFT standards initiative led by Tencent

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    Chinese entertainment conglomerate Tencent has been approved by the United Nations to lead a project exploring the creation of a standard technical and security framework for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) .

    The project, dubbed a “technical framework for DLT-based digital collection services” will be the world’s first U.N.-approved standards initiative for NFTs, according to state-owned local media.

    The U.N. agency for information and communication technologies, The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) approved the project, which is expected to complete an initial draft by the end of 2022, according to a report from the South China Morning Post.

    Currently, any recommendations advised by the ITU only become mandatory and enforceable when nations adopt them as law.

    “The international standard aims to specify the technical architecture, technical flows, functional requirements, and security requirements for blockchain-based digital collectibles,” wrote Tencent in a statement released on Tuesday.

    “It could help drive a consensus and common understanding around the world on the formation of a technical framework for digital collection services.”

    Meanwhile, the Chinese government is in the process of developing its own state-backed Blockchain Services Network (BSN).

    This will help the Chinese Government to support the deployment of NFT projects unrelated to cryptocurrency, which it banned once again in Sep 2021.

    Tencent will collaborate with a number of other companies on the initiative, including Alibaba affiliate Ant Group, The Chinese Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and Zhejiang Lab.

    Related: China aims to separate NFTs from crypto via new blockchain infrastructure

    In China NFTs are often referred to as “digital collectibles” in order to avoid criticism from the anti-crypto media and government. For this reason, Chinese NFT-creators tend to avoid public or decentralized blockchains such as Ethereum or Solana, opting to create their collectibles on permissioned blockchains.

    Despite the country’s apprehension for crypto, it’s clearly very keen on exploring potential use cases for blockchain technology.

    At the end of last month, China announced the commencement of a national plan to expedite blockchain development and innovation across key areas including manufacturing, energy, government data sharing and services, law enforcement, taxation, criminal trials, inspection and cross-border finance.

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  • Bitcoin (BTC) Leads Weekly Crypto Inflows

    Bitcoin (BTC) Leads Weekly Crypto Inflows

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    The institutional crypto inflows rebounded last week after Bitcoin-related products attracted significant investment. In total, investors poured nearly $71 million into BTC investment products.

    Last week, digital asset investment products saw inflows worth $85 million. In the past three weeks, total institutional inflows in crypto products have reached $133 million. Apart from Bitcoin, a wide range of altcoins have gained the attention of institutional investors recently.

    Solana, Polkadot and Cardano witnessed inflows totaling $2.4 million, $2.2 million and $1.1 million, respectively. Digital asset Terra saw a massive spike in inflows last week. Despite the rising popularity of BTC, SOL, DOT, ADA and LUNA among institutional investors, Ethereum saw a bearish trend with outflows totaling $8.5 million in the previous week.

    “Digital asset investment products saw inflows totaling US$85m last week, marking the 3rd week of inflows totaling US$133m, suggesting continued positive sentiment amongst investors. Total assets under management (AuM) now total US$52.4bn with January 24th marking the low point in the most recent run of negative sentiment. While Europe has seen inflows (US$10.3m), the majority has been from the Americas, particularly Brazil and Canada (US$75m),” CoinShares noted in its report.

    Bitcoin AUM

    Due to the market dip in December 2021 and January 2022, the overall value of global Bitcoin assets under management have declined substantially. According to the report from CoinShares, the total value of global BTC AUM reached $34.4 billion last week. Ethereum came in the second spot with almost $13 billion worth of assets under management.

    “Bitcoin continues to lead the inflows with US$71m last week, the largest since early December with this 3-week run of inflows totaling US$108m. Volumes in Bitcoin investment products remained low last week at US$1.8bn versus US$3.4bn the previous week,” CoinShares added.

    Yesterday, BTC jumped above the price level of $44,300 for the first time since 13 January 2022.

    The institutional crypto inflows rebounded last week after Bitcoin-related products attracted significant investment. In total, investors poured nearly $71 million into BTC investment products.

    Last week, digital asset investment products saw inflows worth $85 million. In the past three weeks, total institutional inflows in crypto products have reached $133 million. Apart from Bitcoin, a wide range of altcoins have gained the attention of institutional investors recently.

    Solana, Polkadot and Cardano witnessed inflows totaling $2.4 million, $2.2 million and $1.1 million, respectively. Digital asset Terra saw a massive spike in inflows last week. Despite the rising popularity of BTC, SOL, DOT, ADA and LUNA among institutional investors, Ethereum saw a bearish trend with outflows totaling $8.5 million in the previous week.

    “Digital asset investment products saw inflows totaling US$85m last week, marking the 3rd week of inflows totaling US$133m, suggesting continued positive sentiment amongst investors. Total assets under management (AuM) now total US$52.4bn with January 24th marking the low point in the most recent run of negative sentiment. While Europe has seen inflows (US$10.3m), the majority has been from the Americas, particularly Brazil and Canada (US$75m),” CoinShares noted in its report.

    Bitcoin AUM

    Due to the market dip in December 2021 and January 2022, the overall value of global Bitcoin assets under management have declined substantially. According to the report from CoinShares, the total value of global BTC AUM reached $34.4 billion last week. Ethereum came in the second spot with almost $13 billion worth of assets under management.

    “Bitcoin continues to lead the inflows with US$71m last week, the largest since early December with this 3-week run of inflows totaling US$108m. Volumes in Bitcoin investment products remained low last week at US$1.8bn versus US$3.4bn the previous week,” CoinShares added.

    Yesterday, BTC jumped above the price level of $44,300 for the first time since 13 January 2022.

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  • Bitcoin Settles Above $43,000, But What Does The 4-Year Cycle Say?

    Bitcoin Settles Above $43,000, But What Does The 4-Year Cycle Say?

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    Bitcoin has already lost its footing above $44K after breaking the coveted point to much fanfare. The downtrend has not been significant in any way but the digital asset could still end up losing more ground before the end of the trading day. Nevertheless, it has been a good run for bitcoin coming out of the weekend. As the cryptocurrency has made its bottom above $43,000, what could be expected going forward?

    Bitcoin In Four-Year Cycles

    As bitcoin has settled above $43,000, looking at other metrics to figure out where the digital asset may be headed has become imperative. In this report, we take a look at bitcoin through 4-year cycles and what it has often meant for the asset. Four years is important to the movement of bitcoin given that things like halvings happen in such timeframes. But for this, we take a look at the monthly EMA50 and how it works as the last correctional support before takeoff.

    Related Reading | TA: Bitcoin is Surging, Why Bulls Could Aim More Upsides

    The monthly exponential moving average is calculated using the past 50 periods. It is used to obtain the average price at which an asset has been acquired over a 50-day period. Thus, making it a widely used support level.

    Over the years, at four-year intervals, the monthly EMA50 has served to show the final correction support for bitcoin. The first time was between 2009 to 2013, a four-year period that ended with the monthly EMA50 working as the final correction support. The same happens between 2013 and 2017, 2017 and 2021, with the next happening between 2021 and 2025.

    For each of these, the monthly EMA50 has always stopped highly than the previous four-year cycle. Likewise, the price of bitcoin has not gone below this point.

    If this stays true, then bitcoin is likely forming its support higher than $30,000. Continuing on, this trend would put the price of the digital asset as high as $220,000 over the next four years.

    bitcoin chart

    EMA50 marks four-year cycles | Source: TradingView.com

    BTC On The Charts

    Long-term, bitcoin shows tremendous promise. With adoption expected to rise and supply on the decline, it would impose scarcity on the asset, making it even more valuable. However, in the short term, BTC continues to struggle price-wise.

    Related Reading | The Bear Signal That Suggests Another Bitcoin Crash Is Coming

    After fighting its way out of a bear trend, it remains up to the bulls to pull out from underneath the bears. Market sentiment is getting better but still remains mostly negative, making investors wary of putting more money into the market.

    Bitcoin is now trading in the $43,500 territory at the time of this writing. It lost about $2K after bursting through $45,000 in the early hours of Tuesday. But it has begun to recover after falling near $43,000.

    Bitcoin price chart from TradingView.com

    BTC slips to $43K | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com
    Featured image from Tokeneo, charts from TradingView.com

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  • Quantitative Crypto Insight: an analysis of triangular arbitrage transactions in Uniswap v2 | by Coinbase | Feb, 2022

    Quantitative Crypto Insight: an analysis of triangular arbitrage transactions in Uniswap v2 | by Coinbase | Feb, 2022

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    Coinbase

    By Indra Rustandi, Nabil Benbada, Yao Ma

    In traditional finance, an arbitrage is an opportunity to make a positive gain with virtually no risk involved by taking advantage of pricing discrepancies that are present in the markets. These pricing discrepancies are an indication that some inefficiencies are present in the markets.

    Arbitrageurs will exploit these opportunities to make a profit and thus remove the pricing discrepancies, bringing back the markets to a more efficient state.

    In FX markets, a typical arbitrage trade is the triangular arbitrage which involves at least 3 currencies:

    This arbitrage would take advantage of any deviation in price between the above three pairs.

    Here, in an efficient market, we should always have:

    In this example:

    Here, any deviation from this equilibrium will lead to an arbitrage opportunity. For example, if Euro was cheaper relative to USD.

    Uniswap is a decentralized exchange venue that allows two kinds of activities:

    1. Provide liquidity of a given pair of ERC-20 tokens
    2. Swap one ERC-20 token for another ERC-20 token

    For the remainder of the post, we will focus on the second version of Uniswap (Uniswap v2), first deployed in May 2020. And since we are interested in triangular arbitrage, let us first explain how a swap is priced.

    Uniswap belongs to the category of “constant-product market”. In this category, the product of the liquidities of the two ERC-20 tokens in the pair of interest is constant:

    For illustration purposes, say token A is WETH while token B is USDC, and we have in the WETH-USDC pool 1,000 WETH and 3,000,000 USDC. Then,

    Assume now that we want to swap 1 WETH to USDC, how much USDC can we obtain? Our trade would increase the liquidity for WETH to 1,001 WETH. In order to maintain the constant product, we have:

    So the amount of USDC that we receive in the swap is:

    So in our swap, we receive an effective WETH/USDC rate of 2,997.

    A few things to note here:

    • This example doesn’t include fees to focus on the pricing.
    • The effective WETH/USDC rate can change when we swap a different amount of WETH. This is called slippage. In this example, the effective price “slipped” by 3 USDC or 0.1%.
    • Our WETH/USDC rate is purely determined by the liquidities available in the venue and is not dependent on how WETH/USDC is quoted on other venues. This is yet another possible source of arbitrage, albeit one that is beyond the scope of this post.

    Based on the discussion so far on both triangular arbitrage and Uniswap, a natural question is how prevalent triangular arbitrage opportunities are in Uniswap v2. We try to answer this question indirectly by analyzing Uniswap v2 swap trades that take advantage of triangular arbitrage opportunities. More specifically, we focus on the following characteristics:

    • All the trades are executed in the same transaction to reduce the risk of prices moving and affecting the arbitrage opportunities.
    • All the trades involve only Uniswap v2. With this, we miss triangular arbitrage trades that involve multiple venues (e.g. simultaneous swaps on Uniswap and Sushiswap).
    • All the tokens involved in the trades offset except for one token: the gain token, for which the sender will gain more at the end of the trade series.

    After analyzing over 68 million Uniswap v2 swaps since Uniswap v2 was deployed until the end of 2021, we found 1,371,122 swaps grouped in 429,315 transactions taking advantage of triangular arbitrage opportunities in Uniswap v2.

    On a monthly basis, we see a pronounced peak in October 2020, while the number of trades taking advantage of triangular arbitrage opportunities have been decreasing since. There are many factors that might have caused this (rise of competing DEXes, arbitrage opportunities mechanically decreasing due to the market becoming more efficient…). We are currently exploring these leads to try and explain this behavior.

    Next, we see which tokens are most often used as gain tokens. WETH is the clear front runner here with 417,229 trades. 2nd-4th place are occupied by stablecoins: USDC, USDT, DAI. In total, we identified 123 distinct tokens used as gain tokens, but the top four tokens account for more than 99% of the trades.

    How many legs were typically used to trade these opportunities? A majority of these trades were done using three legs. Quite a significant number also involved up to 6 legs.

    How profitable are these trades? For WETH, a high proportion of the 417,229 trades involving WETH are profitable (about 94% when accounting for gas). The most profitable trade gained around 280 WETH, but the average and median gas-adjusted gains are much smaller (average: 0.08 WETH, median: 0.012 WETH).

    For USDC, the trade with the most gain accumulated more than 14,000 USDC, but on average, the gain was around 97 USDC, while the median gain was almost 28 USDC.

    Let us now consider the individual addresses (without revealing any specific ones) behind these trades. We found that these trades were initiated by 4,784 unique addresses, the most active of which initiated more than 16,000 trades. In total, 94 unique addresses initiated more than 1,000 trades each. When using WETH as the gain token, the most profitable address managed to accumulate more than 1,100 WETH as a result of its trades; in the case of USDC as the gain token, the most profitable address accumulated almost 35,000 in USDC.

    Last but not least, let us now discuss at a high level how these triangular arbitrage opportunities are detected and how the corresponding trades are executed.

    We need to monitor the prices, likely using an automated process, in the Uniswap v2 pools. Given the prices for various pairs, an algorithm can run a search to see which combinations of pairs give rise to triangular arbitrage opportunities, potentially also incorporating opportunities identified from pending transactions in the mempool.

    Once opportunities are identified, then we move to the execution aspect. One key consideration is minimizing slippage, and it naturally leads toward having the swaps being executed within a single transaction. Another consideration is avoiding front-running or sandwich attacks, for which Flashbots Auction can be beneficial.

    Here, we have just scratched the surface in terms of understanding and maximizing the potential of decentralized finance. We, as part of the Data Science Quantitative Research team, aim to get a good holistic understanding of this space from a quantitative perspective that can be used to drive new Coinbase products. We are looking for people that are passionate in this effort, so if you are interested in Data Science and in particular Quantitative Research in crypto, come join us.

    The analysis makes use of the Uniswap v2 subgraph made available through the Graph Protocol. Thanks to Luke Youngblood and Xavier Lu for their contribution and feedback.

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  • 4 key takeaways from KPMG Pulse of Fintech Report

    4 key takeaways from KPMG Pulse of Fintech Report

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    As Bitcoin (BTC) and altcoins took a break from reaching new all-time highs, the market sentiment seems gloomy since the start of 2022. However, while the market seems to be sleeping, its trajectory shows that there’s more to look forward to in the coming months.

    Multinational professional services network KMPG published its biannual Pulse of Fintech report, where the firm tracks and analyzes developments and investments within the financial technology sector. The report highlighted the most notable developments in major regions like the Americas, Asia Pacific and EMEA, and pointed out the “surging interest” in crypto and blockchain in the past year.

    While the scope of the report covers a broader context, crypto and blockchain remained as one of the key topics. Here are the main takeaways from the Pulse of Fintech report by KPMG.

    Over $30 billion in investments entered crypto and blockchain

    From the $5.5 billion amassed in 2020, investments in the crypto and blockchain space rose to more than $30.2 billion in 2021. This shows that more companies have recognized that crypto and its technologies have potential roles to play in modern financial systems.

    Brian Heaver, KPMG US Managing Director thinks that 2021 is very significant for crypto when it comes to adoption.

    “There’s an incredible number of companies trying to do a lot of things in the crypto and blockchain space right now — and while we don’t know where all their efforts are going to land, there’s a ton of curiosity and interest in the possibilities.”

    Regtech focused on crypto despite the shift in Asia-Pacific

    Despite the outright crypto ban in China, technologies that help regulate crypto have been “a relatively hot area of investment” according to KPMG. The firm predicts that there may be more investments to come in regulation technology (regtech) solutions focusing on cryptocurrencies in the future.

    This may also make its way to Europe according to KPMG International’s Global Head of Regtech, Fabiano Gobbo.

    “While the US continued to attract the vast majority of investments in regtech, Europe is well-positioned to see growth heading into 2022.”

    Related: Global crypto adoption could ‘soon hit a hyper-inflection point’: Wells Fargo report

    Blockchain use cases are growing

    In 2021, as investors started to become more familiar with blockchain, interest in its various use cases has also grown. According to KPMG, the “universe of blockchain applicability” has expanded in 2021. The year spurred more interest in a wide range of blockchain applications, including multi-jurisdictional blockchain uses cases for data, research and analysis.

    Because of this, the firm also predicts that crypto will attract “investors of all types” including retail investors as well as corporate and institutional investors because of the increase in use cases.

    Singapore-based crypto investments grew more than tenfold

    As previously reported by Cointelegraph, crypto investments in Singapore grew very significantly in 2021. The global crypto hub recorded a whopping $1.48 billion in crypto-focused investments last year. This wildly surpasses its previous record in 2020 which was $110 million. The region’s crypto investments accounted for 5 percent of the total global investments in crypto in 2021. It also makes up a third of all investments in the fintech sector throughout the country.

    KPMG Singapore’s Head of Financial Services Advisory Anton Ruddenklau thinks that Singapore attracted investors that were previously looking into China, but are pushed away because of the crypto bans.

    “Singapore and India could be big winners on the investment front as investors and companies that might have gone to China look for opportunities elsewhere in the region.”