The crypto markets ended the working week on a high note, with Bitcoin up 7.39% to US$21,822, while Ethereum rallied 6.61% to US$1,244 in Friday’s early hours.
Total market capitalisation across the board rose to US$961.64bln, marking a daily gain of 5.05% and a weekly gain of 9.3%.
If this market trajectory continues, we could see a breakthrough of the $1tln barrier some time next week.
Decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols continued to make decent gains in response to the ongoing barrage of controversy tainting the centralised finance (CeFi) space.
The top DeFi mover was stablecoin liquidity market Curve, which is now up over 50% across the seven-day period for a market cap edging close to the US$550mln barrier.
DeFi protocols THORChain, Aave and Convex Finance also saw strong gains.
Blockchain large caps had a strong week, with Avalanche up 25.16%, Cosmos up 24.45% and Polygon up 23.67%.
KuCoin suffered a -7% blow to its KCS token, following widespread insolvency rumours over Twitter, although the centralised exchange’s CEO Johnny Lyu has robustly denied the claims.
A former employee of Celsius Network has commenced legal action against the collapsed CeFi lender via a summons before the New York courts.
Plaintiff Jason Stone accuses Celsius of market manipulation, gambling with customers’ funds, and refusal to honour a multimillion-dollar profit-sharing agreement.
Binance has welcomed former PayPal executive Jasmine Lee as chief financial officer in the latest step towards going public in the near future.
The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange said: “Her experience at Paypal, a public Fortune 500 company... will be invaluable as we chart our path to an IPO in the coming years.”
Speaking of hires, investment firm JP Morgan has lost three of its top executives to crypto companies in the past week alone.
Among the exodus from the world’s fifth-largest bank are former managing director Eric Wragge, who joins the Algorand Foundation, and former head of ideation and digital innovation Puja Samuel, who joins the Digital Currency Group.