If no news is good news, then it’s been a positive week for the crypto markets.
Global market capitalisation traded within a tight range, with Friday’s opening value of US$1.08tn a slight 1.8% down from Monday.
Bitcoin dropped by 1.4% throughout the week while Ethereum followed suit by shedding 1.5%.
There are signs that the market is stabilising after a prolonged period of intense volatility, according to Bloomberg’s senior commodity strategist Mike McGlone, who suggested that Bitcoin could phase into a “directional tilt” akin to US Treasury Bonds.
Daily movers
Today’s biggest gainer was the Flow blockchain, having soared nearly 40% in the past 24 hours to bring its market cap up to US$2.7bn.
Developed by Dapper Labs, Flow’s rally coincided with a major partnership announcement with Instagram.
The Waves blockchain saw a 9.5% rise while Trust Wallet’s TWT token added 8.2%.
Ethereum scaling solution Optimising was among the biggest daily losers, having shed 4.6% from its market cap, while Filecoin, THORChain and lending platform Nexo also sustained moderate losses.
DeFi freakout
Total value locked (TVL) in the decentralised finance (DeFi) space plummeted by over 20%, according to go-to market tracker DeFi Llama, but it’s not as bad as it sounds.
In a bizarre turn of events uncovered by CoinDesk, it turns out that Ian Macalinao, chief architect of DeFi protocol Saber, had been using a “double-count” exploit designed to artificially inflate the protocol’s TVL by up to five times.
The news has forced DeFi Llama to reevaluate how TVL is counted.
In like-for-like terms, TVL across the DeFi space fell only a fraction this week, from US$68.75bn to US$68.71bn.
In the headlines
In other news, ex-Coinbase manager Ishan Wahi has pleaded not guilty of insider trading charges brought by the US government.
Wahi was arrested by the FBI in July after attempting to flee the US to India.
Crypto project MoonDAO has successfully sent a man to space by raising funds for a seat on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin NS-22 rocket.
Just a small part of the 5,000+ MoonDAO community that made this all happen!! ❤️❤️
???? @CobyCotton is an astronaut now thanks to the power of $MOONEY!!! LFG!!! pic.twitter.com/VnaNgEGamk
— MoonDAO (????,????) (@OfficialMoonDAO) August 4, 2022
The lucky astronaut? YouTube personality and member of Basketball “trick shot” collective Dude Perfect.