First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Trades Little Changed Above $58,000

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Bitcoin was little changed, drifting mainly between $57,800 and $58,200 and trading just 0.33% higher over 24 hours at $58,250. The listlessness is a possible sign the world's largest cryptocurrency is taking a breather following its recovery from $53,800 a week ago. The broader digital asset market has risen around 0.9%, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 Index, with XRP rallying more than 5% to lead the gains. XRP was buoyed on Thursday by digital asset manager Grayscale's launch of a trust offering exposure to the token, paving the way for a possible effort to turn it into an exchange-traded fund, as it did with its BTC and ETH products.

The market value of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) has hit $12 billion, according to research by crypto exchange Binance. Bigwigs from Wall Street, including BlackRock and Fidelity, have successfully forayed into RWAs alongside several crypto-native projects such as Securitize and Polymath. Tokenized treasury funds, digital representations of the U.S. Treasury notes, have surpassed $2.2 billion in market value, with BlackRock's BUIDL boasting nearly $520 million. With a market cap of $434 million, Franklin Templeton's FBOXX is the second-largest tokenized Treasury product. Elevated interest rates in the U.S. have catalyzed the rapid growth and leadership of the tokenized Treasuries market, according to Binance Research.

Starknet token holders voted on Friday to implement staking on the layer-2 network, a proposal that’s been in the works since July, in a landmark governance election on Snapshot's new decentralized Snapshot X platform. The vote, which went live on Tuesday, passed with overwhelming support, though only 0.08% of eligible voters took part. A full 98.94% of participants voted in favor of implementing staking, while 0.45% abstained and 0.61% voted against it. The new mechanism on Starknet means that anyone holding more than 20,000 of the project's native token, STRK, will be able to stake on the network, starting in the fourth quarter of this year.

Chart of the Day

• The chart illustrates the distribution of trading activity in decentralized exchanges (DEX) over different blockchains over the past 11 months.
• Arbitrum accounts for more DEX volume than Binance Smart Chain. Still, Arbitrum's ARB is down over 60% this year, while binance coin (BNB) is up 75%.
• Source: IntoTheBlock

- Omkar Godbole

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