Société Générale, Nomura and Nasdaq are bringing crypto some positive vibes this week. That said, it’s still a busy time for underpants in this current climate. Wintermute would probably agree with that, although for a reason that’s less macro-related.

Let’s take a look at some of the latest crypto happenings of import, through a pair of glasses with both yin and yang lenses.

But first, a check-in on the leading crypto market sentiment tracker, the Fear & Greed Index, put together by altenative.me, which gathers its data from volatility readings, market volume, social media and other factors.

That’s a lot of gut-curdling, extreme fear. According to this metric, and Arcane Research, the crypto market has in fact been in a constant state of fear since April of this year – more than 170 days straight of chewed fingernails.

Can October, which is historically not such a bad time in the crypto market, pull an “Uptober” and bring back some confidence for investors and traders?

We’re not prepared to call it definitively, but the following news bites can’t hurt.

 

Bullish bites

• Société Générale is reportedly planning on expanding its crypto asset-management foray by launching custodial services for crypto fund managers. What’s Société Générale? Only the third-largest bank in France by total assets, and one of the largest investment banks in Europe.

This follows the news that BNP Paribas, France’s largest bank, plans on entering into crypto custody in a partnership with Swiss digital asset safekeeping firm Metaco – as reported by CoinDesk in July.

• Nomura Group, a Japanese investment banking giant also made a crypto-related announcement midweek. Its financial holding company, Nomura Holdings, has confirmed the launch of a crypto-focused venture capital unit based in Switzerland, called Laser Digital Holdings.

The new venture will reportedly be revealing a host of “new services and product lines” focused on digital and blockchain innovation, including decentralised finance (DeFi), centralised finance (CeFi) and “Web3 infrastructure”.

• Then there’s the big Nasdaq news, which we mentioned on Tuesday. The US stock-exchange firm is launching a new crypto-custody operation aimed at institutional investors.

• Oh, did we mention that Fidelity Digital Assets, Citadel Securities, and Charles Schwab have combined to launch a crypto exchange for both retail and institutional clients? Yep, we did. We’ve also covered a little company called BlackRock aping into the space, too.

• Huobi Global, one of the largest crypto exchanges by traded volume, has announced a partnership with Astropay, a payment processing platform, to allow customers in Latin America to purchase crypto using fiat currencies in selected countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay.

Don’t know about you, but this is just the tip of iceberg of positive crypto news that we’re seeing right now. And that includes some upwards price action from certain altcoins building a groundswell of optimistic sentiment. Coins such as XRP (+30%) and Chiliz (CHZ) (+16%), for example. Algorand (ALGO) (+11%) and, to a lesser extent, the Vasil-forking Cardano (ADA) (+6%), too.

And let’s not forget the positive aspects (e.g. reduction of carbon emissions and token issuance) of Ethereum’s Merge, despite the sell-the-news reaction the event created last week.

 

But what’s keeping the bears interested?

• Macro, mainly, as always this year. The US Federal Reserve continues to do its best to keep the risk in risk-on markets. Its latest hike is its third straight at a level of 75 basis points, reports Stockhead’s Eddy Sunarto. And Jerome “No Soft Landing For You” Powell indicated the Fed could be looking to wreck your portfolio further with either 100 or 125 bp hikes to come in the remaining months of this year.

Would hikes of that size be a bad thing for markets? Probably in the short term! A faster Band-Aid rip, rather than this excruciating, slow peel, grabbing maximum hairs, might be a better plan for markets, though.

• The Wintermute hack. It’s never fun bringing up this sort of thing, but unfortunately the crypto space has suffered another horrendous exploit.

Earlier this week, one of the industry’s largest market makers, the London-based firm Wintermute, announced it had lost US$160 million in a domain-weakness hack related to its DeFi operations.

Its founder and CEO, Evgeny Gaevoy had the tweets…

The firm remains solvent, added Gaevoy, noting it has “twice over” the amount of equity that was stolen.

It’s been a worrying development, though, as Wintermute trades billions of dollars every day, providing liquidity across multiple major crypto exchanges and trading platforms.

In a further development, Wintermute reached out to the hacker on block explorer and analytics platform Etherscan after noted “crypto sleuth” ZachXBT tracked down wallet addresses containing the stolen funds.

The market liquidity provider offered the hacker a 10% bounty if they responded within a set period of time. That period has now elapsed, and at the time of writing there’s been no confirmation on whether the hacker has accepted the US$1.6m offer.

 

Around the blocks

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