Trakx Weekly Update: October 23

Key Crypto Market Figures

CTIs Weekly Performance

Crypto markets posted strong gains over the past week with the Trakx Crypto Top 10 CTI up 9%, bringing year-to-date returns to 37%, a substantially better performance than all the major tradfi asset classes (the best being US equities, up 13.5%). Among the Trakx family of CTIs, the best performer was the Interoperability CTI, up 16% over the previous seven days, closely followed by the Top 10 Defi CTI, up 15%. The weakest performer was the Diversifier CTI, which rose 2% over the week.

Driving the gains in both of the two best performing CTIs was a 37% rally in Chainlink, after the dev team announced they were offering nine new integrations of five Chainlink services that will be deployed across several blockchains. The new offerings stand to further facilitate Chainlink’s integration into real world asset tokenization – a trend many, including us, view as the next big thing in finance.

Also up strongly was Solana (+30%) aided by the news that the bankruptcy trustee managing the FTX estate had decided to stake 5.5mn Sol (worth around $120 million) rather than offer them for sale. As mentioned in our latest Trakx research note, FTX had a large amount of SOL on its books when it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and crypto players were worried that the liquidation of these tokens would weigh on its price. By staking such a large amount of SOL, this contributed to further easing such fears.

Although not the strongest gainer over the past seven days (+10%), Bitcoin was definitely firmly in the spotlight after Cointelegraph tweeted the SEC had approved BlackRock’s spot ETF product. The “scoop”, however, was quickly refuted by BlackRock, who stated their application was still under consideration, and Cointelegraph were forced to publish a retraction. That said, the 10% pump and dump was followed by more sustained gains when BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink, commenting after the fake news story said the rally was indicative of the pent-up interest in crypto.

He added that it also reflected flight-to-quality in light of the escalation in geopolitical tension in the Middle East that was encouraging investors to seek “refuge in assets that are considered safe havens, be it in the form of Treasuries, gold, or cryptocurrencies”. While we, and many other crypto players, have been making these arguments for quite some time, the fact that they are coming from the boss of the world’s largest asset manager, means that have much greater market impact.

Sources: Trakx, Coingecko, Alphavantage

Market Trends

• LINK Shoots up 30% in 5 Weeks as Chainlink Whales Load up But What is Driving Momentum?: CryptoPotato.
• FTX’s Massive Move: Stakes 5.5 Million Solana, Valued at $122 Million: Crypto News Flash.
• BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Says Bitcoin and Crypto Will Play a Role in Investors’ Flight to Quality: The Daily Hodl.
• Clarification on sharing false spot Bitcoin ETF news: Cointelegraph.
• Morgan Stanley believes crypto winter is over, Bitcoin halving will kick off new bull run: CryptoSlate.

Trakx News

• Ryan Shea was quoted in a roundtable interview by Walter Swift at E-Crypto News about Crypto/DeFi fund raising strategies.

Trakx CTIs Performance

Sources: Coingecko and AlphaVantage

*Return of bitcoin is calculated since 01/05/2020, while CTIs performances were calculated since their respective launch date.
**Includes simulated performance.
***The risk signal is determined according to the historical volatility level, the higher the riskier.