Invictus Capital: Weekly Wrap 17.09
By: Dean Adair
Tags: Financial Services, Fintech, Blockchain, Crypto, Market News

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Despite this week’s release of the much-anticipated August US inflation numbers, traditional markets were relatively quiet. While inflation is running high at over 4%, this is still in line with market expectations for this stage of the recovery. Despite being in line with expectations, bond yields climbed this week, with the markets increasingly convinced that the Fed will begin tapering the pace of QE this year. Chinese markets are also being dragged down by signs of slowing manufacturing growth and the ongoing Evergrande solvency crisis (incidentally, Tether came out this week to deny claims that they were exposed to Evergrande bonds, but importantly did not deny holding other Chinese corporate debt — which would be at risk in a contagion scenario).

The combined effects saw stock markets continue to slide, with China faring poorly, and with EU indices managing to remain essentially flat. Gold also fell under the weight of a firming dollar and rising real yields, which hamper the attractiveness of holding assets without cash flows — like gold.

In contrast, the past week has witnessed improving crypto market sentiment, with traders eying positive technical indicators; futures markets are reasonably bullish with positive funding rates on perpetual contracts having returned. While sentiment is improving, many are still cautious as Bitcoin nears the $50,000 resistance level. Some are calling for further price consolidation as we near the expiration of quarterly options next Friday. At the time of publication, Bitcoin and Ethereum were up around 3% for the week. The past week also saw sector rotation from Ethereum alternatives as frothy sentiment in the sector was curbed by outages experienced by both Solana and Arbitrum (a top contender in the Ethereum scaling wars).

Touted by many to be a potential Ethereum killer, Solana is down over 20% for the week after downtime that lasted a full day — sowing doubts as to the feasibility of a blockchain model that sacrifices some level of decentralization in exchange for scalability. This brought the crypto’s stellar run (up over 5x since July, with an over $60 billion market cap at the peak) to a grinding halt. Solana has garnered significant attention due to its scalability and low transaction costs — making it an obvious rival to Ethereum. Solana appears to have become a victim of its success as the surge in users driven in part by a booming NFT space has resulted in scaling problems emerging — though it is important to keep in mind that the project is still in beta phase. The outage is somewhat reminiscent of the teething issues experienced by Ethereum during 2017’s ICO era that saw the blockchain go through short periods of unusability.

$AVAX, the native token behind Ethereum layer-2 Avalanche, bucked the week’s trend and surged with a Thursday announcement of a $230 million funding round led by Three Arrows Capital and Polychain.

This week also saw the announcement of our foray into the DeFi space, with the announcement of our DeFi fund planned to launch early 2022, see the link to our Medium post below.

Indicators (10 September — 17 September)

The Invictus Podcast: Episode 3

Welcome to the Invictus Podcast. As builders of the new financial system, we speak to our peers and industry leaders in the blockchain space.

This week our hosts Haydn Hammond and Jason Welz speak to Zachary Cefaratti, the CEO of Dalma Capital.

Check it out here.

Invictus DeFi Fund Announcement

Invictus recently announced news of an exciting fund planned to launch early next year:

Register your interest here!

Invictus Yield Vault

The Invictus Yield Vault allows qualifying lenders the opportunity to lend a minimum amount of $50,000 BTC, ETH and/or Stablecoins for highly competitive interest rates to Invictus Alpha, Invictus Capital’s trading division.

To view our rates and contact our Vault team, please visit our landing page.

The rates recently increased!

Borrow Against Your Crypto With Peace of Mind

Crypto users can now borrow against their crypto secure in the knowledge that their investment will not get liquidated.

Invictus Alpha (the trading company of Invictus Capital) has engineered a new product that is offering users the opportunity to borrow USD-based stablecoins (or BTC and ETH) against BTC and ETH with no risk of liquidation.

Check out the articles here and here. To inquire, please complete this form.

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