Hong Kong Government Issues The First Tokenized Green Bond, Legalizing Crypto Trading A Possibility by 2H23

17 Feb 2023, Friday

3:32 AM

Hong Kong Government Issues The First Tokenized Green Bond, Legalizing Crypto Trading A Possibility by 2H23

BTC

ETH

S&P Futures 500

$23,694.25

$1,653.00

$4,089.75

(-3.66%)

 (-2.03%)

(-1.75%)

Note: All percentages shown above are referenced to the previous business work day's 09:00 (GMT+8)

GM Treehouser 🌳

Welcome to our Treehouse Daily newsletter (previously known as The Canopy Collective), where Treehouse brings you financial news and insights free daily! We believe you’ll find this helpful.

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January 2023 Market Recap

Our Daily View

What We Are Covering Today

  • Investors lines up for Credit Suisse’s First Boston spinout; Jobless claims in the US stay under the threshold (more in Macro & TradFi)
  • Hong Kong issues its first blockchain-based green bond with rumors of further policy acceptance later this year; Lido launches new incentive program with $OP (more in DeFi & CeFi)
  • BUSD hit with $550M redemption and $1B of exchange outflow (more in On-Chain)
  • IV climbs across the curve as RV follows in kind (more in Crypto Derivatives)
  • BTC and ETH fall after unexpectedly strong inflation data (more in Crypto Technical Analysis)

Macro & TradFi

Credit Suisse’s Michael Klein, appointed to run the First Boston spinout last year as a part of the major cost cutting program, pledged that the new investment bank entity will be profitable. Those who were present in the town hall will also become shareholders of this new venture including the many investors that are lined up to fund this spinout.

In addition, the new report has suggested that the number of Americans who filed for unemployment benefits remained below 200,000 for the 5th week, suggesting a stable US labor market. However, economists have warned that hiring is still bound to slow with more layoffs as the Fed raises interest rates to fight inflation.

Overall, US markets fell yesterday with SPX and DJIA down by 1.38% and 1.26% respectively.

DeFi & CeFi

  • Web 3 Securities Company Stelo Labs closes $6 million seed round by a16z
    zkSync 2.0 mainnet reaches a new milestone which starts to allow registered dApps to deploy and test
  • Evan Cheng, CEO of Mysten Labs - developer of Sui Network, is raising $100 million for a web 3.0 fund
  • Ironblocks, a blockchain security platform, raised $7 million in seed funding
  • HK Government launches its first tokenized green fund
  • State of Wyoming passes a new bill that prevents forced disclosure of private keys in any legal proceedings
  • Lido Finance launches new incentive programmed to encourage layer 2 adoption
  • Hong Kong is rumored to make crypto trading legal for all citizens starting on June 1st

The Hong Kong government has announced the first successful offering of $800 million HKD of tokenized green bond. Priced at 4.05%, this bond was distributed by a 4-bank syndicate on a private blockchain network. This offering demonstrates the Hong Kong government’s flexibility and willingness to adopt innovative solutions. On another note, rumors have been spreading on Twitter that Hong Kong will be allowing all citizens to trade cryptocurrencies legally starting from June 1st of this year. However, there has been no public announcement yet from the government side.

Elsewhere, in an effort to improve liquidity for Lido’s stETH on layer-2 networks, a new incentive program is in place to encourage migration. Through this program, 1 million OP tokens were offered from Optimism as rewards for users who choose to move their staked ETH to Optimism.

Lastly, the capital market’s interest in Web 3.0 continues with multiple deals announced yesterday by various companies in their seed stages. Evan Cheng, CEO of Mysten Labs, is also reported to be raising $100 million for a new Web 3.0 fund to help accelerate the space.

On-Chain

Looking on-chain, @cryptoquant has provided an update on BUSD situation since the Paxos’s announcement. BUSD users have since redeemed $550M for fiat USD with the BUSD market cap down $800M. There has also been an outflow of about $1B of BUSD from exchanges (mostly Binance) that has resulted in Binance’s BUSD reserves declining to the lowest level since December 2021. Despite all the redemptions and outflow, BUSD has held on to its peg thus far.

Elsewhere, addresses holding 100K to 10M USDT have been accumulating in the last 10 weeks, since 7th December. According to @santiment, this is likely a key contributor to BTC's meteoric rise to $25K as the sharks and whales have increased their purchasing power during the past months.

Crypto Derivatives

  • BTC and ETH positive funding rates remain stable
  • 30-day ATM IV jumped to 54.82% and 63.15% for BTC and ETH respectively
  • 30-day 25d put skew dropped to -1.09% for BTC and fell to -5.62% for ETH respectively

Top 3 CEX USDT perp funding rate arbitrage based on last 24-hour lookback:

Net Annualized APR

Perp (USDT pair)

Long on

Short On

35.69%

SOL

BYBIT

DYDX

19.91%

BTC

BYBIT

DYDX

16.60%

DOGE

BYBIT

OKX

Source: @CexyArbBot Telegram

1) Pairs observed include BTC, ETH, SOL, BNB, XRP, LTC, DOGE vs USDT perps 

2) CEX observed include Binance, Bybit, OKX & DYDX

@CexyArbBot allows you to customize CEX, 100+ pairs & lookback periods combo

For futures, total liquidations in the past 24H amounted to $209.2M, the majority coming from longs at $124.9M.

On the options front, IVs rose across the board as volatility returned to the market. The term structure of both majors are still in steep backwardation. Meanwhile, the 7-day 25d skew continues to go deeper into negative territory since 14 January when put skew flipped to call skew for both BTC and ETH. Carry on BTC and ETH have dropped to 12.31% and 12.12% respectively.

On the flow side, upside buying on both BTC and ETH largely dominated the tape. The most popular strategy is the bull call spread on June-23 for both BTC and ETH.

Lastly, the VIX jumped to 20.16.

Crypto Technical Analysis

Onto TA, BTC maintained its upward trend before collapsing during the US trading session, dropping by 6.28% to around $23.5K. BTC is now back to the $22.5K-$23.9K trading range. RSI has also normalized to 58.08 and 61.98 respectively for 4H and 1D. If bearish momentum continues, the next level to watch out for could be the $21.5K-$22K resistance zone.

Similar to BTC, ETH fell by 5.06% during the US trading session to $1,635. ETH has found support around the lower bound of the previous channel at around $1,635. ETH could look to retest the $1,660-$1,670 resistance zone which was denied 6 times in the past few months. However, once its breaks, the next resistance zone could be identified from the “head and shoulders” pattern identified last September at $1,770 (“shoulder”) and $2,000 (“head”). On the other hand, if the bears take control and break the channel’s lower bound, the next support zone could be seen at around the $1,540 level.

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Yours sincerely,
Treehouse Research 🌳