Weekly Beluga Insights

Bitcoin remains near the $38,000 mark as we wait to see if it will break yearly highs, and it appears this consolidation range is also benefitting the alt coin market. One of the top gaining narratives over the last few months has centered around the concept of tokenized Real World Assets (RWAs), and with the aggregated market cap of RWA tokens up to $1.4B now it is clearly still growing. For readers interested at taking a further look into the RWA sector, Beluga has your back!

Veteran RWA protocol Maple Finance $MPL has been moving this year and currently sits up +40% on the week. For context, Maple has historically been a decentralized credit market however following events after FTX’s collapse which created an extremely low-liquidity environment they have pivoted to focus on RWA initiatives. Mostly centered around yield-bearing assets, these include exposure to tokenized US treasury bills, receivables financing, and much more in the future.

What sets Maple apart from many other protocols in the RWA sector is their strong existing business in the credit market as well as their vast institutional appeal. This means not only is the liquidity in the protocol stickier due to more sophisticated actors participating, but the price of MPL could theoretically benefit from the RWA narrative, the institutional money narrative, as well as rising liquidity in the DeFi market. We believe Maple will continue to perform well as the market turns bullish and we head into the Bitcoin halving early next year.

Quick Quips: Catch Up on What You Missed

• DraftKings loses its Polygon validator

• KyberSwap Attacker attempts a coup 

• Blast reaches $570M in TVL in its first week

• Grayscale updates terms for BTC Trust for the first time since 2018

Chart of the Week

Bitcoin becomes the 16th most valuable currency by market cap!

Did you know?

The largest corporate holder of Bitcoin in the world, MicroStrategy $MSTR, holds 158,400 BTC worth more than $6B.