February 7, 2023

Digital Currency Group (DCG) has started selling holdings in several investment vehicles run by its subsidiary, digital assets manager Grayscale, at a steep discount, according to a Financial Times report citing U.S. securities filings. Grayscale operates the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), which has $10 billion-plus in assets under management and was late last year trading at a record discount to net asset value. The discount has narrowed a bit in 2023, but remains above 40%. Grayscale, Genesis and CoinDesk share the same parent company in DCG.

Digital Currency Group founder Barry Silbert (DCG)

Binance is temporarily suspending U.S. dollar bank transfers starting on Wednesday, the company confirmed to CoinDesk on Monday. "We are temporarily suspending USD bank transfers as of February 8th," a Binance spokesperson said, noting just 0.01% of monthly active clients use USD bank transfers. "Affected customers are being notified directly." "In the interim, all other methods of buying and selling crypto remain unaffected, including bank transfer using one of the other fiat currencies supported by Binance (including euros), buying and selling crypto via credit card, debit card, Google Pay and Apple Pay and via our Binance P2P marketplace," the spokesperson added.

Crypto friendly lender Signature Bank faces a putative class-action suit for its involvement in the operations of now bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Statistica Capital, an algorithmic trading firm, claims the bank "had actual knowledge of and substantially facilitated the now-infamous FTX fraud," according to a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. "In particular, Signature knew of and permitted the commingling of FTX customer funds within its proprietary, blockchain-based payments network, Signet." Statistica says it advised Signature the funds were meant for FTX, but the bank allowed them to be transferred to accounts controlled by Alameda Research, the trading firm owned by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

Indexing protocol The Graph’s GRT token surpassed a $1 billion market capitalization again on Sunday, according to data from CoinMarketCap. The spike reflects the platform’s significant ecosystem growth in 2022, particularly during the fourth quarter.

The token began to climb at the beginning of 2023 after plummeting in the second half of 2022, and is now trading at around $0.17, up 94% over the last seven days. GRT in 2021 had risen above $5 billion in market value before spiraling lower as the wider crypto market started tumbling late that year.

The Graph removes the need for data consumers like app developers to expand complex infrastructure for gathering on-chain data. It currently supports indexing data from 26 different blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Near, Arbitrium, Optimism, Polygon, Avalanche, Celo, Fantom, Moonbeam and IPFS.

The two main sources of revenue for the project are inflationary indexing rewards and query fees paid by data consumers, according to a Messari February report on the protocol.

Data from the report showed that in the fourth quarter of 2022, The Graph witnessed a 66% quarter-over-quarter increase in GRT revenue from query fees (In USD terms this amounts to a 5% QoQ increase and a 265% year-over-year rise).

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