
Digital Assets rebounded after last week’s -8% drop to close the week +2.5%. Gains were broad based with 73% of the top coins / tokens ending the week higher.
Trading this week remained largely range bound with both volume and volatility continuing to dredge the bottom end of historical ranges. A mid week Tether scare, offered a brief spurt of excitement, with volume in Tether doubling recent levels and BTC blowing out to as much as an 18% premium on Bitfinex vs peers. The excitement proved short lived, though, with Bitfinex announcing new banking solutions, Tether volumes mean reverting and Bitfinex spreads returning to normal ranges.
News flow this week was slow, but led by a handful of potentially high impact announcements. Mainstream institutional investors were in the spotlight with reports that trillion dollar fund manager Fidelity had launched a Digital Asset subsidiary, reports that Blackrock is investigating opportunities in the space and a small investment by Goldman Sachs in digital asset custodial platform, BitGo.
Our view for the coming weeks remains unchanged with no major changes to market dynamics and increasingly positive news. Continue to view low volatility across the space and previous 4Q seasonality as reasons for optimism that could potentially magnify the price impact of gradually improving news flow.