First Mover Americas: BTC Shows Resilience Despite Widespread Risk Aversion, Celsius' Bankruptcy Filing

Good morning, and welcome to First Mover. I’m Lyllah Ledesma, here to take you through the latest in crypto markets, news and insights.

Bitcoin (BTC) was trading 3% up on the day even as troubled crypto lender Celsuis is the latest to file for bankruptcy.

Celsius, which is facing a liquidity crisis, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, the lender said in a statement issued late Wednesday.

BTC was trading at around $19,820 at the time of writing, holding surprisingly well even after negative news. Ether (ETH) was also slightly down over the last 24 hours, at $1,070.

Polygon’s MATIC was up 17% over the last 24 hours, following the news that the Ethereum scaling solution will join Disney’s ‘Accelerator Program’ to develop augmented reality, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and artificial intelligence experiences.

Also rallying overnight was decentralized exchange Uniswap's UNI token, which climbed 16%.

“We’ve seen strong gains across select decentralized finance (DeFi) coins overnight, such as UNI, SYN and LDO,” said Matthew Dibb, co-founder of Stack Funds.

“While the gains aren’t on huge volume, they appear to be forming a technical base at these levels, which may lay ground for further upside,” said Dibb.

Meanwhile, bankrupt crypto lending platform Voyager Digital's native coin voyager (VGX) has more than tripled in three days. According to one analyst, the move appears to be driven by a short squeeze.

Since Tuesday, VGX has increased by 257% from $0.14 to $0.50 with prices hitting a high of $1.01 in the past 24 hours, CoinDesk data shows.

In other news, crypto exchange OKX has followed in the footsteps of FTX and Kraken and secured a license in the UAE, according to a press release on Thursday.

A metric which measures the difference between bitcoin’s going market value and its 200-day simple moving average (SMA), the Mayer Multiple, is suggesting the $836 billion crypto market may be close to bottom.

At press time, the Mayer Multiple was 0.53, meaning the crypto market valued at $863 billion was worth almost half of its 200-day average of $1.603 trillion.

The Block reported that "move-to-earn" Solana-based project Stepn, which awards users for walking/jogging, announced Tuesday that it earned $122.5 million from platform fees in the second quarter of 2022, and 5% of those earnings will go toward buying and burning the project's native token, green metaverse token (GMT).

DEX Contango Pushes Retro Alternative to Perps With 'Expirable Futures'

The bitcoin perpetual swap is an innovation in crypto markets that was pioneered in 2016 by the exchange BitMEX and quickly adopted by rivals, including Binance and FTX.

Perpetual swaps are like futures contracts without expiration dates; they can be held indefinitely without the need to roll over contracts as they reach maturity.

The decentralized exchange Contango says it's pushing back against that crypto-market convention – with plans to offer "expirable" contracts that more closely resemble the traditional futures traded on exchanges like CME, linked to everything from bitcoin to crude oil and pork bellies.

Contango says its offering will be the first of its kind on a decentralized exchange, or DEX. The firm said Thursday in a statement that it raised $4 million in a seed round in December, at a $45 million valuation, from an investment group led by ParaFi and including Coinbase Ventures, Spartan Group and Amber Group.

The company says its platform is undergoing security audits and that it plans to launch a beta version later in the summer.

The downside of perpetual futures is that funding rates (periodic payments that are long or short based on the difference between perpetual and spot prices) are largely unpredictable, according to Contango’s co-founder, Kamel Aouane.

Whereas with expirable futures, investors are in full control of the cost from the beginning.

“With perpetual futures, if you are on the wrong side of the market, you are bleeding money,” said Aouane, in an interview with CoinDesk.

Contango prices futures using spot and interest rates, as implied by the interest rate parity, a formula well known in traditional finance.

There are currently no other DEX’s that offer expirable futures in the crypto market, according to a report on the state of the crypto derivatives market by Jump Crypto, the cryptocurrency arm of the decades-old trading firm Jump Trading Group.

In the report, Jump Crypto wrote that the decentralized derivatives markets across both futures and options are “under-developed” compared with their centralized counterparties.

Read the full story here: DEX Contango Pushes Retro Alternative to Perps With 'Expirable Futures'

This web version of today's First Mover newsletter was produced by Sage D. Young.