375,000 Traders Liquidated in 24 Hours

September 8, 2021       /       Unchained Daily       /       Laura Shin

Daily Bits ✍️✍️✍️

• Digital asset investment products saw an inflow of $98M for the week ending September 3.

• British bank Standard Chartered expects BTC to rise 3X from its current price, while it estimates ETH could increase 10X.

• Crypto exchange FTX struck an endorsement deal with NBA superstar Steph Curry.

• Solana’s native token, SOL, is now the sixth-largest crypto by market cap, passing XRP.

• Crypto exchanges Coinbase, Kraken, and Gemini, among others, reported that users were affected in various ways during yesterday’s turbulent market.

• The FDIC and crypto bank Anchorage are nearing a deal to help the FDIC liquidate crypto assets.

What Do You Meme?

What’s Poppin’?

After staying above $50,000 for 48 hours straight, Bitcoin is down 10%, its largest drop since May. At one point, the digital currency fell below $40,000 on the crypto exchange Huobi, marking the low point for Bitcoin across major exchanges during yesterday morning’s flash crash. Data from Coinbase shows the daily low for BTC bottoming out at $42,830.77, while bitcoin plummeted down to $39,818.18 on Huobi.

Bitcoin was far from the only crypto to experience a dip. The total cryptocurrency market cap fell to a low of $1.95T yesterday, dropping $400M, or 17%, in between midnight and 10 am. According to The Block’s Larry Cermak, starting at roughly 9:20 am, over $2.6B worth of leveraged positions were liquidated in just one hour, with the primary culprit being the cryptocurrency trading platform Bybit.

Data from Bybt, a crypto data provider unrelated to Bybit, the crypto exchange, mentioned above, shows that over $3.7B in positions were liquidated in the past 24 hours. Nearly 375,000 traders were affected. Approximately 90% of the liquidations resulted in the closure of long positions.

The market dip coincided with El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law going into effect. As of yesterday, Bitcoin is legal tender in El Salvador, with businesses, like McDonald’s, mandated to accept the digital currency.

President Nayib Bukele took to Twitter to announce that he was “buying the dip” to the tune of 150 new coins. The latest purchase brings El Salvador’s BTC stack to a total of 550 coins, or roughly $25M.

At publishing time, the crypto market has somewhat corrected, with Bitcoin settling around $46,500.

Bonus Recommended Read:

Despite President Bukele’s excitement, locals are struggling to understand the ramifications of the Bitcoin Law (CoinDesk)

Recommended Reads

• @RealNatashaChe on NFTs:

•  @d4bba on the n project:

•  Brian Armstrong on Coinbase’s relationship with the SEC:

On The Pod…

How Crypto Streaming Service Audius Hit Six Million Monthly Active Users

Audius, a blockchain native music streaming platform, hit six million monthly active users in August and announced a partnership with TikTok. Roneil Rumburg, co-founder and CEO of Audius, talks about how Audius works, AUDIO tokenomics, the give and take of decentralization, and more. Show highlights:

• what problems Audius is solving for creators
• how artists are utilizing crypto to connect with fans
• how the crypto components of Audius fit together
• what three utilities AUDIO, the native token of Audius, offers holders
• why Audius requires over $500K in AUDIO tokens to run a node
• why AUDIO’s inflation rate is higher than other popular tokens like Ethereum or Bitcoin
• which portions of Audius are centralized versus decentralized
• where the majority of Audius’s listens come from (hint: it’s not the app)
• how Audius has created a “password” system to make blockchain technology easier to use for non-crypto natives
• why Audius uses both Solana and Ethereum
• how big-name artists like Diplo found their way onto Audius
• how Audius makes it easier to upload music to TikTok
• what’s next for Audius

You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians