By Marcus Soterio, analyst A publicly listed digital asset broker GlobalBlock
After falling less than 5 percent on Tuesday, following the release of Coinbase’s Q2 earnings, it hovers above $23,000 at the time of writing. They reported a 63 percent drop in revenue in the second quarter, compared to a loss of $1.1 billion a year ago, even though monthly customers grew from 8.8 million to 9 million. This further demonstrates how much the macro economy has influenced many crypto exchanges over the past few months.
Coinbase predicts that its user base will continue to fall over the next 3 months. The US CPI data (released on Wednesday at 1:30pm UK time) will play a big role in determining whether we continue to see crypto users actually decline in the coming months.
CPI Expected 8.7% – If the release is lower than this figure, I expect a rally for crypto and equities. Although I think any figure below 9.1% is promising, that was last month’s CPI figure, and it signals the start of inflationary tyranny. In this case, the Federal Reserve will tend to be less aggressive at the next FOMC meeting in September, which the market will enjoy.
Hacks have become very prevalent in the crypto space over the past 2 years as the industry has grown exponentially. Yesterday, Curve Financial, the Diffie protocol it was founded on, was hacked for $570,000.
In this case, Curve Finance’s domain name system DNS was hacked (DNS maps readable website names to IP addresses). The hackers modified the IP address translated by DNS to http://curve.fi. They gave their own server IP address, and created the same web application. They then created new smart contracts to steal money, so users would approve transactions that stole their money.
This is an example of how important it is for users in DeFi to be fully educated on the protocols they use. If people verified all the smart contracts they interacted with, they could protect themselves.