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CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.
The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 2982.19, down 0.6% (-17.53) since 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday.
Three of 20 assets are trading higher.
Leaders: BCH (+2.7%) and ETH (+0.5%).
Laggards: SUI (-4.6%) and HBAR (-3.5%).
The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.
Cryptocurrency exchange giant Kraken introduced a blockchain-powered global money app called Krak that allows users to instantly transact across borders for almost no cost, while also earning competitive rewards on their account balances.
Krak is designed to fix the outdated norms of legacy finance, Kraken said, blending crypto technology with the exchange’s trusted network of banking relationships and payment partnerships. The app will allow users to send funds peer-to-peer across 110 countries and using 300-plus assets, spanning cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and fiat currencies without inserting bank details or crypto wallet addresses, according to a press release.
As the U.S. opens up more to crypto, big exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken are busy closing gaps in their customer offerings, whether that’s taking advantage of crypto rails for payments, earning yield or trading stocks.
The Krak app will also offer dedicated spend and earn accounts, where eligible users can earn up to 4.1% rewards on USDG stablecoin balances as well as additional opportunities across 20+ digital assets yielding up to 10%. USDG is the dollar-pegged token of the Global Dollar Network, of which Kraken is a key member.
“Look, banking sucks; maybe that's the simplest way to say it,” Mark Greenberg, Kraken's global head of consumer product said, in an interview. “I spent my whole career in banking and tried many different ways over the years to try to make it better. But it's still too hard to move money, to send it, to share it, to spend it, to move it across borders, to earn off of it in a reasonable way. And crypto has always been a big part of the answer.”
Read more: Crypto Exchange Kraken Wins MiCA License in Ireland
A blank-check company backed by former Blackstone dealmaker Chinh Chu and Tether co-founder Reeve Collins is looking to raise $1 billion to build a publicly traded cryptocurrency treasury firm, Bloomberg reported citing sources familiar with the plans.
The vehicle, M3-Brigade Acquisition V, plans to rebrand and use the cash to buy a basket of tokens including bitcoin BTC, ether ETH and Solana's sol SOL.
The move comes as public companies worldwide are rushing to add cryptocurrencies as treasury assets. Many, however, are focusing on bitcoin, the largest crypto by market cap, alone. Among them, Anthony Pompliano's ProCap BTC this week said it planned to go public through a SPAC and stock up on BTC. Multitoken companies are rarer and Brigade Acquisition would be among the first.
Former Hut 8 Mining CEO Jaime Leverton will run the company. Wilbur Ross, who served as U.S. Commerce Secretary, and Gabriel Abed, Barbados’s former ambassador to the UAE and current chair of Binance’s board, will act as vice chairs.
Cantor Fitzgerald is among the advisers, and both the fundraising target and token mix could still change, Bloomberg said.
The biggest name companies with single-coin strategies include Strategy (MSTR) and Metaplanet (3350), whose focus is on bitcoin. Other single tokens firms are exploring alternative coins, for example SharpLink Gaming (SBET) accumulating ether and Nano Labs piling into BNB.
Shares of M3-Brigade fell 12% after news of the plan surfaced on Wednesday, and were recently up 5% pre-market.
Crypto whales looking to trade large orders in Solana's SOL SOL, dogecoin DOGE and XRP XRP might want to consider new research by Coingecko, which shows Bitget as the industry leader in altcoin liquidity, outpacing Binance.
"CEX [centralized exchange] liquidity for the top 5 major crypto assets is generally healthy across various market depths, with Binance offering the most liquidity for BTC, while Bitget is the most liquid platform for altcoins within the 0.3%-0.5% interval," Coingecko's research said.
The firm researched global order books for the top five coins, bitcoin BTC, ether ETH, SOL, XRP and DOGE, over the 61 days from March 19 to May 18.
Liquidity reflects the depth and size of buy and sell orders at different prices, representing the ease of trading large orders without causing significant price changes.
The standard measure of liquidity is market depth, which refers to the collection of buy and sell orders at different price ranges (e.g., within 0.3%-0.6 %, 1%, 5%, or 10%).
A tight liquidity closer to the going market rate indicates lower slippage for traders. Slippage refers to the difference between the price at which a trade is expected to be executed and the actual price at which it is executed.
Bitget's leadership stems from its infrastructure, Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget, said in an email responding to the research.
“Altcoin liquidity is a measurement for market depth, and this ranking shows how far Bitget has come. Today, institutions drive 80% of our spot volume, futures activity from professional firms has doubled, and 80% of top quant funds trade on Bitget. Liquidity is infrastructure — and we’re building it where the market needs it most," Chen said in an announcement shared with CoinDesk.
In XRP's case, Bitget was dominant at the 0.3% (with a variance of $0.006) depth range, with Binance and Coinbase catching up at the 1% (with a variance of $0.006) depth level.
A similar pattern was observed in SOL, where Bitget led major exchanges with a 32% share of liquidity at the 0.6% range, only to lose ground to Binance at the wider 2% level. Bitget was also the leader at small intervals in ETH and DOGE.
However, for Bitcoin, Binance was the leader at all levels of market depth, with $8 million on both sides at a spread of $100 from the market price.
Digital asset infrastructure firm Taurus, whose clients which include Deutsche Bank and State Street, has launched the first private stablecoin contract, targeting financial institutions and businesses who have been hesitant to use stablecoins for privacy concerns.
Built on Aztec Network, a privacy-focused Ethereum layer-2 backed by a16z, the contract combines zero-knowledge privacy with compliance features modeled on USDC, including mint/burn controls, emergency pause, blacklisting and audit logging.
The move coincides with stablecoin adoption rapidly growing for everyday transactions outside of crypto. With the U.S. Senate passing the GENIUS Act to create a regulatory framework for asset class, Taurus said it expects global stablecoin supply to accelerate and reach $1–2 trillion by 2030.
With this private stablecoin contract, Taurus said that financial institutions concerned about privacy will be able to issue stablecoins in payment or treasury applications while balances and transfers remain encrypted.
For example, a company could use this private stablecoin for cross-border payroll without revealing staff names or amounts to competitors or random onlookers. At the same time, if regulators needed access, the system’s design lets them in.
"This addresses concerns that we’ve repeatedly heard from banks looking at issuing stablecoins, central banks, and regulators," said JP Aumasson, chief security officer at Taurus. "We showed that it’s possible to protect the privacy and security of stablecoin users while retaining the features of industry-standard stablecoins."