Stablecoin, Yield and Custody News for Week of January 15th, 2023.

Biggest story of this week is the announcement from Avalanche that they will be partnering with Amazon. This news comes as a massive shock to many for a number of reasons, most dominantly that AVAX was down nearly 90% from its all time high at the time of the partnership announcement. On top of this is, many would presume that a large partner like Amazon would partner with Ethereum, the seemingly obvious choice to many. This news was understandably impactful for Avalanche, with AVAX price surging almost 16% on the news. Details of the partnership are still to follow, but the agreement seems to be an effort to have Amazon Web Services (AWS) essentially use Avalanche as its default blockchain partner of choice. Emin Gün Sirer, the CEO of Ava Labs (Avalanche’s development arm), was quoted saying that this partnership is aimed at accelerating “enterprise, institutional, and government adoption of blockchain.”

More news from this week:

• Genesis and Gemini were charged with selling unregistered securities by the SEC
• Tether settled more volume of USD-equivalent assets than Visa and Mastercard last year
• Cardano’s Djed stablecoin is near its launch on Mainnet
• A Cornell professor is signaling warnings around the US bond market from potential stablecoin collapses
• Russia and Iran are reportedly planning to launch a stablecoin backed by gold reserves
• Sushi has laid out its 2023 plans to focus on DEX and user experiences
• Midas Investments closes down amid an apparent $63m deficit in their DeFi portfolio
• Terra has added $2m towards its DeFi mission but LUNC price doesn’t seem to be moving
• CeFi lender Nexo is suing the Cayman Island’s regulators for a Virtual Asset Services Provider (VASP) registration
• OSL, an exchange backed by Fidelity Investments, is cutting workers amid crypto winter fallout
• The surge in BTC price caused over $500m liquidations, the highest amount in 3 months
• Japan is prodding the US and EU to regulate crypto more like banks
• Whitehat hacker platform Immunefi is banning 15 ChatGPT-Generated bug reports
• The number of crypto ETPs grew 50% in 2022 despite the AUM drops across the industry

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