Mon 01/09

Good Morning. Delhi has topped the list of crypto adopters while Lucknow has the most number of DeFi users, 65% of USDC reserves are in US treasury bills, and Polygon paid a lot of $ to move top Solana projects to its platforms.

• India's cryptocurrency exchanges are losing out to foreign platforms: Between Feb and Oct 22, Indian exchanges ceded $3.8 billion in trade to foreign ones, said a report by New Delhi-based think tank Esya. By Oct 22, global players like Binance and Coinbase held 67.6% of the volumes in India, up from 50% in Nov 21. “If investors channel their activities offshore, the Indian virtual digital asset tax design is counterproductive,” the Esya report said. “Indian exchanges lost 97.1% of their volume in Oct 22 when compared to the corresponding volumes in Jan 22. In this period, foreign exchanges lost only 36.3%,” the Esya report said.

• Delhi Tops List Of Crypto Adopters In India At 7.8%, Leads Metaverse Race Too: As per a report by CoinSwitch, Delhi has the highest crypto adoption in India, in terms of value invested, while tier-2 cities are keeping up with the metros in terms of crypto adoption – about 3.4% of Indian crypto investors are from Jaipur, the highest adoption among tier-2 cities. Out of the 19 million crypto investors, 94 % were Android users. Interestingly, Lucknow and Patna were leading the Decentralised Finance adoption, at 16.48 % and 14.43 %. About 45 % of the investors were Gen-Z, while 34 % of investors were from the age of 26 to 35 years.

• Polygon Paid Top Solana Projects Y00ts And Degods $3 Million To Migrate Chains: DeLabs, the Los Angeles-based startup behind popular non-fungible token (NFT) projects DeGods and Y00ts, received a $3 million grant from Polygon to migrate blockchains. "DeLabs received a $3M non-equity grant from Polygon to help fund the expansion of the DeLabs team and to kickstart and initially help scale the incubator we are building that will allow you to spend y00tpoints and DePoints to mint our incubator's NFT collections," the project’s leader, Rohun Vora wrote in the Y00ts Discord channel.

• Nearly 65% Of USDC Reserves Are Held As US Treasury Bills: Circle held $43.4 billion in USDC reserves to back 43.23 billion USDC in circulation as of Nov. 30, 2022. Of these reserves, $12.79 billion lay in the Circle Reserve Fund, a registered government money market fund wholly owned by Circle and managed by BlackRock. The fund’s holdings included 12 US treasury bills as of Nov. 30. Popular crypto analyst John Paul Koning called it a “win” for USDC users

• Crypto Payments Firm Wyre Cuts Withdrawal Limits To 90% Of Funds: Speculations around Wyre shutting down emerged after Axios published a report on 4 Jan. According to the report, Giannaros told employees to “brace themselves” as the firm might “need to unwind the business over the next couple of weeks.” On Jan. 5, MetaMask announced that it removed Wyre from its mobile aggregator, urging users not to use Wyre while it removed the extension. On 6 Jan, Wyre admitted to users that it had “not been immune” to the headwinds of the current crypto industry.

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What Is Locking & Staking?: Locking or vesting periods prevent the personal transfer, withdrawal, or burning of a set amount of tokens for a designated period. Staking is the incentivized voluntary locking of a certain amount of cryptocurrency. This helps keep the currency more stable, with rewards offered for locking tokens for a designated time period.