The exploit at DeFi giant Curve Finance has driven down the price of its CRV token, putting a $168 million stash of founder Michael Egorov’s money at risk of being liquidated. BlockSec co-founder Yajin “Andy” Zhou joined the conversation. Todd Groth, CFA, CoinDesk Indices head of research, discussed how the crypto markets performed in July. And, Koray Caliskan, author of “Data Money” shared his thoughts on the future of crypto regulation.

After a rough 2022, bitcoin mining is swinging upward, as CoinDesk analyst George Kaloudis writes. The bear market that sapped prices and publicly traded miners’ stocks tumbling has lessened this year. Crypto mining is now mostly healthy. Bitcoin network’s hashrate, a measure of the amount of computing power committed to running the network, shows a bountiful capacity with which to run crypto’s premier network. As of July 21, Bitcoin’s hashrate was 400 exahash per second, up five-fold from June 2021. And a number of miners have returned to report healthy margins, especially those that have access to cheap energy like TeraWulf (WULF) and CipherMining (CIPHER), whose gross margins in Q1 2023 exceeded 60% (see below).

Ether, the second largest crypto by market value, was recently changing hands at $1,913, off nearly a half-percentage point from Sunday, same time and well off its heights last week above $2,000. Other major cryptos, which also soared last week, sagged on Monday before rebounding slightly. XRP and ADA, the token of the Cardano smart contracts platform, were recently off 1.5% and 0.6%, respectively, while SOL, the native crypto of the Solana blockchain was down more than 2.8%.

“The city’s digital assets regulation is overall friendly and encourages banks to work with crypto companies, however, banks still currently have stringent requirements in place, which makes it difficult for crypto businesses to expand and grow,” Adrian Wang, founder, and CEO of Metalpha, a Hong Kong-based digital assets wealth management company, said to CoinDesk at the time. “We have yet to see major progress in the banking sector to embrace crypto. Hopefully, that will change soon.”

All but a couple of the 19 tokens mentioned in the suit, which accuses the exchange giants of violating securities laws, have sunk by double-digits over the past seven days with CHZ and SAND, the tokens of the Chiliz network and The Sandbox metaverse game, falling more than 28% and 27%, respectively and ADA, the native crypto of the Cardana blockchain, dropping over 21% as investors looked fretfully at an an increasingly uncertain U.S. regulatory environment in which cryptos have yet to receive a designation as security, commodity or otherwise.

Ether also spent much of Tuesday on the upswing to trade near $1,900, a 4% gain from Monday, same time. BNB, Binance’s exchange token, which dropped about recently rose about 2% a day after plunging more than 10%. ADA and SOL, the tokens of smart contracts platforms Cardano and Solano, regained slivers of ground lost amid lawsuit aftershocks with the former rising about a half a percentage point and the latter more than 1%. Layer 2 platform Polygon’s MATIC was down about 1.5%. In its filing, the SEC identified those tokens among 13 as unregistered securities.

Bitcoin was recently trading at about $26,835, roughly flat over the previous four hours but down 1.2% from Wednesday, same time, according to CoinDesk Indexes. The largest cryptocurrency has seemed almost entirely unaffected by the Wednesday, late-night U.S. House vote to pass a debt ceiling increase that would ensure the government can pay its bills, at least short-term. The Senate will likely vote on the bill late Thursday night (ET).

“What asset markets are looking for is something not too strong or too weak because if something comes in and around, like, I don’t know, plus, or minus, you know, some decent, low standard deviation of what’s expected, then (it’s) still too early for a pause to rate decreases,” he said. But he added warily that the current inflation rate is still above “the 2% level the Fed is seeking. It’s still about the core PCE level that they’re seeking as well. So, you know, Powell has been clear that he’s going to keep rates at this level for longer than the market is implying.”

The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization tripped early Wednesday, falling first below $30,000 for the second time in three days, and hours later below $29,000 for the first time in more than a week. BTC was recently trading at about $28,930, down about 4.6% from Tuesday, same time, and far from its heights last week when a moderately encouraging Consumer Price Index and renewed investor optimism buoyed markets.