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What Moved Global Markets
Coronavirus update:
– Global cases: More than 4.7 million
– Global deaths: At least 315,000
- Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Saturday night declared a state of emergency to extend coronavirus measures, but didn’t bother to get approval by congress.
- The city of Wuhan, where the new coronavirus outbreak originated in China, conducted 222,675 nucleic acid tests on May 16, the local health authority said on Sunday, nearly doubling from a day earlier. Wuhan kicked off a campaign on May 14 to look for asymptomatic carriers – people who are infected but show no outward sign of illness.
- South Korea on Sunday reported five new domestic cases of coronavirus, all linked to a cluster of cases centred around bars and nightclubs in the capital.
- The daily death toll from the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy fell to 145 on Sunday, the lowest since March 9.
- Summer weather is enticing much of the world to emerge from coronavirus lockdowns as centres of the outbreak from New York to Italy and Spain gradually lift restrictions that have kept millions indoors for months. Greeks flocked to the seaside on Saturday when more than 500 beaches reopened, while New York, New Jersey and other states plan to reopen some beaches in time for the Memorial Day holiday weekend later this month.
- For the upcoming week, investors are bracing for more turbulence in U.S. stocks, as some states prepare to reopen their economies and global trade tensions rise. The Cboe Volatility Index, known as Wall Street’s fear gauge, posted its biggest weekly gain in about two months, reflecting the S&P 500 index’s .SPX 2.6% slide from its April 29 high.
- Saudi Arabian stocks rose sharply on Sunday buoyed by a jump in oil prices and positive corporate earnings, while Dubai was up on news about potential financial support from Abu Dhabi. U.S. crude prices jumped 7% on Friday and Brent crude settled 4.4% up at $32.50 a barrel as demand showed signs of picking up with countries easing travel restrictions imposed to stem the spread of the coronavirus. Saudi Arabia’s index closed 1.6% higher led by Al Rajhi Bank and Saudi Aramco which rose 2% and 1.8%, respectively.
Crypto Prices (from CoinMarketCap)
Bitcoin: Up 3.65% to $9,869.38
Total trading volume (24h): $43.27+ billion USD
Ethereum: Up 6.42% to $214.42
Total trading volume (24h): $17.21+ billion USD
3 biggest movers 24 hours
Biggest Mover 1: DeviantCoin (DEV) is up 5,342.91% to $0.640408
Biggest Mover 2: IFX24 (IFX24) is up 243.58% to $0.015782
Biggest Loser: Switch (ESH) is down 46.77% to $1.18
What Moved Crypto Markets (i.e. digital assets)
- Singapore state investor Temasek Holdings has joined the Facebook-backed Libra digital currency project. The entry of Temasek, which latest figures show has a portfolio value of just over S$300 billion ($210 billion), was announced by the Switzerland-based Libra Association, the entity managing the digital currency project, late Thursday. Temasek becomes one the project’s most prominent backers after payments giants Mastercard, Visa Inc and PayPal earlier ditched the scheme.
- Bitcoin’s halving appeared to have fueled a surge in a trading product at one of Wall Street’s most important financial institutions. Trading volumes and open interest in CME Group’s bitcoin options product has surged since the event last Monday, which saw the number of bitcoins produced with each transaction block falling from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC (effectively cutting new coin issuance in half). Open interest and volumes hit new records last week. The number of accounts trading the product has topped 2,100.
- Uniswap, the non-custodial, automated market-maker exchange protocol, saw it’s quarter-over-quarter volume surge by over 225% between Q4 2019 and Q1 2020. A good portion of that boost, perhaps unsurprisingly, came in the form of ‘Black Thursday,’ the mid-March crypto market event that saw the price of bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies swing significantly. Uniswap saw an all-time monthly high of $191.4m in March. Volumes then fell roughly 60% in April ($77.3m). May, according to available data, is on course to see around $100m in protocol volume.
- Crypto.com said Friday it has begun shipping its crypto-to-fiat card, the MCO Visa, across the European Union. In total, 31 European countries, including the EU’s 27 member states, now have access to the card that lets users pay in crypto, it said in a blog post. MCO Visa was previously only available in the U.S. and Asia. Crypto.com also announced Thursday its U.S. cardholders could begin integrating with Apple and Google Pay. The card works by exchanging users’ crypto for local fiat when the user loads crypto onto the card.
Other Specialties
Fintech: Visa looks to be laying the groundwork for a future in which fiat currencies such as the U.S. dollar could be easily turned into a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The California-based payments giant, which processes upwards of 100 million transactions every day on average, has filed a patent application for a process for turning physical fiat currency into a newly digitized version. The filing, which was filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in November and made public on Thursday, says the system would be able to mint digital fiat currency and keep a tally of all issuances on the blockchain. Managed by a “central entity computer,” the system would also remove physical cash from circulation.
Healthtech: For the past few years, Estimote has sold wireless tracking beacons to companies including Amazon, Apple, and Nike, promising a more precise way to map the movement of products, equipment, and people—all in the name of boosting productivity and efficiency. Now Estimote is touting its wearable beacons as a way to combat the spread of the coronavirus. A new analytics package will help managers pinpoint high-touch areas for cleaning, show them when workers flout workplace social distancing rules, and identify those who need to quarantine after a colleague tests positive.
Smart Cities: Colombia’s commerce regulator said on Friday it will probe Mother’s Day complaints that mobile applications Rappi, Uber Eats, iFood and Domicilios.com failed to deliver on time or at all and were slow in making refunds. If any conduct is found that violates consumer rights, it could lead to fines of up to 2,000 minimum monthly salaries. That fine is equivalent to about $445,000.
AI: Humans and AI systems work better when they tackle problems together. That’s according to research from Microsoft chief scientist Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Research principal research Ece Kamar, and Harvard University student and Microsoft Research intern Bryan Wilder. The paper appears to be one of the first published by Horvitz since Microsoft named him Chief Scientific Officer in March, the first in company history. The paper released earlier this month studies the performance of human and AI teams working together on two computer vision tasks: Galaxy classification and breast cancer metastasis detection. With the proposed approach, the AI model determines which tasks are best for humans to perform and which are best handled by AI.
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