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Oil: Backwardation to the future

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Oil: Backwardation to the future

Oil futures curves have been in backwardation – when the closer futures contract can be sold for a higher price than it costs to buy a futures contract with a further expiry date, resulting in a profit for the investor – for most of the past year, driven by perceived tightness in short-term supply1. This has provided investors with ‘roll yield’ on top of the gains made from spot price movements in oil.

While we believe that the oil market is balanced at present, there is supply tightness in specific areas – especially in heavier crudes – and this could be enough to ensure that the oil futures curve remains mostly in backwardation going forward. Here’s a closer look at current oil market supply and demand dynamics.

Oil curve backwardation

Recent curve backwardation has largely been engineered by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Since January 2017, the oil cartel has restricted the supply of oil by assigning its members and partners a quota for the amount of oil that they produce. Although the cartel has historically had a poor history of complying with quotas, this time it has done exceptionally well. Part of the reason for this, is that up until June 2018, each country was allocated an individual quota (rather than a group-wide limit) and this helped to restrict oil supply.

Another reason OPEC has done well in complying with quotas is because of unintended production disruptions. Recently, Venezuela has experienced an economic implosion, and this has impacted oil production significantly. Supply disruptions in Libya and Nigeria have also contributed to OPEC supply volatility.

Can backwardation last?

In June 2018, OPEC abandoned individual country quotas, so the level of quota compliance that we have seen over the past year may not last if the organisation reverts to its old ways. This could explain why the very front of the Brent futures curve went back into contango – when it costs more to buy the new futures contract than the amount received from selling the old futures contract – in July and August. Indeed, Saudi Arabia – the largest OPEC nation – has clearly expanded production since the end of the country-quota system, as have other countries.

After going back to an all-backwardated curve, the short end of the curve is now back in contango, a move underpinned by fears of over supply from increasing rig count in the US, as well as delays in the full implementation of sanctions on Iran. Despite those recent developments, we do not expect them to significantly impact long term supply. While the front end of the curve will remain prone to shifts, we do not see it to durably get back to a mostly contangoed curves.

Figure 1: Year-on-year difference in OPEC oil production

Source: Bloomberg, WisdomTree, data available as of close 05 October 2018.
Historical performance is not an indication of future performance and any investments may go down in value.

Tightness concentrated in heavy crudes

In relation to supply disruption, supply of the ‘heavier’ crudes is most at risk, in our view. Venezuela, Iran and Canada produce ‘heavy’ (low API gravity), ‘sour’ (high sulphur) crudes and these countries experienced the bulk of supply disruption this year.

Most of the world’s growth in crude oil supply is currently from US tight oil, which is ‘light’ (high API gravity) and ‘sweet’ (low sulphur). So, even though global oil supply is close to balance at the headline level, growth in oil production is uneven, with declines in supply of heavy crudes, and gains in supply of light crudes2.

Moreover, while US tight oil is seeing supply growth, there are limitations to this growth. Infrastructure needs to grow in lock-step with growth in oil production, and infrastructure limitations could slow the pace at which US shale can help satisfy global oil needs.

Demand remains strong for now

Looking at forecasts from the International Energy Agency (IEA), demand for oil looks set to remain healthy, with the IEA expecting oil demand to grow by 1.4 mb/d in 2018, and 1.5 mb/d in 2019 (following 1.5 mb/d growth in 2017). Over the medium term, the dearth of capital investment in oil production is likely to lead to tightness if demand continues to remain robust.

Oil futures likely to remain in backwardation

While we believe that the market is in balance at present, there is supply tightness in specific areas and this could be enough to ensure that the futures curve remains mostly in backwardation.

We don’t believe that a new wave of supply is forthcoming as a lack of investment in oil exploration and production should keep supply contained, and it may only take another supply shock to Libya or to Canada to cast doubts on supply. We also think that demand will remain robust, assuming today’s bullish demand expectations are not unfounded.

Source

1 For a full description of backwardation, contango, roll yields, spot return, total return, excess return and collateral yield please see Costs and Performance Tab on our ETPedia page.

2 Energy Information Administration, WisdomTree, data available as of 04 October 2019.

This material is prepared by WisdomTree and its affiliates and is not intended to be relied upon as a forecast, research or investment advice, and is not a recommendation, offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities or to adopt any investment strategy. The opinions expressed are as of the date of production and may change as subsequent conditions vary. The information and opinions contained in this material are derived from proprietary and non-proprietary sources. As such, no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given and no responsibility arising in any other way for errors and omissions (including responsibility to any person by reason of negligence) is accepted by WisdomTree, nor any affiliate, nor any of their officers, employees or agents. Reliance upon information in this material is at the sole discretion of the reader. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.

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21Shares lanserar Toncoin Staking ETP (TONN)

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21Shares, världens största emittent av börshandlade kryptovalutaprodukter (ETPs) och ett dotterbolag till 21.co, tillkännager stolt lanseringen av 21Shares Toncoin Staking ETP. Denna banbrytande produkt ger investerare ett sömlöst sätt att engagera sig i ekosystemet för staking och tjäna belöningar utan ansträngning.

21Shares, världens största emittent av börshandlade kryptovalutaprodukter (ETPs) och ett dotterbolag till 21.co, tillkännager stolt lanseringen av 21Shares Toncoin Staking ETP. Denna banbrytande produkt ger investerare ett sömlöst sätt att engagera sig i ekosystemet för staking och tjäna belöningar utan ansträngning.

Toncoin Staking ETP presenterar en innovativ lösning för investerare som söker exponering för insatsbelöningar utan komplexiteten med att sätta upp och hantera en insatsnod. Med 21Shares ETP kan investerare nu dra nytta av fördelarna med att satsa Toncoin samtidigt som de utnyttjar likviditeten och bekvämligheten på traditionella finansmarknader.

”Vår 21Shares Toncoin Staking ETP öppnar upp en ny horisont för investerare och ger en problemfri inkörsport till att satsa belöningar inom blockchain-ekosystemet”, sa Ophelia Snyder, medgrundare och VD för 21Shares. ”Vi är dedikerade till att bemyndiga investerare med innovativa produkter som Toncoin Staking ETP, vilket bekräftar vårt engagemang för att driva utvecklingen av investeringsmöjligheter för blockchain.”

Nyckelfunktioner i 21Shares Toncoin Staking ETP:

  • Toncoin (TON): En decentraliserad lager 1-blockkedja, nu känd som ”The Open Network” efter förvärvet av TON Foundation. Toncoin fungerar som den ursprungliga valutan för TON-nätverket.
  • Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Consensus: TON använder en PoS-konsensusmodell för skalbarhet och nätverkstillförlitlighet, och erbjuder snabba, transparenta och säkra betalningstjänster med minimala avgifter.
  • Mission: The Open Network syftar till att skapa ett heltäckande ekosystem av användarvända tjänster som superappen WeChat, som erbjuder produkter som en decentraliserad lagring, decentraliserad VPN, en betalningslösning och en inbyggd plånbok för att hålla krypto direkt i meddelandeappen. Det kännetecknas av dess gemenskapsdrivna tillvägagångssätt och flexibla arkitektur, som tillgodoser behoven hos typiska konsumenter.
  • Skalbarhet: TONs avancerade skalbarhet säkerställer snabb avvecklingstid för transaktioner på ett kostnadseffektivt sätt, vilket möjliggör snabb nätverkstillväxt utan negativa effekter på miljön.
  • Stöd från Telegram: Trots separation stöder Telegram TON som sin favoritplattform för web3-infrastruktur, vilket framhäver dess engagemang för blockchain-innovation.

21Shares Toncoin Staking ETP kommer att vara tillgänglig för handel på SIX Exchange från och med onsdagen den 27 mars 2024, vilket ger investerare en sömlös väg att engagera sig i Toncoin-insatser och utnyttja de potentiella belöningarna med insatsekosystemet.

För mer information om 21Shares Toncoin Staking ETP, besök 21Shares hemsida.

NamnISINKortnamnValutaBörsListningsdatum
21Shares Toncoin Staking ETPCH1297762812TONN SEUSDSIX Swiss Exchange27 mars 2024

Om 21.co/21Shares

21.co är världens ledande företag när det gäller att tillhandahålla tillgång till krypto genom enkla och lättanvända produkter. 21.co är moderbolag till 21Shares, världens största emittent av börshandlade kryptovalutaprodukter (ETPs) – som drivs av Onyx, en proprietär teknologiplattform som används för att emittera och driva cryptocurrency ETP för 21Shares och tredje part. Företaget grundades 2018 av Hany Rashwan och Ophelia Snyder. 21Sharesis registrerat i Zürich, Schweiz med kontor i Zürich, London och New York. För mer information, besök 21Shares hemsida.

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FUD vs. Fundamentals: What Happened This Week in Crypto?

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Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) have clouded Ethereum's business prospects after CoinDesk reported on March 20 that Ethereum’s Github repository seemed to confirm rumors about ongoing investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). If true, this could be business as usual for the regulator as it nears its deadline for a decision on ETH spot ETFs on May 23. Nevertheless, statements about the investigations are vague and ambiguous, whether they're focused on the Ethereum Foundation or the companies dealing with it, making it a curious case to monitor closely.

• Ethereum: FUD vs. Fundamentals

• Arbitrum Doubles Down on Dencun’s Cost-Efficiency

• Optimism Strides Towards Full Decentralization

• Can This Major Upgrade Help Fantom Level Up With Solana?

Ethereum: FUD vs. Fundamentals

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) have clouded Ethereum’s business prospects after CoinDesk reported on March 20 that Ethereum’s Github repository seemed to confirm rumors about ongoing investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). If true, this could be business as usual for the regulator as it nears its deadline for a decision on ETH spot ETFs on May 23. Nevertheless, statements about the investigations are vague and ambiguous, whether they’re focused on the Ethereum Foundation or the companies dealing with it, making it a curious case to monitor closely.

How did the market react? Nothing dramatic. In the past week, despite Ethereum experiencing a 10% drop on the day of Coindesk’s report, it quickly recovered the following day with a 10% rebound and shrugging off the uncertainty, ultimately closing the week with a modest 1.78% gain. The below on-chain metrics are also worth noting:

• ETH deposits on centralized exchanges increased by ~3%, well within the 3-5% average increases seen in May 2021, 2022, and 2023, which is understandable as investors capitalize on reaching the $4K milestone.

• The market-value-to-realized-value (MVRV) is one of crypto’s leading on-chain indicators comparing Ethereum’s current market price to its historical average transaction price, to estimate its valuation based on past trends.. As shown in Figure 1, the MVRV went from 2.23 on March 13 to 1.65 on March 24, indicating that the network continues to be undervalued when compared to previous bull runs. For example, in May 2021, the MVRV Z-score was at 5.57 when Ethereum traded at around $3.9K.

Figure 1: Ethereum’s MVRV Z-Score (7D Moving Average)

Source: Glassnode

On a more positive note, the biggest news for Ethereum was arguably BlackRock’s announcement of tokenizing treasury bonds and repo agreements. The asset manager has partnered with Securitize as a transfer agent and tokenization platform to launch their yield-bearing fund, BUIDL, on top of Ethereum. As shown in Figure 2, Ethereum accounts for 80.33% of tokenized assets, if we exclude fiat-collateralized stablecoins. BlackRock has joined the likes of Franklin Templeton and Citigroup, among others, in tokenizing real-world assets. The deployment on Ethereum reiterates our thesis that the network will continue playing a vital role across the tokenization realm. So far, there has been a total of over $2 billion worth of commodities and government securities, among other traditional assets tokenized on several networks. Thanks to blockchain technology, these tokenized assets boast several advantages over their traditional form due to their transparency, around-the-clock trading, and faster settlement.

Figure 2: Tokenization Market Share by Chain

Source: 21.co on Dune Analytics

On the fundamental side, Ethereum’s core developers have launched an initiative called “pump the gas” to raise the gas block limit from 30 to 40 million (and even more), decreasing gas fees on Ethereum’s mainnet by as much as 33%. The gas block limit is the maximum amount of gas that all transactions combined can consume within a single block. The discussion of expanding the gas block limit has been up for debate since Vitalik brought it up in January 2024. However, some are not in favor of the initiative, arguing that EIP-4844 has already increased the block size and that it could lead to potential risks of network spam and attacks.

Arbitrum Doubles Down on Dencun’s Cost-Efficiency

With Optimism, Base, and Arbitrum all witnessing transaction fees drop by over 90% post-Dencun’s activation, the total number of transacting addresses across their networks has almost doubled since then, as seen below in Figure 3. However, Arbitrum has taken a step further by introducing the ATLAS upgrade, aiming to drive fees down even more. Specifically, ATLAS decreased what’s known as the “L1 surplus fees” from 32 gwei to zero while lowering the L2 base fees from 0.1 to 0.01 gwei, helping the network achieve a median transaction fee of ~$0.002, the lowest since October 2022. Applications built on Arbitrum can reap the benefit of the upgrade right away without any modifications from their end, while L3 networks built on top of Arbitrum, using its Orbit framework, need to implement the upgrade to capitalize on the blob posting mechanism to experience lower fees.

Figure 3: Number of Transacting Addresses across Base vs. Optimism vs, Arbitrum

Source: msibl7 on Dune

Optimism Strides Towards Full Decentralization

On the other hand, Optimism is progressing towards its vision of full decentralization. For context, the network currently relies on a single sequencer, a validator that posts transaction data from Optimism on Ethereum, run by the Optimism Foundation itself. This sequencer is overseen by an elected security council, which acts as a custodian managing the protocol upgrades and the security of the network by ensuring that the sequencer is acting honestly, amongst other security-related tasks. This means that only a handful of eight elected individuals can contest the validity of transactions if they suspect any malicious behavior. Nevertheless, this was a temporary setup until Optimism released its “Fault Proof” system, which determines the validity of transactions before they’re posted on Ethereum’s mainnet. This enables a proactive rather than a reactive approach to maintaining transaction integrity. In line with this, Optimism rolled out the second iteration of the system on Sepolia testnet after releasing the first in October of last year, with the full launch expected later this year, where anyone can submit a fault-proof and dispute the validity of transactions.

Can This Major Upgrade Help Fantom Level Up With Solana?

The Ethereum alternative blockchain is set to implement its upcoming Sonic upgrade in the spring of 2024. Although the date isn’t determined yet, the next network iteration will position Fantom as one of the most scalable networks within the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ecosystem, capable of rivaling Solana’s efficiency. Namely, Sonic introduces the Fantom Virtual Machine (FVM), a new operating system facilitating close to 2000 transactions per second (TPS) based on the latest testnet results while adopting parallelization to enhance transaction throughput. Further, Sonic achieves transaction finality in under a second, with transaction fees costing less than a cent while introducing Carmen, a new database model that reduces the storage costs for validators by close to 90%. This enables them to participate in the network’s security validation in a cost-effective manner while expediting the time required for the foundation to spin up a new archival validator node from several weeks to 36 hours.

All in all, the excitement in anticipation of the upgrade can be seen with Fantom’s price growing by 200% over the last 30 days, while its DEX trading volume has surged by close to 12-fold, growing from $5M and peaking at $60M last week. Fantom’s stablecoin assets under management has also increased by about 150% over the same period since the lows of October 2023, implying that new users are increasingly depositing capital into the network to experiment with its ecosystem, akin to what was seen during the run-up of the ETF-led rally last October. Nevertheless, Fantom shows promising growth prospects as its P/E ratio continues to decrease despite its recent price gains, as shown below in Figure 4. This indicates that transaction volume and network utilization are outpacing its market capitalization growth, potentially implying that Fantom remains relatively undervalued.

Figure 4: NVT: The P/E-Equivalent of Blockchain Networks

Source: Glassnode

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The information provided does not constitute a prospectus or other offering material and does not contain or constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of any offer to buy securities in any jurisdiction. Some of the information published herein may contain forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties and that actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. The information contained herein may not be considered as economic, legal, tax or other advice and users are cautioned to base investment decisions or other decisions solely on the content hereof.

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BlackRock säger att det finns låg efterfrågan på Ethereum

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Robert Mitchnick, chef för digitala tillgångar på BlackRock, har avslöjat att kunderna till finansgiganten visar låg efterfrågan på Ethereum, den näst största kryptovalutan efter börsvärde. Samtidigt finns det "väldigt lite intresse överallt", vilket innebär att investeringsbolaget inte ens överväger mindre kryptovalutor.

Robert Mitchnick, chef för digitala tillgångar på BlackRock, har avslöjat att kunderna till finansgiganten visar låg efterfrågan på Ethereum, den näst största kryptovalutan efter börsvärde. Samtidigt finns det ”väldigt lite intresse överallt”, vilket innebär att investeringsbolaget inte ens överväger mindre kryptovalutor.

Mitchnick har erkänt att kryptovalutacommunityt vill se finansjätten utforska fler alternativ, men han säger att BlackRock fortfarande främst fokuserar på Bitcoin. Bitcoin, enligt chefen, är ”överväldigande prioritet nummer ett.”

Nyligen gick BlackRock med i tokeniseringsracet genom att lansera en ny fond baserad på Ethereum-nätverket. Fonden, som officiellt lanserades tidigare i veckan, gör det möjligt att tjäna amerikanska dollaravkastning med hjälp av blockchain-teknik.

I november ansökte BlackRock också om att lansera en Ethereum börshandlad fond. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sköt dock upp sitt beslut om denna ansökan tidigare i mars.

Som rapporterats av U.Today kollapsade oddsen för att en Ethereum ETF skulle godkännas på grund av regulatoriskt tryck. För en vecka sedan bad senatorerna Jack Reed och Laphonza Butler specifikt SEC-ordförande Gary Gensler att inte godkänna ETFer för fler kryptovaluta-tokens.

Samtidigt har SEC enligt uppgift lanserat en aggressiv kampanj för att klassificiera Ether som ett värdepapper, vilket ytterligare minskar sannolikheten för att en Ether-baserad spot-ETF ska godkännas inom en snar framtid.

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