The bear is waking up after slumbering to the winter times. It is not here yet, but could be soon. The bull is on its knees. Let's see what happened this week!
South Korea is working on clear regulations, tackling on financial crimes and tax evasion using cryptocurrency as payment. Local crypto exchanges need to be related to local banks to have the real names linked to accounts. Coinbase CEO sold amlost 750K shares for a mere $291M, followed by some of the exec and early investors. Still, they only sold 10% of the shares they hold, basically getting back some profit. Do not shame them, but try to learn for it, and pocket 10% of your big profits when you get them. Coinbase Pro also listed USDT (Tether) with a reference that the company behing it has reserves fully backing each token. This is a question as old as crypto, and yet in March a attestation was published telling us that they got $35B in reserves, without telling what are those reserves. Right? Turkey's local exchange market is not doing well either, with two of the most used halting trading with no prior notice.
Mark Cuban is investing in CryptoSlam, a NFT data agregator, previously being involved in SuperRare and Nifty's (another two NFT related projects). Do you see a pattern?
China admitted that crypto are financial assets, at the moment being much more friendlier than US. But, as financial assets, they will need to be regulated, right? Wall Street Journal criticized SEC approach against Ripple, warning that the lack of legislation to protect the people will harm the real investors. Ripple was victorious in the pre-trial rullings, but that may not be enough to win the lawsuit. Deutsche Telekom is now a CELO supporter, due to its features (a tool that can map your phone number to a public key of your blockchain wallet, simplifying access to cryptocurrency). Venmo will let its users to buy, sell and hold crypto soon enough (most probably they will start with BTC, BCH, ETH and LTC), but you can't use your crypto to make payments. They are targeting the people who just start to learn about crypto. Basically just another Paypal. Hold your horses, they are in fact owned by Paypal. Joke on me. WeWork is another big name letting their clients to pay rent for their offices using BTC, ETH, USDC or Paxos, and Coinbase is one of their tenants. In US, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) are recognized in Wyoming as Limited Liability Corporations (LLC), but need to be based in the state.
On Monday, Doge was $0.41, Tuesday $0.40, reaching the rank#6 in terms of market cap, Wendnesday decreased a bit, towards $0.32, next day being only $0.26. Right now is $0.24, what do you think about that?
Also on Monday, a power outage in China crashed and burned BTC, after the hash rate dropped. Then some random weird tweets sent the bitcoin under $50k, where they are still right now. A record number of liquidations from BTC Futures mainly this week, with $10B just monday (59 to 52K). Not only bad news, Okex adopted Bitcoin Lightning network, being the seventh exchange to do this. Smaller fees for everyones. Badger DAO is working on a one-click solution to bring BRC to DEFI. Signature Bank in New York will offer soon bitcoin-backed cash loans. In UK, NatWest will not accept corporate clients dealing with BTC. Why? They said they blame the UKs Financial Conduct Authority for this move. Yeah, the reasoning is, BTC and the other cryptocurrencies are much more riskier than shares. Do not do that, keep your sabings in the bank, we offer 0.05% interest yearly. Nothing dodgy here, we pinky swear!
Canada approved 3 new ETH ETFs, with Gemini as sub-custodian. Ethereum seems to improve slowly, with acceptable gas fees at the moment, under attack from its competitors (Binance Smart Chain and Solana short term, and Polkadot and Cosmos long-term). Fantom and Avalanche are also coming strong from behind.
A public consultation was done in order to find out what people expect from the digital Euro. They got various ideas, starting from blockchain use to prevent counterfeiting, no additional costs, security and privacy being the main requests. Yet, there are no future plans, this option being just explored at the moment. I presume that US will be the next one to launch a CBDC, with EU following after a couple of years. Morgan Stanley said that CBDCs are not a threat for cryptocurrency, just for stablecoins. But then, how stable are they?
Seems that Facebook is finally making a move, starting a smal-scale experiment with Diem on April 20, with P2P transactions and maybe option to buy/sell goods and services. But the thought of 2.8B customers able to use DIEM is not accepted kindly by the regulators, with G20 wanting to delay launch until CBDC are ready, and EU threatening them with a full ban if they try to do it as a Switzerland entity. Facebook was headhunting few experts in financial crime and regulations, in order to hasten the project. Binance is also doing the same move, getting one of the ex-head of Office of the Comptroller of Currency, Brian Brooks as Binance CEO, recruited straight outta Compton, pardon me Coinbase.
And then, the Hell break lose, and an Angelic Chorus started to sing ''Ampleforth, Forth, Forth...''. 75 thousands wallets are qualified for the Ampleforth governance token, called Forth. If you ever had some Ampleforth in your Metamask, Coinbase wallet or Trust wallet, you may be eligible to participate into the airdrop. I got ten grants, send two to the bank, kept the rest. As usual, Binance and Kucoin, and few others, did not supported the airdrop, most probably keeping it for themselves.
Sushiswap tried some new features (read gimmicks) like BentoBox (single vault hodling all assets deposited by users, accesible via DAPPs, and that sounds quite risky to me) and Kashi Lending (lending and margin trading platform powered by isolated lending paird, on top of Bento - hard to understand, first Bento has all the assets, now this one is using isolated lending pairs). I do not know why, but i never liked Sushi, despite their succes and machiavelic moves. To me, they look just like a dodgy clone of Uniswap. By the way, Uniswap just launched their version 3, and this one, combined with Berlin upgrade on ETH, made Ethereum almost manageable. Yes, you sill have $14-20, but they are far from the 3 digits gas fee that I was rejecting in the past two months. I managed to move some of the ERC20 crypto actually, after they were stuck in the wallet for months. Matic is slowly shutting down their nodes (Matic Foundation nodes) letting the external validators to support the network as their Phase 3 is live now. Solana mainnet Beta is also going live right now, a good moment to make some quick profits, if you are a SOL Hodler.
End of the week found us mostly in red, with few exceptions (thank you for the CAKE). Cosmos, Binance, Solana, all went down, with the worst performer being Polkadot. Wow, a good time to buy another KSM, i say, while the market crashed and burned.
And these being said, we stop here for the moment, see you next week.
All the best,
George
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