2024-11-16 17:29

The price surge is consistent with the recent bullish positioning in the options market. XRP's price has nearly doubled this week to above $1. The SEC's legal troubles could have a bearing on the agency's pending appeal in the Ripple ruling, which said that XRP sales on public exchanges did not fall under the definition of a security. The price surge is consistent with the recent bullish positioning in the options market. XRP surged past the $1 mark Saturday, hitting a three-year high amid the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's mounting legal troubles. The payments-focused cryptocurrency surged over 27%, reaching a high of $1.27 at one point, a level last seen in November 2021, CoinDesk data show. Prices have nearly doubled this week, boosting the market capitalization to $63.59 billion. On Thursday, a group of state attorneys general and the DeFi Education Fund sued the SEC, alleging unconstitutional overreach, accusing the regulator of overstepping the boundaries in bringing enforcement actions against digital asset exchanges. The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky said the SEC has unilaterally asserted regulatory authority over cryptocurrencies, classifying them as investment contracts like stocks and bonds. It added that digital assets are just assets and not investment contracts and the SEC's approach encroaches upon states' rights to police the industry on their own. The lawsuit could have far-reaching implications, especially on the SEC's pending appeal in the Ripple case, which is one of the biggest factors impacting XRP's price. In December 2020, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Ripple Labs, accusing the company of conducting an unregistered securities offering by selling XRP, which the SEC classified as a security. In July of last year, a U.S. court ruled that Ripple's XRP sales to institutional investors qualified as securities transactions. However, it also determined that sales of XRP on public exchanges did not fall under the definition of a security. In October, the SEC appealed against this ruling, seeking further clarification on the legal status of XRP. Founders of the newsletter service LondonCryptoClub said that XRP's surge stems from expectations for friendlier regulation under President-elect Donald Trump's administration. "XRP is a key beneficiary of a more friendly administration under Trump and particular from a likely outgoing of [SEC chief] Gary Gensler who has had Ripple Labs tied up in legal battles which could disappear along with his departure," founders told CoinDesk. "There's even speculation of a potential meeting between Ripple CEO and Trump reinforcing the sense that the regulatory environment is set to be significantly more favorable to companies and tokens, such as Ripple," the founders added. Note that the price surge above $1 is consistent with the bullish positioning in the options market early this week. Besides, it's accompanied by a surge in futures open interest to a record high of $1.53 billion, according to data source Coinalyze. An uptick in open interest alongside a price rally is said to validate the uptrend. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/11/16/xrp-skyrockets-past-1-as-sec-faces-legal-troubles-and-favorable-regulatory-shift-looms/

2024-11-15 22:30

The industry is hopeful, but the only crypto-ish thing he's done since the election is sell shirts with the DOGE dog. Donald Trump and the Republican Party at large had a strong 2024 election, winning the presidency, Senate and House. This almost certainly guarantees crypto legislation will advance and become law sometime in the next two years. It also heralds a potentially softer approach from regulators toward the sector. Taking stock The narrative Last week Donald Trump won his second presidential race in three tries. During his campaign, Trump said the U.S. would become the crypto capital of the planet. Soon we'll see whether and how he'll deliver on those promises. So far, his only official announcement since the election that has any — even weak — sort of crypto tie is appointing X/SpaceX/Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramasway to head up the "Department of Government Efficiency," some sort of advisory panel tasked with reducing government costs. DOGE, of course, is the ticker symbol for the popular memecoin. Trump is selling shirts with the DOGE dog, or at least a lookalike, as well as his and Musk's faces. Why it matters The U.S. — and global — crypto industry will be watching to see just how, exactly, Trump shapes policies and regulations around the sector and what that means for businesses. Breaking it down There are a few broad conclusions I think we can draw based on the results so far. 1. The crypto industry confirmed that in a post-Citizens United world, money talks. Fairshake dumped $40 million into Senator-elect Bernie Moreno's Ohio race against incumbent Senator Sherrod Brown. Brown ran ahead of Democrats' presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, but ultimately still lost his seat amid Republicans' broader sweep last week. Overall, Fairshake has backed over 50 candidates who won their races, and may see just five candidates lose their general election races (as of press time, that number is three; California's 45th district and Alaska's at-large district are still counting votes). We'll have a deeper analysis on Fairshake and its track record soon. 2. The chances of some kind of crypto bill passing have gone up. Republicans will hold the House, Senate and White House. While crypto probably won't be priority number one, the chances of some kind of crypto legislation — whether that's a new version of the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (aka FIT21), a stablecoin bill, a Bitcoin strategic reserve bill or something else entirely — passing through the legislative process and becoming law have increased dramatically. Just what that bill may actually be is less clear. Industry groups are coordinating to get on the same page, said Kristin Smith, CEO of the Blockchain Association, a lobbying organization. "This is the time to get the policy done. We're really excited," she said. 3. We still don't know who may lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, Treasury Department or Commodity Futures Trading Commission. These are probably the three entities most directly of interest to the crypto industry. Trump has named a number of his future Cabinet nominees, including Representative Matt Gaetz as attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services and Pete Hegseth to run the Department of Defense Former SEC Chair Jay Clayton, who set in motion much of Gary Gensler's SEC crackdown on crypto, will be Trump's pick to run the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York — i.e. the Department of Justice branch best known for pursuing corporate crime. This is the team that prosecuted Sam Bankman-Fried and is prosecuting Roman Storm, Keonne Rodriguez, William Lonergan Hill, KuCoin and others. While some names have floated around for some of these financial regulator roles, we don't yet know who will actually receive the nods or how they'll direct policy. On the SEC front in particular, a new chair may not mean that the regulator's active cases against exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken or Binance are immediately dismissed. There are many ways the cases could be settled, Smith said, but "I don't think it's a guarantee" that they will be settled or settled quickly. Former SEC attorneys and staff agree, Jesse Hamilton reported. In the Treasury Department, both the head of the department itself, as well as the Undersecretary for Terorism and Financial Intelligence — the role now held by Brian Nelson — can affect crypto policymaking (recall that under Trump's first term, Steven Mnuchin proposed having wallets collect know-your-customer information and oversaw the U.S.'s role in driving the Financial Action Task Force to implement the so-called travel rule for crypto). And, of course, if Congress passes a bill directing the CFTC to become a primary market regulator for some digital assets, whoever heads that agency up will have a lot of sway over how exactly that happens. Stories you may have missed Crypto Is a Clear Winner With Trump as GOP Takes Senate, Sherrod Brown Loses and Gensler Likely Heading for Door: Some immediate post-game analysis from CoinDesk's Jesse Hamilton. Former FTX CTO Gary Wang Asks Court for No Jail Time: Gary Wang, the former chief technology officer of FTX, will be sentenced next week. He asked a judge not to send him to prison. A DOJ memo said he also built a tool to help federal agents detect fraud. French Regulator Says It's 'Examining' Polymarket: What the headline says. Detroiters Will Be Able to Pay Their Taxes in Crypto Next Year Using PayPal: Detroit residents will be able to pay taxes in crypto using PayPal as an intermediary. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren Rises Into Role Where Crypto Sector Won't Shake Her: Fairshake's $40 million to sway the Ohio Senate race had one side effect: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, perhaps the Senate's most critical crypto skeptic, will lead Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee. If Democrats retake the Senate in a future election, that means she'll drive legislation that could affect the digital assets sector. This week Thursday 21:00 UTC (9:00 p.m. GMT) Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves gave her first Mansion House speech, laying out a long-term vision for policymaking, including some crypto components. Friday Heather Morgan (i.e. Razzlekhan) was supposed to be sentenced, but that's been moved to Monday at 11:00 a.m. ET in Washington, D.C. Her husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, was sentenced to five years in prison on Thursday. Elsewhere: (AP) Black men and women, including college and primary school students, received racist, anonymous text messages after last week's election. (The Wall Street Journal) President-elect Donald Trump's transition team is looking into creating a panel that would review and potentially recommend the removal of officers with three or four stars, the Journal reported. Relatedly, Reuters reported that the transition team is "drawing up a list of military officers to be fired" at the Pentagon. (404 Media) Meta (Facebook) automatically added an AI chatbot to a mushroom identification group that recommended users saute dangerous mushrooms, 404 Media reported. (U.S. Attorney's Office, SDNY) Prosecutors with the Southern District of New York filed to seize FTX funds allegedly used to bribe officials with the Chinese government. If you’ve got thoughts or questions on what I should discuss next week or any other feedback you’d like to share, feel free to email me at [email protected] or find me on Bluesky @nikhileshde.bsky.social. You can also join the group conversation on Telegram. See ya’ll next week! https://www.coindesk.com/news-analysis/2024/11/15/what-does-trumps-win-mean-for-crypto/

2024-11-15 19:58

The most recent batch of 13F reports filed by institutional investors was uneventful alongside bitcoin's price action during the third quarter. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and other Wall Street banks continued buying shares of the spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds on behalf of clients. While allocations barely changed, most likely due to uneventful price action in bitcoin, the fourth quarter could see renewed interest sparked by recent new all-time highs. Wealth management clients of Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley in the third quarter continued to modestly accumulate (or trade) bitcoin (BTC) via spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds. Given the huge spike in crypto prices following last week's U.S. presidential election, it's possible the action will perk up in the fourth quarter. "The 13F filings mirror the tepid price action in bitcoin in Q3," said James Van Straten, senior analyst at CoinDesk. "Most institutions are slow to deploy capital and to observe trends, and didn't take the initiative to front-run a historically bullish Q4." Goldman Sachs reported holding spot bitcoin ETF shares worth $710 million in the quarter that ended Sept. 30, as clients' allocations into the ETFs nearly doubled, up from $418 million in the previous quarter. Most of the bank's shares were in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), in which it held just shy of 13 million shares. Other top-tier banks/wealth management operations, including Morgan Stanley, Cantor Fitzgerald, Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of America, UBS and HSBC, didn't add to or subtract much from their positions. A new entrant was Australian investment bank Macquarie Group, which purchased 132,355 shares of IBIT worth $4.8 million. Wells Fargo, which has a very minor stake in the ETFs, held most of its shares in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) and Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust (BTC). The positions were reported in 13F filings, a quarterly report that institutional investors with over $100 million in assets under management are required to file to disclose their holdings of certain securities. The deadline for the third quarter was Thursday. BlackRock disclosed a stake of 2.54 million shares, worth $91.6 million as of Sept. 30, in its own fund. The three-month period from the start of July to the end of September signaled a period of flat to downward price action for bitcoin, with the price largely ranging from $53,000 to $66,000. This followed the flat to downward price action during much of the second quarter, so it's possible the tepid institutional interest reflected the pall that sat over the market. Things, of course, have changed in a big way in the fourth quarter amid the run-up to and following the election of crypto-friendly Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency. Bitcoin blasted out of its multi-month range, quickly taking out March's record of $73,700 and continuing this week to as high as $93,400. The recent price action, combined with a hoped-for crypto embrace by the Trump administration taking office in January might inspire a good deal of "fear of missing out" (FOMO) in institutional players and their clients. It's at least somewhat possible the next batch of 13Fs coming after the start of 2025 could prove far more interesting than this quarter's. "I expect a lot of scrambling behind the scenes to make sure institutions have at the bare minimum a 1% allocation due to crypto-friendly president Donald Trump and bitcoin breaking," van Straten said. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/11/15/bank-clients-just-dipped-their-toes-into-bitcoin-etfs-but-q4-could-see-a-fomo-spike/

2024-11-15 16:02

The user held BTC from when it was worth $0.06 all the way up to $90,000. A bitcoin (BTC) whale moved 2,000 BTC, worth $178 million, to Coinbase after holding their stash since 2010, Mempool data shows. The user first received BTC in 2010, when the asset was worth just $0.06 per coin and had a market cap of around $250,000. Trading volume at the time rarely topped $60,000 per day. Inflows to an exchange typically suggest that the BTC will be liquidated. The transfer follows a trend of dormant bitcoin wallets becoming active in light of the recent market-wide price surge after Donald Trump's U.S. election win earlier this month. Glassnode shows a recent uptick in wallets that have been inactive for more than five years, with the figure reaching a two-month high. Bitcoin is currently trading at $88,532 after cooling off from a rally that saw it set a record high of $93,214 on Wednesday. This is not the first time older wallets have woken up as bitcoin started to hit new all-time highs this year. There have been at least two instances this year where millions of BTC from a period of late 2009 to 2011 called the "Satoshi Era" were moved from dormant wallets. Whether those bitcoin were sold is hard to gauge, but not impossible given the massive profits the users could reap at current prices. The trend of more of the older wallets that held bitcoin from its early days coming out of the woodwork could continue, as they might be able to bag massive profits at current price levels. Such moves could limit any additional price upside, even though some traders are still optimistic that bitcoin could reach $100,000—a key psychological level of resistance—by year-end. However, Chainalysis estimated that between 3-4 million BTC has been “lost forever” due to irretrievable private keys, meaning some of these "OG" wallets may never be able to cash out. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/11/15/this-og-bitcoin-investor-just-turned-120-into-178m/

2024-11-15 14:34

Soccer player George Boyd made over 100 Premier League appearances and has now joined crypto ETF issuer Jacobi Asset Management as an ambassador. George Boyd made over 100 Premier League appearances and played in an FA Cup Final in a successful soccer career. Now he's joined Jacobi Asset Management as a bitcoin ambassador. Boyd discovered bitcoin in 2020 and sees it as a better savings tool than property or stocks. George Boyd has had a change of heart. The former Premier League soccer player first heard of bitcoin (BTC) when it was just $1,800 and, like most people at the time, dismissed it. He was happy to follow the advice he'd received at the start of his career and put his cash into real estate and stocks. But the more Boyd, who appeared in more than 100 games for Burnley FC and Hull City, learned, the more his outlook changed. The 39-year-old, who in the course of his career also played in the final of the FA Cup — the U.K.'s most prestigious domestic football competition — is now an ambassador for Jacobi Asset Management and said he sees bitcoin as a great source of generating generational wealth. In common with many sportspeople, Premier League players have a shorter career span than the average person who works until they retire in their mid-60s. For professionals like Boyd, it's not just a case of accumulating wealth, but also preserving it. “So I had a really good agent who looked after me well," Boyd said in an interview. "His mentality was to start me in property, so I bought into the property market and I've also got a stock portfolio. So that was our sort of general thesis. Now, I try to sell them all and then buy more bitcoin.” His journey into bitcoin began in 2020 during the Covid pandemic, although he was initially skeptical of the token and its value. Later, he learned how the current monetary system is driving up inflation and how the old-school mentality of investing through property or savings in a bank doesn’t work anymore. “I think that happened with Covid. Your eyes open even more ... I think the monetary system, once you do go around it and with inflation, how it's stealing from us. I've tried to tell friends, and they're still not listening. But bitcoin just fits today. It's more of a store of value,” Boyd said. Boyd emphasized the importance of understanding the difference between bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies as well as the benefits of self-custody. He also criticized the traditional financial advice given to soccer players and advocated using bitcoin as a means of creating sustainable wealth. “We're not talking [profits], we're talking generational wealth, if you get it right and correct, we're talking about, generations of families being set up for life. I think that's how big it is.” Boyd isn't the first sports personality to come out in support of bitcoin. Some, such as the National Football League (NFL)'s Russell Okung, decided to be paid in bitcoin. Others include the NFL's Odell Beckham Jr. and Premier League's Kieran Gibbs, who sat down on the Peter McCormack podcast “What Bitcoin Did.” “Sports people have a very unique earning window in that their capacity to earn is high yet the window in which to do this is low, unlike most careers," said Peter Lane, co-founder of Jacobi Asset Management, which listed Europe's first bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) in 2023. "Retiring in your 30’s means that you need to make the wealth you’ve accumulated last possibly another 60 years unlike most people who work 40 years to retire for 20 years or so. These guys need an asset that will keep them wealthy for a very long retirement and we feel that bitcoin is in an ideal position to offer that,” Lane said. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/11/15/from-real-estate-and-stocks-former-premier-league-players-new-found-love-of-bitcoin/

2024-11-15 09:51

The potential deployment on a Bitcoin layer 2 by the largest DeFi lending protocol highlights the appetite for harnessing the original blockchain for purposes that are commonplace elsewhere in the crypto ecosystem. Aave is gauging the interest of its community for deployment on Bitcoin layer-2 network Spiderchain. Spiderchain's builder, Botanix Labs, developed the blockchain to be compatible with other networks that use EVM, the software that powers Ethereum and enables smart contracts. Aave, the largest decentralized-finance (DeFi) lending platform, is canvassing its community to gauge the level of interest in deploying on the Bitcoin layer-2 network Spiderchain. The Aave-Chain Initiative (ACI), the driving force behind the protocol, published a call for comments on the proposal by Spiderchain developer Botanix Labs to expand the lender with more than $17 billion in total value locked into the emerging Bitcoin DeFi environment. The idea of deploying on a Bitcoin layer 2 highlights the appetite for bringing functionality that is common elsewhere in the crypto ecosystem to the original blockchain. The bitcoin (BTC) price soared above $90,000 for the first time this week, reaching an all-time high of $93,445, as its dominance of the crypto industry reached 61.38%. Developers of projects native to other networks may be seeking to harness the deep reserves that are held in BTC. Botanix Labs developed Spiderchain to be compatible with protocols that use Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the software that powers Ethereum and enables smart contracts. Botanix's goal is to allow any Ethereum-based application to be compatible with Bitcoin. After feedback is gathered, the protocol will need to identify and mitigate potential security risks. ACI hasn't offered any expected timescale for this process. Aave's native token (AAVE) has fallen just under 8% in the last 24 hours to just under $168, according to CoinDesk Indices. This drop is likely a reflection of the broad pullback across the crypto industry following BTC's surge above $90,000 on Wednesday. Read More: Chainlink Expands to Bitcoin, Helping Original Blockchain With Its Layer-2 Shift https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/11/15/aave-gauges-community-interest-for-expansion-to-bitcoin-layer-2-spiderchain/