Crypto News Bites 2022/11/25
Binance $1b industry rescue plan, can scale to $2b / Bybit $100m fund for institutional clients / Cold wallet Black Friday deals
Top News Summaries
Binance pledges $1b rescue plan, industry heavyweights committed, 150 companies sought support. Bybit also announces $100m fund to support insto clients.
Crypto Black Friday Sales! Not financial advice but I WOULD GET A COLD WALLET
Belgium regulator says BTC & ETH are NOT securities. SEC to lose case against XRP soon? Defi Alliance. 3 dapps winding down.
MetaMask collects your IP and address.
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Market Overview
Crypto markets had a calm day for US Thanksgiving holiday. Most people probably stepped away from the screens and charts to enjoy the time with family, despite having to answer the below question. That said, clearly crypto is seeing adoption if it’s a topic of conversation every year at Thanksgiving… right?
FTX Bankruptcy Fallout
Binance announces their crypto rescue plan, pledging $1b with intent to raising it to $2b if necessary. So far, Jump Crypto, Polygon Ventures, Aptos Labs, Animoca Brands, GSR, Kronos and Brooker Group have committed to participating with an initial aggregate commitment of $50m. Binance published the public address holding the funds here. Around 150 companies have applied for funding.
Bybit announces a $100m institution support fund, to help market makers and high frequency trading institutions with financial/operational difficulties up to $10m per client. The impact of FTX will sharply reduce market liquidity, and this helps to build it back up.
In the aftermath of FTX, Galaxy Digital’s CEO expects a slow grind to built trust. I have similar thoughts, FTX’s collapse probably set the industry back by years.
Decentralized Applications
The Decentralized Finance (DeFi) Derivatives Alliance was formed from three futures Decentralized Exchanges (DEX), GMX, Perpetual Protocol & Drift. Aims to provide greater visibility and integrity in the space. First step to build an aggregated analytics dashboard showing exchange reserves and health. Welcomes global regulatory bodies to join them in discussion. This hopes to separate DeFi from Centralized Finance (CeFi) which is what Three Arrows, Voyager, Celsius, FTX etc all were.
Ardana, a decentralized stablecoin ecosystem on the Cardano ADA ecosystem, suddenly halts development due to funding. Effects from crypto winter.
Quix, the NFT marketplace on the Optimism blockchain, is winding down. Sister NFT marketplace Stratos on the Arbitrum blockchain is also winding down. Both due to funding as well. They will open source the code allowing anybody to build a new marketplace and make improvements. Crypto winter.
Akula, an open source app that provides Ethereum implementation in the Rust programming language (Ethereum contracts written in Solidity), is winding down, explaining that a more well funded competitor allegedly copied their open source code to do the exact same thing. Perhaps startups should keep their code closed until they gain enough traction before releasing as open source?
Regulation / Govt
Belgium’s regulators say cryptocurrencies without an issuer such as BTC and ETH are NOT securities. This could help push other global regulators such as the US SEC to accept similar classification rules. Currently SEC has sued Ripple Labs saying XRP is a security, which seems to be coming to an end with speculation that XRP will win the case.
EU Parliament passed a vote on the Digital Decade policy program, helping businesses and public services digitalize their work in support of a EU blockchain infrastructure. Goals are multi-country projects such as building common data infrastructure, improving high-performance computing, rolling out 5G internet corridors and investing in blockchain and web3 solutions by 2030. Blockchain is here to stay.
Adoption
Russia intends to launch a national crypto exchange, reportedly supported by both the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank of Russia. Is crypto the way forward for countries to bypass sanctions?
Renowed digital artist Beeple exhibit in Hong Kong art museum M+.
Crypto Black Friday Sales
Not financial advice. I would get a cold wallet, and learn to self custody. Two great options:
TradingView offers 60% discount on their charting services
Also multiple exchanges offering free crypto for opening an account, but after FTX…
Dark Side of Crypto
MetaMask, the largest Ethereum wallet, updated its privacy policy, infuriating crypto Twitter users. "Infura will collect your IP address and your Ethereum wallet address when you send a transaction". I went to chainlist.org to choose a different Ethereum RPC.
A random protocol claimed that they were partners with crypto security firm Certik, but the latter denied this. As the crypto saying goes, don’t trust, verify. Go to the smart contract auditor’s website to see which protocols have done audits.
7 year old BTC moved today, around 10k BTC worth $167m started moving. Wallet received BTC when it was $297 in 2015, an almost 5600% gain, linked to the 2014 Mt Gox hack. If they somehow move the coins to a KYC exchange we could find the identity of the hacker.
Crypto lender Hodlnaut, which halted withdrawals earlier in August due to the collapse of the Terra blockchain, is being investigated by Singapore. Police looking into allegations of cheating and fraud. The exchange revealed it had $13m of crypto stuck on bankrupt exchange FTX.
Ongoing Trends
Bankruptcy of 2nd largest crypto exchange FTX causes contagion risks. How many funds & protocols have yet to announce their exposure?
Decentralization no longer just a tagline. Centralized to decentralized movement for remaining crypto traders & investors.
Global crypto adoption and increased regulation, launches of Centralized Bank Digital Currencies.
Bitcoin mining industry consolidation as margin squeezed on low BTC prices and higher costs (electricity, funding, hashrate difficulty etc).
Macro: US CPI peaking & potential slowing of Fed rate hikes / Russia Ukraine war may be thawing / China pivoting from zero-Covid policy, small steps to re-opening.
Tokens Mentioned Today
BTC ETH ADA XRP