BTC ETF Incoming? SEC Accepts Defeat?

In the upcoming bull market, Lamborghinis may become a thing of the past, as Ferrari has recently announced its acceptance of crypto payments for its cars. Who among our readers will be driving their Ferraris to the moon? Those who continue to work diligently and conduct thorough research! LFG!

ICYMI

• Former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison wanted to resign from her position due to her perceived poor performance, but SBF convinced her to stay, fearing that her departure could trigger a bank run on FTX

• The SEC reportedly won't appeal the court decision favoring Grayscale Investments

• Genesis has been ordered to pay $175M to FTX in a lawsuit, leading to the halt of customer withdrawals in its lending division

• Platypus Finance hacked for $2M on Avalanche

• The BOND token from BarnBridge experienced a significant surge following the project voting to comply with the SEC

• Uniswap is bringing out KYC Verification in the form of a Hook for Uniswap V4

• BlockFi CEO Zac Prince testified that the company might have avoided bankruptcy if it hadn't loaned hundreds of millions of dollars to Alameda Research based on what were later found to be misleading financial statements

Catalysts Of The Week

• Monday: British retail bank Chase will ban crypto transactions made by customers from today, Arbitrum Odyssey to continue, ZKX claiming period ends, RoseonX Beta Mainnet launch

• Tuesday: Celestia airdrop claiming ends, Floki plan big announcement; Goldman Sachs earnings report

• Wednesday: RealFevr is launching Organya; Earnings reports for Netflix, Tesla and Morgan Stanley; China releasing Q3 GDP information

• Thursday: Yearn Finance to launch veYFI; Fed Chair Powell to deliver speech

• Friday: Hedera deprecating hether.js library

State of the Market

• Despite a recent surge in crypto markets, there has been a sharp sell-off resulting in the loss of recent gains, though markets have seen a recovery which began over the weekend

• Investors have been reallocating their funds, either into other asset classes seeking refuge from market volatility or holding BTC as a hedge against uncertain market conditions

• Altcoins have been particularly affected, experiencing continuous declines and persistently low prices.

• ETH, in particular, has struggled relative to BTC. This is also an indicator of how altcoins are still in for much lower lows

• Market sentiment remains divided regarding the outlook for the coming months, with some anticipating a drop in BTC’s price, while others foresee a significant surge by year-end

• Moreover, macroeconomic factors such as global liquidity and economic metrics like the PPI and CPI are influencing the confidence of major investors during this period

• Investors need not despair, as market fluctuations are a natural part of the cycle. An intriguing metric to consider is the percentage of BTC long-term balances relative to the total supply, which recently reached its highest point since 2010

• This observation underscores the trend of experienced crypto investors steadily accumulating and holding their assets. It's important to recognize that the bull market is on the horizon, making this an opportune time to accumulate and make preparations

Industry

• Mastercard has successfully experimented with wrapping central bank digital currencies across various blockchains, demonstrating cross-blockchain compatibility

  The trial involved using Mastercard's Multi Token Network to enable CBDCs to purchase Ethereum-based NFTs

• JPMorgan's blockchain-based payment system, Onyx Coin Systems, successfully completed a cross-border payments pilot in partnership with First Abu Dhabi Bank in the Middle East, demonstrating smooth execution and response times

  The pilot project follows a similar successful test in Bahrain with Bank ABC, showcasing the growing adoption of JPMorgan's permissioned distributed ledger technology

• Stephen Ehrlich, co-founder of Voyager Digital, has been charged by the CFTC with fraud and failing to register

  Ehrlich and Voyager are accused of lying to customers, misrepresenting platform safety and finances, and taking risky actions that led to Voyager's bankruptcy and customer losses

• One unlucky user seems have swapped what had been worth around $131,350 in USDR earlier in the day for $0 in USDC

• The FTX estate has staked an 5.5M SOL tokens with Figment

• Tether has promoted its long-time CTO, Paolo Ardoino, to CEO

• WOO Network has agreed to repurchase all tokens and shares previously acquired by bankrupt hedge firm 3AC

• China opens its first industrial park in Shenzhen dedicated to developing the digital yuan (e-CNY)

• DeCurret Holdings plans to launch a Japanese yen-backed digital currency called DCJPY in July 2024

• Moscow Stock Exchange plans to introduce digital financial assets (DFAs) for real estate in 2024

Projects

• GMX was the largest grant recipient from Arbitrum's Short-Term Incentive Program (STIP), receiving 12M ARB tokens worth $15M

  Arbitrum's first grant application round concluded with 29 projects set to receive a total of 49.6M ARB tokens (approximately $40M) to develop and incentivize applications on the L2 network

• CoinList have launched a fund that enables U.S. accredited investors to earn returns from staking digital assets, starting with Ethereum and Near

  The fund supports Ethereum and Near staking, and rewards will be issued in the native token of the purchased fund interests or according to protocol rules. There are plans plans to support other chains like Flow, Sui, and Mina in the future

• BIGTIME, the native token of the blockchain-based multiplayer game Big Time, has experienced an impressive 250% rally in its first week of trading. However, concerns about supply dynamics and potential short-term price manipulation have emerged among analysts

  Analysts have raised concerns about the limited circulating supply, with only 5% of the total token supply airdropped to players and traded on the open market

• Blackdot pioneer generative art tattoos

• Apple Music integrates with STEPN

• Beluga Protocol has been exploited for 59 ETH on Arbitrum

• MetaMask is back on the App store after being removed

• Defillama release Llama Search plugin that allows users to search safely

• Uniswap announce the launch of the Uniswap Wallet on Android. This release brings the full power of the Uniswap interface — including swaps, liquidity provision, and governance

• Unibot announce their new tokenomics structure with the primary goal of incentivizing traders

Crypto Is Undervalued: The total crypto market capitalization has increased. However, despite this increase, the crypto market is still undervalued by approximately 49.63% when compared to the fair value logarithmic regression trend line, indicating potential room for growth in the market

The U.S. Treasury Department's Sanctions On Tornado Cash: Tornado Cash has seen its overall volume decline by close to 85%. However, illicit actors continue to use the service

BTC Transactions: Following an all-time high in daily transactions in September, Bitcoin network transactions have sharply declined, returning to levels not seen since the Ordinals hype began. The drop in transactions appears to be linked to decreased Ordinals inscription activity, which previously drove transaction volume

Good Reads

A helpful cheat sheet that summarizes open interest and cumulative volume delta

Learn to run a Celestia node in under 30 seconds with Vistara

Ignas dives into how VCs are reading current market conditions

Adi unpacks some of the incidents and hacks that resulted in the loss of funds at FTX and Alameda

Reflexivity Research do a deep dive on Aleph Zero

Explore the evolution of data collection and its significance particularly in the context of crypto and blockchain technology

Dive into the TON ecosystem with this detailed read

Read this article for a complete timeline of how FTX and Alameda came to implode

Recommended Tool

Use this useful dashboard to track protocols that are integrating RWAs

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