Tether & Binance Have Targets On Their Backs

GM! Last week was one for the books with the surge to $35K! In other news, it seems that many U.S. politicians increasingly have their sights set on crypto; Senator Warren now has a new ally in Senator Lummis

ICMYI

• US Senator Cynthia Lummis asks the Department of Justice to criminally charge Binance and Tether

• U.S. Treasury Deputy Secretary Adeyemo asserts that crypto is not the main funding source for terrorist groups

• Gensler confirms SEC is reviewing eight to ten applications for spot BTC ETFs

• Bloomberg releases documentary on SBF

• IRS orders Kraken to provide user data

• Gemini sues Genesis over $1.6B worth of BTC Trust shares

• Neo plans ethereum-compatible sidechain for N3 mainnet interoperability

• Solana adds incubator to boost growth and attract founders from rival chains

Catalysts Of The Week

• Monday: Stellar Quarterly Review, Optimism continue token unlock, Radiant Capital RFR-25 Vote; Key macro data coming out of Germany

• Tuesday: Injective Neptune lending testnet, Stacks public SBTC testnet, Boba Avax ends, APEcoin.dev transparency report; EU GDP data

• Wednesday: Lybra Finance grants program launch, Alpaca Finance Binance live AMA, NvirWorld official staking service; US ISM manufaturing PMI

• Thursday: Concordium airdrop event, Yield Games Guild advancement program, Lido DAO new proposal votes; US Fed interest rate decision and press conference* 

• Friday: SuperRare RarePass airdrop artist, Oasis Network IllumineX DEX launch, Sandbox land owners focus group; US Unemployment Rate and ISM Services

State of the market

• Bitcoin experienced significant gains recently, with the price surging from around $29k to just over $35K in one week, prompting discussions about the beginning of a potential bull market

• A major catalyst for this surge was the speculation surrounding a BlackRock ETF with the ticker symbol $IBTC appearing and disappearing on the DTCC website, suggesting the possibility of an imminent ETF approval

• Despite the substantial Bitcoin pump, some analysts anticipate a possible correction or period of consolidation in the market. Others believe we will see prices of $40K before year end

• Stable coins have stopped their decline and have not reached new lows for over three months, signalling a potential reversal in market sentiment

• The imminent launch of spot Bitcoin ETF continues to grow with the focus of most investors revolving around this event, many are expecting it to occur this year

• CME Bitcoin futures open interest surpassed 100,000 BTC for the first time, indicating growing institutional interest in crypto derivatives

• Hong Kong aims to become an international hub for virtual assets, including the regulation of virtual asset exchanges and the introduction of a digital Hong Kong dollar. Many anticipate that the next bull market will see new crypto power centres emerge, Hong Kong being one of them

• Bitcoin dominance increased to 54%, indicating a strong preference for Bitcoin over altcoins in anticipation of the ETF approval

Industry

• FTX is in discussions with three potential buyers to relaunch its trading operations

  FTX is considering various options, including selling the exchange entirely, partnering with another entity to relaunch, or rebooting independently

• FTX has initiated a transfer of $8.6M worth of ETH, LINK, AAVE, and MKR tokens to Binance, potentially indicating preparations for repaying creditors

  The transfer was identified by crypto analytics firm Nansen and could be a step toward restoring lost funds and potentially relaunching the exchange

• Bitfinex Securities is set to list its first tokenized bond, ALT2611, in November

  This bond, issued by Mikro Kapital, will be a 36-month, 10% coupon bond denominated in Tether and involves risks associated with microfinance organizations and financial institutions in several countries

• Turkish government unveils plan to tax and regulate digital assets next year

• Upbit dominates South Korean crypto trading landscape

• VanEck updates filing for spot BTC ETF

• HTX’s Justin Sun reports record profits amid staff cuts

• Taiwan proposes virtual asset management bill for industry supervision and customer protection

• Google to invest another $2B in AI firm Anthropic

• Hacken study indicates 85% of Q3 crypto rug pulls lack audit reports

• Ryder Ripps must pay Yuga Labs nearly $1.6M over copyright infringement lawsuit

Projects

• Celestia (TIA) is conducting its initial listing on KuCoin and Bybit on October 31st, accompanied by a token generation event

  Celestia allocated 60M $TIA tokens (6% of total supply) via Genesis Drop to 7.5k developers and over 576k on-chain addresses. However, the Genesis Drop was  concluded with only 191k claims, with those who claimed seeing their airdrop being multiplied due to most addresses not claiming

• Goldman Sachs views Ethereum's Dencun upgrade, set for the first quarter of 2024, as a significant step toward transforming the blockchain into a scalable settlement layer

  The upgrade will primarily increase data availability for L2 rollups through proto-danksharding, reducing rollup transaction costs and benefiting end users by enabling transactions at a fraction of the price

• Floki is venturing into the trillion-dollar RWA market with the launch of TokenFi, positioning itself as a serious DeFi player

  Floki's new platform empowers users to create crypto without coding, access funds from the Floki community, collaborate with exchanges for liquidity, and tokenize real-world assets that aren't classified as securities

• Investor removed from private round of Memecoin after revealing listing coming on Binance

• Polygon’s POL token upgrade is now live on Ethereum mainnet

• Astrid Finance exploited and will refund users

• Fireblocks uncover ERC4337 Abstraction vulnerability

• ZachXBT release warning to users on LastPass following hack of $4.4M

• LUSD launches on Starknet

• Dydx chain goes live and protocol to distribute network fees to validators and stakers

• Auto compounding protocol Beefy Finance launches on Gnosis 

• Surge in daily exchange volumes, reach their highest levels since spring: Daily exchange volumes across crypto platforms, as measured by the seven-day moving average, surpassed $24B on October 26th. This volume level hasn't been seen since the end of March. Increased market volatility has accompanied the surge in volumes, driven by anticipation and discussions surrounding the potential launch of a spot Bitcoin ETF

• Binance has seen a significant decline in its market share:  Dropping from 74% in December 2022 to 50% in the current month, despite the recent crypto surge. Several factors, including executive exits, regulatory challenges, and legal charges, have contributed to Binance's decline in market share

• Crypto delistings from exchanges are on the rise: More than 3,400 tokens have been dropped this year, marking a record pace for delistings. Major exchanges like Coinbase and Binance have been actively delisting tokens, with Coinbase delisting 80 pairs in October, the highest monthly delisting count since at least 2021

Good Reads

• Cryptunez summarizes important points from the Chainanlysis 2023 Geography of Cryptocurrency report

• Alex dives into GameFi and projects that could launch their own token 

• Trissy unpacks liquidity fragmentation in this derivatives edition focused thread

• Learn about DeFi attack vectors in this detailed post

• Arndxt summarises the different monetization methods that exist for protocols

• Dive into the recently released 2023 Crypto Industry Report by Coingececko

• Castle Capital release a deep dive on Data Availability

• Galaxy release a detailed report on scalability in blockchains

• Learn about the new Trezor in this review by Decrypt

Recommended Tool

• Try out Lore, a new blockchain explorer with enhanced capabilities, and with a UI that is convenient and intuitive

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