All Been Crypto — Week 4 Oct 2024
We are at the hope stretch for the year, 4Q has officially started and it’s now 82 days till christmas. And while everyone is eyes glued on US election and how historically Bitcoin and crypto has done well into this set up — well we had a down week now briefly dipping below 60k BTC and -6.5% Wow. Similar for ETH -10% WoW and tokens with unlocks did even worse ENA -24%, TIA -22%, WLD -20%. The only major ones flat WoW are APT and SUI where renewed interest came from the alternative L1 narrative. Worst of the whole space however did the new TON meme coins who dropped (literally) wether its Hamster, Dogs or Cats they are all down 50% or more within a few days. So sentiment is not overheated to say the least. All the while traditional markets are climbing new highs and so is gold. In the news are a bit lighter this week, a lot about new investment products with Bitwise filing for a spot XRP ETF and Grayscale launching an AAVE trust. There’s the CVVC summit in Zug where they managed to get together the majority of Ethereum founders and gave them an award for the 10th year anniversary. We got CZ back out of prison, Caroline going soon and Lamborghini teaming up with Animoca to launch NFT versions of the sport car. Enjoy reading!
Bat Tai Chi — btc21@mail.com
HEADLINES:
Visa launching Tokenized Asset Platform
The Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP) is a new product designed to help financial institutions issue and manage fiat-backed tokens on blockchain networks. Participating financial institution partners can create and experiment with their own fiat-backed tokens in a VTAP sandbox. Full launch is expected in 2025. Everyone wants in on the stablecoin game. PYUSD got listed on OKX this week and got a bit of a head start but obviously Visa and Mastercard have a much larger reach and deeper ins to the existing TradFi players. BBVA the second largest Spanish bank already lining up. But not all is rosy with VISA they were also target of a DOJ lawsuit alleging them to illegally monopolizing the debit card market so they are not a darling of regulators to be clear.
Update: SEC vs Ripple
The SEC has appealed a recent ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals in its case against Ripple, arguing the decision contradicts established Supreme Court precedent and securities laws. The appeal follows a partial victory for Ripple in 2023, where a judge ruled that its programmatic XRP sales did not violate securities laws, though direct sales to institutional investors did. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse criticized the SEC’s move, asserting that XRP’s status as a non-security remains intact despite the ongoing legal battle. The case, which began in 2020, revolves around whether Ripple’s sale of XRP constituted unregistered securities offerings.
New wrappers for old coins
Another sign of confidence where market thinks the courts will end up on XRP is the filing of Bitwise for an XRP spot ETF with the SEC. They said BNY will serve as the trust’s administrator and that Coinbase Custody Trust Company, LLC will be the custodian for the spot XRP ETF. Same time Grayscale came out with a new trust product for AAVE. They started a new fund called Grayscale Aave Trust and it sounds very much like their other products where they just buy a single token in this case AAVE. Now given muted interest from institutions on the spot ETH ETFs I tend to be a bit more skeptical that these new wrappers actually will have a large target audience and bring in a ton of fresh money but I get it why these platforms are launching them. You have to differentiate and compete and the first one always gets the most liquidity so of course there’s a race to that. And who knows maybe the boomer XRP army wants to put their 401k money into an XRP ETF. With AAVE since it’s a governance token it will be particularly interesting if the trust will actually engage in such behavior because atm most US institutional holders don’t mainly because of regulatory concerns.
QUOTES:
Somehow, they still haven’t gotten the message: they [SEC] lost on everything that matters. Ripple, the crypto industry, and the rule of law have already prevailed. While we’ll fight in court for as long as we need, let’s be clear: XRP’s status as a non-security is the law of the land today — and that does not change even in the face of this misguided — and infuriating — appeal.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse
A lot of people — and I don’t want to name names, but Solana — are taking good ideas and they’re just going, ‘Well, what if we just centralized everything? It’ll be faster, it’ll be more efficient, it’ll be cheaper. Anything significant built on the network could easily be disrupted if states started moving toward it.
Edward Snowden
gm, the food taste so good… And what a luxury to be able to have more than one piece of fruit per day! I know some of you may have a lot of questions. I won’t have all the answers. Let me chill for a bit. Then figure out the next steps. There are always more opportunities in the future than there were in the past. I want to thank everyone for your support. It meant a lot to me, and kept me strong in the darkest moments. A few quick updates/thoughts: Giggle Academy has been going well, and will be a big part of my life for the next few years. Will continue to invest in blockchain/decentralized technologies, AI, and biotech. I am a long term investor who care about impact, not returns. I will also dedicate more time and funding to charity (and education). I have some rough ideas. Still working on my book. About 2/3 done, I think. Writing a book is a lot more work than I anticipated, but will see this one through. Oh,binance seems to be doing well without me back-seat-driving, which is excellent. Every founder’s dream! Stay tuned. See you at the conferences
Changpeng Zhao (CZ) — Binance Founder
All Been Crypto — Week 4 Oct 2024 was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.