All Been Crypto — Week 29 Nov 2024
Thanks Giving week and prices are relatively unchanged BTC still hovering just under 100k currently at 97k while ETH +8% Wow at 3600 and some of the laggards catching a bid. Big outperformers were SAND +90% XLM +75 and ALGO +58%. On the Flipside SOL was down 6% wow and BONK and Floki also -12%. In the news we had a major win for privacy as a court overturned OFACs Tornado Cash sanctions, more companies adopting BTC treasury strategy adopting the MSTR playbook with SOS and RUM to US listcos joining the club. There’s an alleged rug by GFT where token supply increased +50% shortly post Binance delisting announcement. We also learned that Cantor Fitzgerald apparently bought a 5% stake in Tether, and Justin Sun was the biggest investor in Trumps World Liberty Finance. Wild times to be alive, enjoy the ride and reading!
Bat Tai Chi — btc21@mail.com
HEADLINES:
Tornado Cash court win a BIG win for privacy
I’ve been covering the Tornado Cash saga extensively in my weeklies so you probably very familiar with the background but if you’d like to read up see (ABC 12 Aug 2022; ABC 19 Aug 2022; ABC 28 Aug 2022; ABC 17 Sep 2022; ABC 18 Aug 2023; ABC 8 Sep 2023; ABC 26 Jan 2024). This week the industry scored a massive win for privacy. A court in the US ruled Treasuries sanctions against Tornado Cash smart contracts as unlawful. To put it into Paul Grewal’s words “This is a historic win for crypot and all who care about defending liberty”. He’s Coinbase Chief Legal officer and was one of the main supporters of the challenge. What happens now is that the smart contracts need to be removed from OFAC sanction list and US citizens can now once again use the mixer for privacy enhancement. Now this is not just important for Tornado Cash and US citizens seeking onchain privacy but the ruling clearly states that open source, immutable smart contracts can’t be owned by anyone and so are not ‘property’ subject to sanctions. This doesn’t mean that other mixes where devs still have control over the protocol are immune or that the Tornado Cash devs themselves have no legal liabilities BUT it means that a permissionless immutable smart contract can’t be subject to OFACs sanctions under the current US legislation. I also believe this will hopefully drive more upgrades to immutable smart contracts from dev teams in order to protect the projects future.
Microstrategy Market Update
We all know Michael Saylor as the poster child of the current Bull Run, he and Microstrategy have developed a playbook to arbitrage inefficiencies between financial markets and in essence become a massive liquidity sink for BTC. His 21bn equity + 21bn debt 3 year issuance plan is running way ahead of speed and Saylor already trouting more. He’s calling for 100k New Years party at his house and judging by the size he’s buying now he might as well single handedly push us through the sellwall there. His stock is still trading at a mouth watering 2.5% premium over BTC NAV and sell side analysts rush to upgrade their target prices based on BTC price forecasts. The 2x levered MSTR ETFs had gathered insane AUMs propelling the reflexive trade. And while some see resemblance to the GBTC trade during the last cycle I’d like to argue it’s quite different. The only risk Saylor is running is that BTC drops sharply below his liquidation price and then stays there till his debt is due in 4 to 5 years. That’s a long horizon for BTC and so no wonder market is more excited about trading intraday levered MSTR. The stock got poured cold on because of a short seller report from Citron, early backers who said valuations have overextended. This married with some of the Prime Brokers restricting collateral thresholds for the leveraged ETFs have caused a bit of a breather. But you most certainly can bet on Saylor to do one thing buy more BTC.
Pump.Fun — halting live streaming
Pump.Fun was in focus this week not just because MEME’s are still on everyones mind but also because controversial and extreme content being live-streamed on the platform, which has led to calls for moderation or shutdown of the feature. Users were expressing concerns over the platform’s role in promoting harmful behavior for financial gain, with some suggesting that it could attract regulatory scrutiny. We are seeing this become more and more a dark/redroom kind of live streaming with violence and self harm being promoted. Whatever gets people’s attention. Everytime you think things can’t go crazier, well last cycle we had all the XXX rated NFT/coins and don’t even get me started on some of the ICOs so there’s probably still room unfortunately.
QUOTES:
I am not against memes, but meme coins are getting “a little” weird now. Let’s build real applications using blockchain.
CZ
We are thrilled to invest $30 million in World Liberty Financial as its largest investor. The U.S. is becoming the blockchain hub, and Bitcoin owes it to Donald Trump! TRON is committed to making America great again and leading innovation. Let’s go!
Justin Sun
Today, we’re rolling out. Base to everyone on Phantom. You can now: → Swap tokens between Base and Solana → Access your favorite DeFi and NFT apps → Buy ETH and USDC on Base right inside your wallet
Phantom Wallet
All Been Crypto — Week 29 Nov 2024 was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.