All Been Crypto — Week 22 March 2024
A mixed week with BTC down -2.5% ETH underperforming with -5% but ALT L1s like SUI, APT, TON +20–25% and SOL also in the green 4%. Our sell off happened as market was getting nervous around the ETF flows taking a breather with some days this week actually seeing outflows but then FED’s comments got whole markets comfortable again saving the week. In the news we had the SEC going after ETH, Blackrock launching their first tokenized fund on Ethereum, Japanes’s State Pension fund said they seeking information about bitcoin (and gold) as part of a broader strategy overhaul. Sayler continuing to buy the ‘dip’, OKX pulling USDT pairs in Europe, and of course the MEME mania continues with next levels of degereracty. Some ‘cLeVeR’ marketing about burning presales ‘accidentally. Have a look at ZachXBT put some data together showing (at least) 796k SOL (150mm) from 33 pre sales with less than half of these even having a token address. We are back to the ICO era of goldrush. I know i don’t have to tell my readers but maybe you can help warn some others, don’t fall for scammers pls. Enjoy reading!
Bat Tai Chi — btc21@mail.com
HEADLINES:
SEC waging campaign to classify ETH as security
Well that’s the fortune crypto headline, we know it’s election year and Dems are generally not happy with Garry approving the BTC ETF. There just surfaced some indication that suggest the SEC is going against the Etheruem Foundation with subpoenas issued to entities associated with the foundation. The allergation is these legal actions are part of an investigation targeting the foundation’s dealings, with a focus on the non-profit organization headquartered in Switzerland.Now this all has gone back a long time some firms reportedly received subpoenas back in Sep 2022 shortly after the merge. This is very interesting because obviously the SEC approved ETH futures and these trade on CFTC supervised CME. Brian Quintenz a16z head of policy and former CFTC Commissioner put out a good threat here showing how arbitrary these action are. Another story that’s not putting the SEC in a great light happened this week with a judge in the Debt Box case finding them having engaged in bad faith and gross abuse of power. The judge has placed sanctions on the SEC for “abuse of judicial process,” ordered them to pay the legal fees of Debt Box and denied its motion to dismiss the charges without prejudice, meaning it will not be able to refile the same charges at a later date. You can read about the DEBT Box case here. It’s a small firm that offered investment vehicles in the form of “node software licenses” that allowed customers to mine different digital assets. The SEC first sued the firm in July, alleging the project had defrauded investors out of nearly $50 million by selling unregistered securities. Before the case was unsealed, the agency took the drastic step of requesting an ex parte temporary restraining order — an extraordinary step that does not even notify the defendant of the proceedings, and is typically granted only when there is a serious risk they will destroy evidence or flee the U.S. In the DEBT Box case, the SEC claimed the company was actively closing its bank accounts and seeking to move out of the country.
We all in crypto don’t have the highest opinions of the SEC but rulings like these slowly show mainstream how arbitrary the institution has been operating.
Blackrock launches first tokenized fund on Ethereum
They’ve tokenize a ‘moneymarket fund’. The BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund is represented by the blockchain-based BUIDL token, is fully backed by cash, U.S. Treasury bills, and repurchase agreements, and will provide yield paid out via blockchain rails every day to token holders. Securitize will act as a transfer agent and tokenization platform, while BNY Mellon is the custodian of the fund’s assets. They’ve also announced a strategic investment in Securitize. It’s big because Blackrock betting on Ethereum for their tokenized fun, a clear contrast to what we had seen so far with TradFi preferring private chains and/or foundations where liquidity comes directly from treasury i.e. Templeton and Stella or now Sygnum/Fidelity and zkSynch. Larry Fink was talking about tokenization AND Bitcoin since he started his main media campaign for the ETFs and so the announcement doesn’t come as complete surprise but it shows the commitment from the world’s largest asset manager.
OKX pulling USDT from EU and out of India
OKX made headlines this week for taking a more cautious regulatory approach. The USDT story is not underpinned with comments from their side but got picked up by market with them announcing to pull it as major liquidity pairs. It could be that they wana concentrate liquidity in EUR pairs but more likely it’s about uncertainty with USDT and MiCa coming into place leaving only space for EU regulated stablecoins. Not a bit thing for Tether as most liquidity is still in USDT on CEX and there will still be time OKX international facing off the deeper markets. On the India side they are responding to regulation banning international exchanges and giving customers till end of April to pull assets. Regulators had issued a notice in December to nine exchanges it said were operating illegally, including Binance, Kraken and MEXC Global. OKX was not on the list but might have gotten a wink now. India is becoming dominated by local exchanges now.
QUOTES:
The number 1 dex on Base, and the number 1 dex on Optimism are both built with code I wrote and pioneered. Stick to where the innovators are, post Sonic I will be adding some new primitives to crypto.
Andre Cronje — Developer
We’ve done a lot of yelling at people to not all jump into Lido. We’ve done a lot of yelling at people to use different clients. There [are] a lot of people voluntarily doing those things because it’s good for the security of the network, but it’s not healthy to over-index on those things
Vitalik Buterin
The SEC does not comment on the existence or nonexistence of a possible investigation [with regards to Ethereum Foundation]
SEC spokesman
