All Been Crypto — Week 23 Feb 2024

What a week in crypto, while overall market cap relatively unchanged at 2trn with BTC slightly underperforming -1.5% wow and ETH closing the gap +6% flirting with 3k level under the hood we had some very interesting moves and big news. All at front UNI token which jumped 50% in the last few hours since the proposal to turn fee switch on, but also WLD, AGIX two AI related coins doubled in value wow. And then of course STRK debut settling at 1.5bn market cap. We had some major raises with Hack VC’s150mm venture fund, a16z disclosing 100mm investment into Eigenlayer, Riot disclosing they raised 559mm in equity to fund new WhatsMiner ASICs, and Ethena finishing another 16mm round before the launch which already got them 420mm TVL. Outside of that we had Avalanche experience major outrage, Circle suspending USDC on Tron, Kraken dismissing SEC suit and some 120 pages of Satoshi Nakamoto’s early email correspondence with Adam Black and other Bitcoin Devs became public due the court case against Craig Wright. If you wana go back to the very beginnings you now can. I’ll be over at ETH Denver next week so as always hit me up if you are around always love to meet loyal readers and please excuse if I likely won’t be able to write a weekly next week. Enjoy reading!

Bat Tai Chi — btc21@mail.com

HEADLINES:

Uniswap could be turning the fee switch on

Now Uniswap labs has already started charging a 15bps fee on major pairs back in 4Q last year but this was only for people using the Uni app and went straight to the Labs so tokenholders got nothing. Was a bit controversial back then but went through nevertheless, now there’s a proposal to turn the fee switch on on the protocol level meaning that token holders would actually start earning fees from revenue generated. That news sent Uni price 50% higher within a few minutes, probably because the proposal came from Erin Koen who’s Uniswap Foundation’s governance lead. Quite a lot of other DeFi tokens rallied in sympathy either because expectation is that fee switches will become normalized or to steal volumes from UNI coz execution just got more expensive?

Circle stopping USDC on Tron

Circle on Wed out of the blue announced they will halt support for USDC on Tron network. A decision that “aligned with its efforts to ensure that USDC remained trusted, transparent and safe”. They didn’t give a reason but it’s probably not hard for most of us to put 1+1 together. Justin Sun’s chain and reputation doesn’t merry well with a company’s pitch of 100% clean US regulatory approval compliant operations. Especially in the light of the upcoming planned IPO this 1H24. And of course there’s almost no USDC on Tron anyways a merely 300mm vs the 50bn of USDT. It’s an interesting move nevertheless because Circle also asked Congress for additional powers to the Treasury to clamp down on Tether.

Kraken dismisses SEC lawsuite

Kraken filed a motion to dismiss a November lawsuit from the SEC that accuses them of failing to register with the agency and commingling customer funds. In Kraken’s response, and an accompanying blog post, the exchange echoes the legal arguments deployed by competitors Binance and Coinbase in similar lawsuits, contending the SEC’s enforcement action came as retaliation for political speech. Kraken received notice of the lawsuit the day after its chief legal officer Marco Santori testified about SEC overreach before Congress in May. Courts are increasingly more wary of SECs behavior and so no surprise that Kraken is also going into the offensive here.

New Emails from Satoshi revealed

It’s a lot to read through and Pete Rizzo has dug out some nuggets. The whole thing got made public because of the court case of Craigh Wright and COPA (Crypto Open Patent Alliance). It gives a lot of insights into the early days of Bitcoin and Satoshi’s thinking.

QUOTES:

If it [Bitcoin] did grow to consume significant energy, I think it would still be less wasteful than the labor and resource intensive conventional banking activities it would replace

Satoshi Nakamoto

Treasury department should investigate Circle for all of the times they did not blacklist illicit funds when they had ample time instead of larping as the compliant centralized stablecoin

ZachXBT

We want to earn the community’s trust, and believe in showing this with actions [revised token emission schedule] as well as words. We feel this is the best path forward given our long-term commitment to Starknet and its ecosystem, and are grateful to have the support of our investors in this decision

Eli Ben-Sasson, StarkWare co-founder and CEO