A crazy week in Macroeconomics (and just another week for crypto)

Let's start talking. I will cover the important events, mostly from my perspective, so i may be biased on some interpretations. This is life. A long read also, as much happened lately, and i will try to put everything in one long post.

• The demand for institutional Bitcoin is going down, said JP Morgan Chase (while buying more quietly). This could be declared the Irony Week, this is how much amusing were the official comments of many many institutions in the past few days. They were saying that Grayscale Bitcoin Trust is not strong enough to boost BTC to 40k again. Really? But something happen indeed that may lead them to this conclusion. Bitcoin Core lead Maintainer Wladimir van der Laan choosed a background role in order for BTC to become truly decentralized. He will still be active in the project. But there are other positive signals, as universities are buying BTC in the last year for their endowments (Harvard - $40M, Yale - $30M, Michigan - $12.5M, Brown - 4.7M). Even Alexey Navalny, the Russian dissident, received more that 650 BTC as donations. Not to talk about Argentina, for example, where Google searching BTC is happening right now twice as often than in the 2017-18 bull run. Pantera Capital joined the companies investing into BTC, with Mass Mutual rumoured to join very soon. Things changes, and if you look on the Miami government website, they posted the Bitcoin white paper on it. Yes, a government website promoting Bitcoin ideals. And Ray Dalio, The Ray Dalio, said that ''BTC is one hell of the invention'' and he is considering investing in cryptocurrency as protection for the fiat currency loss in value, but he also noted that they are liable to loss in case of hacking or government attempts to restrict policies. The market is still a wild beast, and right when all the signs and deep analysis was showing that BTC will have a correction, Elon Must added the word Bitcoin to his bio on Twitter, and we experiences a 11% jump after a BTC buying frenzy. It went up to 38291, but right now the correction may still happen, with BTC price sitting at 32k. Canada Toronto's Stock Exchange has now a BTC trust available, courtesy to Ninepoint Partners.

• Coinbase are pumping themselves up, announcing $90 B in crypto-assets and 43M users. The direct public listing is coming soon. But they are already holding a secondary market for private stock, were current and former employers are able to sell stock right now. By choosing a direct listing instead of an IPO, the stock dilution for the existing shareholders is avoided. They estimate mid-December and the debut share price is around $200.

• Monday Uniswap (UNI) went up 20%, with AAVE and SUSHI increasing 10%. GNY (49%) Nervos (21%) and Axie (17%) were the best on the middle of the week, with Dogecoin(Doge) having an incredible pump lately, 380% increase in one day being quite a record. Now it is sitting at $0.03, not that far from its 0.051 high.

• New York Signature bank reached 16% of their total deposits in cryptocurrencies, with a total of $10 B. They are working also with Coinbase, Kraken and Bitstamp.

• Polkadot project is lately very popular in China, using the Ethereum Killer narrative, and the Chinese capitalists are very interested in investing into a blockchain of blockchains. Binance, Huobi and MXC are actively promoting DOT. REEF, a Polkadot native token using BINANCE Smart Chain, is showing immense potential, presented as the gateway to DeFi through Liquidity and Protocol Aggregation, Proprietary Analytics, and Multi-Chain Accessibility, powered by Polkadot. Its founder, Gavin Wood, one of the ETH co-founders, is very active in China, being present in many important conferences and road-shows close to his Shanghai residence. And is not at all without reason, as DOT network had a 45% increase in active developers in the last month interval. Before DOT, many other succesful blockchains initiated in West were promoting a neutral approach to the Chinese market, due to the language barrier. But in the end, will these be just empty marketing and shilling or DOT will really benefit from the actual conjecture, we do not know, as something similar happened in 2018 with EOS, and you can see where are they now. But exhanges like Binance, to give an example, made a $10 M fund to sponsor developers to build DEFI based on BSC and DOT. I think there is even a rumor about Grayscale creating a DOT-based fund soon. The rumour was confirmed today as Grayscale filled paperwork needed to open few more trusts for DOT, AAVE,ATOM, EOS and ADA.

• On ETH network, there is something called KeeperDAO, an on-chain liquidity underwriter for DEFI, being very actively promoted on multiple platform. What is KeeperDAO? Minimum slippage, non-competing with miners for fees, the profits not destroyed by gas costs, i do not now, sounds too good to be true, even for a game theory. Is it true? I hope it is, and i am wrong, but i do not know, something is not adding up. It is like you can have the cake and eat it.

• Also on ETH, Mike Novogratz is launching ETH funds through his investment firm Galaxy Digital (Galaxy ETH fund - locally oriented, and another 2 funds for onshore and offshore institutional investors - all held in custody by Gemini). Just for fun, the best time to trade ETH is between 20-2AM and 4-8AM. But then, this barely counterbalance Ethereum Foundation postponing DEVCON from August to Q4 or even 2022. I think this has more to do with successfully bridging ETH1.0 to ETH 2.0. Everyone in his own way, as Simon Byrne build an ETH mining rig using 6 high-end graphic cards in his BMW boot, mining on the go, just to annoy those pesky gamers.

• Good news for our Muslim friends, Sharia-Compliant Crypto Exchange CoinMENA got a licence from Bahrain Central Bank. Crypto is creeping in Middle East too, offering BTC, ETH, XRP, LTC and BCH. In America, Janet Yellen was confirmed as Treasury Secretary, and her atitude towards crypto is not yet to be understood. And American Cancer Society will accept donation in BTC, ETH and LINK, with a helping hand from The Giving Block. If you donate 25% of the targeted amount ($1 million) you can name the fund. Now that's clever marketing.

• The Federal Reserve - central bank of U.S. - just announced that they will keep overnight interest rate close to zero, while buying bonds monthly for $110-120 B. This make borrowing cheaper and is not promoting savings at all, being one of the main reasons why people started to look for extra passive income and interest, starting to learn about crypto from March 2020 until now. Bad for the little guy, but awesome if you go into crypto. Hey, looking for gold as a safe heaven doesn't solve the problem, you know? Meanwhile in UK, britons like crypto, but they are not buying it. A great day to feel English, right?

• Facebook Testnet for Diem had reached the 50 M transaction mark yesterday, with a little over 3 TPS - transactions per second (BTC - 4.5 TPS, ETH - 15TPS, SOLANA - 65000 TPS). 221k Addresses interacted with the testnet. They say they are not yet operating at full capacity. The public launch is expected later in 2021.

• Talking about Solana, they just set up a $5 M development fund for Asia, focusing on DEFI and Web3 projects (wanted to invest into marketplaces, exchanges and dAPPS). They partnered with Coin98Ventures. DEFInitely a coin worth keeping an eye on it.

• Blockfolio is working on a zero fee crypto trading app. In fact FTX bought the Blockfolio tracking app for $150M 6 months ago, so technically FTX is using the Blockfolio project team to build this app. Anyway, i would enjoy using it. Launch it as soon as you can, please!

• On NFT market, one ultrarare CryptoPunk NFT bought with 8 ETH in 2017 just got sold with 605 ETH (that's translated as $750k for people like me). After the famous picture at the inauguration, Bernie Sanders has now his own NFT collection, on WAX blockchain.

Yours truly

George

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