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| What you need to know today in crypto and beyond April 16, 2021 Sponsored By: If you were forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive it, sign up here.
Send feedback to daniel.kuhn@coindesk.com – we'd love to hear from you!
Today's must-reads Top Shelf TAIL WAGGING: Dogecoin is on a tear. Following publication of a CoinDesk article outlining smoked meat stick vendor Slim Jim’s dedicated DOGE strategy, the meme cryptocurrency has rallied to an all-time high. A 160% price surge brings dogecoin’s market valuation to $39 billion, or almost the size of Barclays, and disrupted services on Robinhood’s brokerage platform. BAN PRESSURE: Turkey’s central bank will ban the use of cryptocurrency for payments, but not trading. The ban, set for April 30, follows a similar move by Morocco and a possible prohibition in India. Bitcoin fell on the news as figures like Ray Dalio predicted further global regulatory pressure for bitcoin. BULLS BUY: Undeterred by short-term market fluctuations, BTC options traders are still loading up on bullish contracts priced at $80,000. Meanwhile, Chicago-based Rothschild Investment Corporation purchased 265,302 shares of the Grayscale Ethereum Trust (following an earlier bitcoin buy). Finally, a Chinese tech consortium is spending $1.3 billion to build the largest filecoin (FIL) mining facility in the country. FLIPPENING? There’s now more of the dollar-linked stablecoin tether (USDT) on the Tron blockchain than on Ethereum, data from Coin Metrics shows, possibly a sign that crypto traders are favoring the network’s lower transaction fees. MOVERS & SHAKERS: Former Citigroup Chairman Dick Parsons has joined blockchain payments startup Celo as the first member of its external board. Also, Galaxy Digital named former Goldman Sachs executive Michael Daffey as its chairman. Galaxy’s Mike Novogratz will remain as CEO.
– Daniel Kuhn
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Can't Beat Them? Join Them: Why Crypto Company Anchorage Became a Bank Perhaps the old adage "every tech company wants to be a bank — someday, at least" is true. But why would a crypto company, given Bitcoin's philosophical roots, want to become a bank? And what does a crypto bank even look like, let alone do?
Join us for a chat with leaders from Anchorage, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Blockchain Association for an inside look on why and how Anchorage became the first crypto company to secure an OCC bank charter. We'll dive deeper into the topic at Consensus by CoinDesk, our big-tent event May 24-27.
Join us on Clubhouse on April 20 at 5 p.m. ET.
Overheard on CoinDesk TV Sound Bite “The reaction we're seeing from countries like Turkey … to try to push the cryptocurrency and digital currency industry back in the bottle is a little misguided.”
– Circle Chief Strategy Officer Dante Disparte, on CoinDesk TV's "First Mover."
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A message from CoinDesk CoinDesk's Quarterly Review Webinar Series The suits are here to stay, but retail isn’t going away. While Q1 saw the emergence of retail investors as a market driver, crypto caught explosive interest through non-fungible tokens from investors, celebrities and the general public.
Every Monday at 11:30 a.m. ET, crypto analysts Noelle Acheson and Christine Kim will discuss the performance and milestones of bitcoin and ether compared to macro and other crypto assets, along with important developments in the emerging DeFi and NFT sectors.
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What others are writing... Off-Chain Signals Coinbase is big — but can it be Amazon big? (Protos) These Crypto Bros Want to Be the Guggenheims of NFT Art (Bloomberg) FTX is gunning for stonks? (WSJ) Binance destroys $595 million worth of BNB tokens in its largest-ever burn (The Block) Celsius, the crypto lender, had a data breach Arthur Hayes read your white paper
– D.K.
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Putting the news in perspective The Takeaway Examining the Split Reactions to the Coinbase Listing Coinbase on Wall Street is widely seen as validating bitcoin, but a lot of bitcoiners aren't feeling validated. Why are so many hardcore bitcoiners so disgruntled? Well, as others have pointed out, Coinbase just isn’t all that punk rock. The cypherpunk movement from which Bitcoin sprang advocated for privacy and self-empowerment in face of meddling governments and corporations. A centralized exchange – even one responsible for onboarding tens of millions of people into the revolution – is just another intermediary. (And an expensive one at that: 97% of Coinbase's revenues come from transaction fees that are above industry averages.)
“The fact that a company like Coinbase went public makes it clear that custodial solutions have product-market fit and, honestly, it’s sad,” perennial nomad and Bitcoin promoter Katie Ananina said in a direct message. If punks chant “Oy,” bitcoiners rally around “not your keys, not your coins,” a reminder that “radical ownership” only comes from taking possession of your money.
In a similar vein, Coinbase’s public listing solidifies the exchange’s place among the Silicon Valley and Wall Street set. For some, the exchange’s “mission-focused” attitude towards crypto adoption is an artifice. So, asking bitcoiners whether they like Coinbase is like asking crust-punks whether they like Johnny Rotten.
Prominent Bitcoin personality Brekkie von Bitcoin says he bought his first BTC from the exchange but thinks Coinbase “has lost the thread.” Perhaps most glaring is that the Silicon Valley-based company has signed surveillance contracts with the government. “They used to be revolutionary,” he said.
Then there’s the exchange’s poly-crypto approach to the industry. Von Bitcoin admits Coinbase was a needed agonist for bitcoin but it’s guilty of “promoting every altcoin under the sun.” New users might confuse various altcoins for cheaper versions of BTC, a sort of identity theft.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Coinbase’s willingness to list bitcoin forks. Investor Stephen Cole went as far as saying “Coinbase attacked Bitcoin” by supporting competing, payments-friendly versions – “BitcoinXT. Bitcoin Classic. Bitcoin Cash.” – of the original cryptocurrency. Some are turned off for less ideological reasons, namely Coinbase’s history of going down during market rallies and higher-than-average trading fees. Not to mention the perennial complaints of lackluster customer support.
Bitcoiners are a strong-willed, vocal bunch. But even their calls to blacklist the exchange might be drowned out by traders barking for the exchange to list dogecoin.
– D.K.
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