Top shelf

ADA Holders might be the biggest winners this week, despite BTC's historic momentum upwards. Tezos updates bring the SuperBaking feature to life.

HyperPooled
In a stunning turn of events, the Cardano Foundation launched an Official Cardano Staking HyperPool. The offering brings 20% APY to the first 3000 registrants and a new standard of security and transparency not seen before, pundits claim. Despite drawing criticism from some pool runners, the team at the Foundation reassured everybody that this is not a "power grab and monopolization of the industry", thanks to the saturation-control mechanism that is fundamentally enshrined in the Cardano Blockchain.

Baked in?
Tezos introduced its community to the newest feature - SuperBaking. Those that have followed the development of the XTZ blockchain wouln't be shocked by the name, as it only builds on the well established practice of "baking". In the context of Tezos, this is similar to mining. So what's "super" about this newest feature? Besides being a fully fledged node on the network and other technicalities, the main benefit would be the much higher compensation for your troubles.

CBDC 'hunch'
European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde has a “hunch” there will be a digital euro in two to four years. At a virtual panel yesterday, Lagarde said an European Union-wide central bank digital currency should be explored, “If it is going to facilitate cross-border payments.” The ECB previously said it is researching a CBDC. The latest statements are another indicator of what to expect and when: “A digital euro will not be a substitute for cash,” Lagarde said. “It will be a complement.” Separately, Benoit Coeure, head of the Innovation Hub at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), said any potential CBDC for the supranational bank could involve blockchain. “Everything is possible,” he said.

Exchange flows
Bitcoin flows to Binance from Huobi have reached an all-time high. According to data provided by CryptoQuant, some 18,652 bitcoins, worth nearly $300 million, were transferred from Huobi to Binance from Nov. 2 to Nov. 11. The bustling trade spiked ever since the Huobi chief operating officer, Robin Zhu, went missing at the beginning of the month. For months, Chinese regulators have been clamping down on crypto trading platforms, as part of a broader sweep of the fintech industry.

Goodbye, dai and bitcoin sv. Hello, kyber and cosmos.

A swelling in volume in the crypto markets over the third quarter has changed the list of noteworthy digital assets beyond bitcoin and ether that matter most to traders and investors. That change is reflected in the CoinDesk 20.

In the latest revision, five assets were replaced by crypto assets that saw volume surges outpacing even the double-digit gains posted in market volume as a whole.

The new assets are algorand (ALGO), cosmos (ATOM), cardano (ADA), kyber (KNC) and omg network (OMG). On average, incumbent CoinDesk 20 asset volume increased by 22% from Q2 to Q3. However, these crypto assets' trusted market volume increased by much more.

These five new crypto assets replaced incumbent assets that are well-known to crypto investors. Read more about how they displaced incumbents bitcoin sv, dai, zcash, monero and dash on CoinDesk 20's latest update.

SPONSORED BY POLICY 4.0

Policy 4.0 is a research and advisory body working on policy strategy for the new economy, with a deep focus on the future of money and data. Our team of blockchain engineers, financial sector and policy experts has spent several months reverse engineering and analyzing the implications of China’s digital currency system. This 4-part research series is being launched on Nov. 18.

Join us on this day at our exciting launch event with CoinDesk at 15:00 -16:30 UTC. The event comprises an exclusive first look of our deep dive report series on China’s DCEP, an address by the governor of Bahamas on the world’s first retail CBDC – the sand dollar – perspectives from the IMF, fintech thought leader David Birch and Internet pioneer Pindar Wong, and a rich interaction moderated by Michael Casey.

Dignity and bitcoin

“The systems don’t always work,” Robby Gutmann, co-founder of Stone Ridge Holdings Group, told NLW in his first public interview since the company made waves by investing heavily in bitcoin. That’s why the $10 billion alternative asset manager has placed its "primary treasury reserve” in bitcoin.

In short, bitcoin is an exit from an inflating monetary base that has failed to serve the public. Last month, Stone announced it would stash more than 10,000 BTC with its crypto subsidiary NYDIG. This follows other corporate firms like MicroStrategy and Square moving some of their cash treasuries into bitcoin, also citing monetary debasement.

“The expansion of the money supply in the U.S. hasn’t shown up in growth of CPI in a measurable way, but in other measurements of inflation,” Gutmann said. Notably, Gutmann considers the prospect of living a “dignified” retirement as an ideal marker for inflation.

“The idea of financial security is much broader in bitcoin,” he said, when claiming that only a “single-digit number” of fiat monetary systems are functional or scale. “Can I save my day’s labor in something I can spend tomorrow next week,” isn’t a question most U.S. workers are confronted with, but it may be a legitimate concern elsewhere.

That’s why a bitcoin-based world economy could better serve nations that weren’t part of the industrializing processes of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Gutmann further explained NYDIG’s thesis is in fostering the “long-term development of an open source monetary system.” This includes opening some of its in-house bitcoin infrastructure up to other companies – “we won't be the last people that have this challenge” – and applying for New York State’s “BitLicense '' and a limited trust charter.

“To the extent we can move the bitcoin project forward, it feels like we can do something measurable in society today around this idea of financial security for people outside the first world,” he said.

The full, hour-long interview can be found here.