The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day |
Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here. Don't want this newsletter? Unsubscribe |
|
|
Welcome to The Node! This is Ben Schiller to take you through the latest crypto news. In today's news: Coinbase and Binance team up to advance USDC adoption; stablecoin market cap reaches $200 billion, could double in 2025, says Bitwise; crypto doesn’t care about cash flow but that will change, Pantera Capital says; Italy set to scale back crypto capital gains taxes, Reuters reports. The Takeaway: Polymarket's founder Shayne Copland demonstrated a real-world consumer use case for crypto, earning him a spot on CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 list. Read his profile by Marc Hochstein here.👇 👇 |
|
|
Coinbase-Binance Stablecoin Tie-Up |
Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, has formed a strategic partnership with stablecoin giant Circle to accelerate global adoption of the USDC stablecoin, the companies said on Wednesday at Abu Dhabi Finance Week.
Through the partnership, Circle's USDC will be more extensively available to over 240 million customers for trading, savings and payments. Binance will also adopt the second-largest stablecoin as "a vital dollar stablecoin" for its own corporate treasury, according to a press release.
"Through our strategic partnership, our users will have even more opportunities to use USDC on our platform, including more USDC trading pairs, special promotions on USDC across trading, and other products on Binance," Binance CEO Richard Teng said in a statement.
Staunch competition for growth exists between Circle, which has $40 billion worth of USDC in circulation, and its bigger rival Tether, whose USDT stablecoin has a market capitalization of about $140 billion.
Circle has typically cast itself as the more regulated stablecoin, so the high-profile tie-up suggests Binance is charting a path that complies with global regulation. Binance settled U.S. allegations last year by paying more than $4 billion.
Asked if this was a conscious choice to be more compliant with regulations, a Binance spokesperson said via email: "Our users want choices. We always work with multiple stablecoins. Today we support USDT, USDC, FDUSD, and a bunch of others. And we will continue to work with multiple stablecoin issuers or creators."
As well as a tool for simply buying and selling other cryptocurrencies, U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins can be used to hedge inflation in developing countries or facilitate lower-cost and efficient remittances, a Binance spokesperson said. Each USDC and USDT token is worth close to $1. |
|
|
A message from The Interchain Foundation |
|
|
Cosmos is expanding: Skip joins the Interchain Foundation.
The Interchain Foundation has acquired Skip, one of the leading Cosmos teams, to bring their excellence in engineering, product strategy, and execution in-house and usher in an era of growth for Cosmos, and its vision for the interchain. Skip will rename to Interchain Inc. and become the ICF’s main subsidiary, concentrating product, vision, and go-to-market for the Interchain Stack and Cosmos, led by Skip co-founders Barry Plunkett and Maghnus Mareneck. This acquisition marks a departure from the ICF’s distributed product development model and starts a new growth-driven stage defined by the alignment between the Interchain Stack’s vision, and the vision for a Cosmos Hub that is at the center of the ecosystem, driving user and liquidity growth for the entirety of the Cosmos’ interchain ecosystem. |
|
|
Stablecoins Cross $200B Mark |
The booming stablecoin market hit another milestone Wednesday, crossing the $200 billion total market value mark for the first time ever as demand accelerates and adoption expands for the assets.
The asset class as a whole added $10 billion market value in only two weeks since it surpassed the 2022 bull cycle record of $190 billion, according to CCData and DefiLlama. Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies designed to hold a steady price, predominantly pegged to the U.S. dollar. They are a key piece of infrastructure for the digital assets space, serving as the main source of liquidity for trading crypto assets on exchanges and move value on blockchain rails.
Demand for stablecoins grew steadily through the past year as crypto markets emerged from a brutal bear market. The growth significantly accelerated following Donald Trump's election victory last month, adding $30 billion supply as investors poured funds into cryptocurrencies in a frenzy.
Tether's USDT, the most popular stablecoin, climbed to a record supply of $139 billion, up 12% in a month, DefiLlama data shows. USDT was recognized as an accepted virtual asset by the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) earlier this week, and the issuer aims to expand services across the Middle East region.
Circle's USDC, the second-largest in the asset class, also grew 9% to nearly $41 billion market value during the same period. Circle just recently teamed up with Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume, to push USDC adoption globally. |
|
|
Bitcoin’s Pumping. Memes Are Minting Millionaires. The bear market’s snoozing, and the bull run is here.
Consensus Hong Kong is where you level up, make moves and position yourself to win. Top global leaders will be there. Will you?
Prices rise Dec. 13 at 10 a.m. ET/ 11 p.m. HKT—save $700 and get an extra 15% off with code NODE15. Don’t miss out. Register today. |
|
|
Startups Will Care About Cashflow, Pantera |
It’s not easy to pick what crypto tokens to invest in. Conventional wisdom among crypto natives is that you shouldn’t think too hard about it — after all, coins named after dogs, frogs or cats will regularly outperform tokens tied to legitimate projects.
But that state of affairs cannot last forever, according to Cosmo Jiang, a general partner and portfolio manager at crypto hedge fund and venture capital firm Pantera Capital.
“If fundamental investing does not come to this industry, it just means that we failed,” Jiang, a self-described classically trained investor who worked in banking and private equity before joining crypto in 2022, told CoinDesk in an interview. “All assets eventually follow the laws of gravity. The only thing that matters to investors at the end of the day — and this has been true for millennia — is cash flow.”
“Crypto went from nothing to $3.4 trillion in market cap now on the back of retail interest,” Jiang said, “but the only way for this asset class to keep growing is by attracting institutional capital. And institutional capital will only care about fundamentals. Logically, that will be the only way to make money on a sustainable basis going forward.”
Pantera has roughly $5 billion in assets under management, Jiang said, with about 75% of those funds locked in venture vehicles and the rest in liquid assets. As the portfolio manager of the firm’s liquid token fund, Jiang’s focus lies in publicly traded tokens. How does he pick which ones to add to the fund’s portfolio? By looking at product-market fit — meaning, at crypto projects that are developing products in areas where there’s huge demand. There are wwo basic questions at the forefront of his mind: whether the team can execute on their vision, and whether there’s a chance their token will capture some of the economic surplus generated.
“This will sound so stupid to anyone that works with normal asset classes, because it’s so normal,” Jiang said. “But in crypto, for whatever reason, this method is non-consensus.” |
Successful Trading Takes More Than a Bull Market Choosing the right exchange is crucial throughout the business cycle. This has been a very, very good month to trade in crypto. People who regularly read CoinDesk are making money just by checking their phone alerts. And yet, this environment isn’t as kind to the exchanges. Continue reading here. |
Italy Scales Back Crypto Tax |
Italy is set to trim its planned tax increase on crypto capital gains, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
Two months ago, the government was intent on raising the tax to 42% from 26% by the end of December.
"The tax increase will be significantly reduced during the parliamentary work," lawmakers Giulio Centemero and Federico Freni, a junior minister at the Treasury, said in a statement according to Reuters.
The decision to increase the capital gains tax was inspired by the rising popularity of investments in crypto, especially bitcoin, which climbed above $100,000 last week. The “phenomenon is spreading," Deputy Finance Minister Maurizio Leo told Bloomberg in October after announcing the news.
|
The Takeaway: Shayne Coplan |
For decades, prediction markets were a backwater, a science experiment. In 2024, Shayne Coplan, founder of Polymarket, turned them into a multibillion-dollar business and a popular barometer of the political winds, cited by everyone from Donald Trump to CNN. In so doing, he demonstrated a real-world consumer use case for cryptocurrency – and, some argue, a new model for news media at a time when the public has lost trust in traditional sources of information. "Most people I know were checking Polymarket for odds during the election," said Meltem Demirors, a crypto O.G. and early investor in the company. "You're creating so much signal that you're getting people who don't care about crypto, and would never care about crypto" to look at the site. Like many crypto founders – and even some successful tech founders – the 26-year-old Coplan also took what looks like a calculated risk in pushing the regulatory envelope. In mid-November, the FBI raided his New York home and confiscated his devices, reportedly as part of a Department of Justice investigation into whether Polymarket was operating illegally in the U.S. Coplan has laid low since then, and would not comment for this article. However that investigation shakes out, Coplan has brought unprecedented attention to an idea long advanced by academics: That the wisdom of the crowd, backed by skin in the game, can produce more accurate forecasts – or at least, more accurate gauges of sentiment – than traditional experts or polls. "This man made prediction markets mainstream. Simple as that," said Hart Lambur, co-founder of UMA, the decentralized oracle service that Polymarket uses to resolve contracts. "He's just been the guy that's grinded through the pain and been dedicated to the Polymarket concept for years."
A stubborn wunderkind
Demirors recalls meeting Coplan in 2018, when the college dropout was about 18 years old, on the recommendation of a crypto colleague.
"Shayne came to my office, and we basically just argued with each other for two hours," Demirors said. "I was like, 'wow, this kid is sharp.'" Pratik Chougule, executive director of the Coalition for Political Forecasting, got a similar impression interviewing Coplan for the Star Spangled Gamblers podcast early in Polymarket's history. "He's a very unique figure in the sense that he's this creative artist type, but he's also delved deeply into academic literature, and he really understands technicalities of building something on the blockchain," said Chougule.
Read the profile here. |
|
|
|
