The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day 

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Welcome to The Node. This is Daniel Kuhn, here to take you through the latest in crypto news and why it matters. In today’s newsletter:  

Royalties Pay Off

Donald Trump’s official NFT collection increased 462% on NFT marketplace OpenSea after the former U.S. president, who is being charged with a crime in relation to a payment he made to a porn star, appeared in court Tuesday. The former commander-in-chief released his series of digital collectibles in December 2022, which quickly sold out and established a “floor price” just under $1,000. As part of the initial sale, Trump offered buyers a chance to earn exclusive experiences with him, and continues to earn 10% royalties on each secondary-market transfer. He has pleaded not-guilty to 34 felony criminal charges of falsifying business records. 

Texas Trouble? 

Texas legislators are reevaluating the friendly stance the state has taken on bitcoin miners, which serve as “load-balancers” for the unique Texan electricity grid. Senate Bill 1751, a proposed new law that caps how much miners can participate in grid balancing programs in Texas, passed a state Senate committee on Tuesday and is now headed to the full chamber. It was unopposed. The proposed legislation will take away tax incentives and require miners with more than 10 megawatts of computing power to register with the Texas grid operator, ERCOT. The bill has more than a 95% chance of winning Senate approval, Satoshi Action Fund CEO Dennis Porter said. 

Banks Do Bitcoin

Brazilian investment bank BTG Pactual has introduced what it calls the world's first dollar-backed stablecoin issued by a bank. The stablecoin, dubbed the BTG Dol, enables bank clients to "dollarize part of their equity in a simple, efficient and secure manner" using the bank’s crypto platform Mynt. In other news, PostFinance, Switzerland’s fifth-largest financial services firm, will begin offering its users access to cryptocurrency after partnering with regulated digital asset services provider Sygnum Bank. The firm will start by providing its 2.5 million customers access to buy, store and sell BTC and ETH, with more crypto-tokens to be added in later on. 

Crypto Wallets and Self-Custody Are Back in the Spotlight, and Core Wallet Leads the Way

Core – a free and comprehensive suite of tools by Ava Labs – supports Avalanche, Bitcoin, Ethereum and all EVM-compatible blockchains. It allows users to self-custody their assets, ensuring complete control over their funds without relying on third-party intermediaries. In addition, Core provides an integrated platform across a mobile app, Chrome extension and web portfolio that enables users to manage their assets, NFTs and more, all while keeping track of real-time price movements through the Watchlist feature. Continue reading.

*This is sponsored content from Ava Labs.

Sound Bites  

"CBDCs, digital securities and endgame tokens ... that's what's going to drive the growth of blockchain adoption." 

– Citi future of finance global head Ronit Ghose, on CoinDesk TV's "First Mover" 

The Takeaway: Bad Vibes 

So this is how mass adoption happens? Elon Musk, at least at one point the world’s richest man, replaced Twitter’s classic blue bird logo with a sprite of DOGE, the Shiba Inu known as much for the meme as the memecoin. Dogecoin spiked something like 40%, and hasn’t yet crashed. I hear there’s excitement brewing DOGE could pump above the $0.10 threshold, which is proportionately one-tenth as exciting as when the so-called proletariat investors of the GameStop era attempted to drive dogecoin, sometimes unironically called “the people’s cryptocurrency,” past $1 (it didn’t work). 

Dogecoin is apparently spiking because people believe that Elon Musk could soon integrate a permanent dogecoin payment system on Twitter, the microblogging platform he overpaid for ($43 billion). Twitter has several million daily active users, many of them high-profile, and if even just a small percentage begin transacting in DOGE – as a joke or not – it’s not completely irrational to speculate on that translating into a higher price. Mind you, Twitter already has payment/tipping features using the U.S. dollar and Bitcoin Lightning. The latter is rarely-used, which gives some indication of how frequently the even-less-widely-adopted and even-less-trusted crypto, dogecoin, would (or wouldn’t) be used.

Of course, this is my attempt to ascribe meaning to crypto price moves. Prices are basically the only thing that matter in crypto, but rarely for any reason investors typically rely on when evaluating the expected return of an asset. Instead, crypto prices are almost a perfect reflection of market sentiment – or, to put it in the people’s language, vibe. The coronavirus shutting down the global economy? Bad vibes. Locked-down workers with excess cash turning into slap happy day traders? Fun vibes. A massive stablecoin experiment crashing and burning? Bad vibes. The collapse of the U.S. banking revealing Bitcoin’s virtues? Apparently good vibes. 

Elon Musk has manipulated the price of dogecoin in the past. The first time it happened, in early 2020, DOGE jumped after the Tesla founder tweeted out a meme. He apparently got a taste of something he enjoys – power through shitposting – because he pulled similar moves again and again, each time raising the stakes as the joke grew stale. He weighed in on a dispute between DOGE traders and crypto exchange Binance. Tesla, his car company, would allow DOGE payments. Musk planned to bring DOGE to space, with a SpaceX satellite launch. Over 30-some tweets, Musk pumped the price of DOGE by 4.5% on average, according to crypto-skeptical newsite Protos.

There’s speculation Musk may be a massive DOGE holder, though it’s unknown how much, if any, he owns. Investors in New York actually filed a racketeering lawsuit against Musk alleging he purposely drove up the price of DOGE 36,000% (the evidence being his tweets and a Saturday Night Live appearance) only to short the crypto when it inevitably collapsed. On March 31, Musk’s lawyers asked to throw out the suit, saying his statements were too vague to be considered fraud. 

Dogecoin began as a joke, and has been denounced by one of its co-founders. Development on the project was stalled basically for years, before people noted its out-of-date code base put users at risk. Riding the wave of a price jump, and Musk’s support, developers announced they were actually going to not only fix Dogecoin but revamp it, ultimately transitioning the network to proof-of-stake like Ethereum to position it as a genuine payment solution for the web. Dogecoin developers have hinted that Top DOGE Musk even sat in on development calls, and Musk has said DOGE has unique capabilities for micropayments. 

Whether a working codebase and the support of one of the world’s most influential people is enough to propel dogecoin into the hands of everyone remains to be seen. Of course, the vibes for crypto are way off since the collapse of FTX. And most of the “chattering class” is sick of Musk due to media saturation, especially now that Twitter’s internal chaos spills out into the news nearly every week. Musk’s scatterbrained leadership at Twitter has even weakened support among his base of $TSLA stock owners and space nerds, showing that Musk’s brand of creative-destruction may actually just be destructive. 

– D.K.

daniel@coindesk.com

@danielgkuhn

Secret's Out 

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