Mooners and Shakers: Chainlink surges but Bitcoin flat as US crypto regulations hit spotlight again
We’re seeing the usual mix of hopium and doom and gloom across the cryptoverse as we round out another week of Coinhead coverage. But at least Chainlink is pumping.
Who’s winning in the sentiment stakes? Bulls? Bears? Some sort of weird bull-bear-like creature with crab’s legs? Probably the latter, actually.
Here’s the latest dial shift on the Crypto Fear & Greed Index (below) to help you decide what the vibe is right now. Things appear to have shifted from the XRP and BlackRock uplift, to “Hmm, things have gone quiet again, where’s my next positive narrative coming from?”
Maybe tomorrow the dial with have shifted left, and it’ll be “Ah crap, it’s SO OVER!”
Right. What’s hitting the major crypto-media news this morning?
Making headlines: Nasdaq and US regulations
• In what seems like a bit of a blow to the industry this week, America’s tech-loving Nasdaq stock exchange has announced it’s halting its plans to launch a crypto custody service, citing uncertain regulatory conditions. Yep, that old chestnut.
According to a CoinDesk report, it was being set up to go live soon and would have been set up as a special purpose trust in New York.
However, Nasdaq’s CEO Adena Friedman delivered the bad news in an earnings call yesterday, citing “the shifting business and regulatory environment in the US.”
Friedman added, though, that Nasdaq will continue to support the digital asset industry with partnerships with potential ETF issuers as well as providing technology for crypto custody.
And as CoinDesk notes, Nasdaq is the would-be listing exchange partner in BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF application.
• News just in: Two US House Republican committees have put forth a bill to establish a regulatory framework for crypto. Yes, this has been done before, but this one, at 212-pages long, somehow seems more significant, being the result of several months of work by two separate entities – the The House Agriculture and Financial Services Committees.
The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act bill is intended to address regulatory gaps in the US crypto industry/market by creating a framework for the “specific risks of different digital asset-related activities.”
Importantly, given the SEC’s penchant for curbing the industry’s enthusiasm, the bill would seek to clarify the SEC’s ruthless oversight of crypto assets (of which the committees have been highly critical), give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) jurisdiction over digital commodities, and indeed look to clarify most crypto assets as commodities.
• What else? As Eddy noted in his morning Market Highlights column, there was this:
“According to a report by NYDIG, Bitcoin spot ETFs like the one proposed by BlackRock could increase BTC demand to the tune of US$30 billion.
“NYDIG wrote:
‘Bitcoin is about 3.6x more volatile than gold, meaning that on a volatility equivalent basis, investors would require 3.6x less bitcoin than gold on a dollar basis to get as much risk exposure.
‘Still, that would result in nearly $30B of incremental demand for a bitcoin ETF.’”
Bitcoin just can’t seem to keep its head above the US$30k waterline at present. The entire market’s looking a little flat, and that might be partly to do with a bit of a tech sell-off (Tesla and Netflix) on Wall Street overnight. Yep, tech-stonks and crypto correlation – it’s still a thing.
Perhaps we’re due a “sweep of the lows” at the lower end of the $29ks, as Dutch trader Michaël van de Poppe posits here.
Uppers and downers
Some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)
PUMPERS (11-100 market cap position)
Crypto “oracle” Chainlink (LINK) is flying the altcoin flag well today with an 18% 24-hour gain at the time of writing.
According to various reports, whales (large investors) bought up $6m LINK tokens in a short space of time, sending the token surging. Other than that, though, Chainlink did just release an an interoperability protocol that enables communication between blockchains and banks.
Chainlink founder Sergey Nazarov, who only ever seems to wear a check shirt, explains the new piece of infrastructure here. He sounds intelligent and it sounds important. It’s apparently been tested by the international interbank communication system Swift, so we’ll take his words for it.
SLUMPERS (11-100 market cap position)
• Rocket Pool (RPL), (market cap: US$592 million) -7%
• MultiverX (EGLD), (market cap: US$886 million) -6%
• Sui (SUI), (market cap: US$447 billion) -5%
• Solana (SOL), (market cap: US$10.15 billion) -4%
• Huobi (HT), (market cap: US$428 million) -3%
Around the blocks
Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse.
The UK’s Financial Services Minister seems to envisage a positive future for the crypto industry. We know this, partly by his expression when someone asked him about it all…
