Triaconta Weekly #264

The following topics will be addressed in this weekly:

  • Bundle performance
  • Winners & Losers
  • Market overview

Bundle performance
Bitcoin has barely moved from its spot in the past month, making investors more adventurous towards altcoins. The biggest impact on the Big3 and Top30 bundle was Ripple’s win in its lawsuit with the SEC. The XRP token almost doubled in price and took back its third spot in the crypto rankings from the BNB token of the Binance exchange, also beleaguered by US regulators. Europe and America raise interest rates by another 0.25% with the Federal Reserve chairman seeing resilience in the economy and expecting no more recession in his future forecast.

Big3:
1 Month: +10.51% | 7D: -1.50% | 24H: +0.41%

Top30:
1 Month: +9.37% | 7D: -1.01% | 24H: +0.13%

Penny:
1 Month: +2.87% | 7D: +0.13% | 24H: +0.70%

DeFi:
1 Month: +3.22% | 7D: -2.79% | 24H: -0.47%

Winners & Losers
The biggest riser in the past month was former DeFi project Maker (+72%), which may return to the DeFi top 10 with this. A second former DeFi coin Compound (+70%) also did well. In the Top 30, Stellar (+65%) and XRP (+51%) benefited from the Ripple win in the lawsuit with the SEC. Solana (+53%) also continues its comeback, especially if we can break the $30 mark. Unfortunately, the biggest drop in the past month was the latest addition to the DeFi bundle Rocket Pool (-20%). The battle with Lido DAO (+2%) flared up with accusations that Rocket Pool governance was insufficiently decentralised. Problems on the closely linked MultiChain network caused a big drop in Fantom (-17%) as many users removed their crypto from the Fantom network as a precaution.

Market overview

Ripple partly won and partly lost the lawsuit with the SEC. The judge made very clear that the token XRP itself is not a security and any trading platform, and its users, where parties do not know from whom they buy the XRP or to whom they sell it will not get into trouble over that with the regulator. Pure win for Ripple, XRP and other crypto, which recently received similar allegations from the SEC.

Importantly for Ripple’s future, Ripple’s XRP transactions on the open market for their On Demand Liquidity (ODL) product for facilitating international payments are also not subject to securities sales rules. On one point, though, they lost. Ripple’s institutional sales directly to investors as part of a cooperation agreement or other investment contract do fall under the securities rules, according to the court. For this, Ripple is likely to be fined. And a number of crypto projects, which have also done so, will have to start considering their defences. The judge has called on both sides to come to an agreement in six to eight weeks to work out the details of her ruling.

Such is the confidence in Blackrock’s permission for a Bitcoin ETF that Grayscale (which also applied) has asked the SEC to grant all Bitcoin ETF applications in 1x to prevent the first granted application from having a huge advantage. According to Grayscale, it is not appropriate for the SEC to determine winners and losers in the market.

In America, the Financial Services Committee has passed important bills to regulate crypto, crypto exchanges and their oversight by the SEC and CFTC. The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st century act and the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty act passed with the full support of Republicans and some (renegade) Democrats. There has been criticism that the laws still leave much open, but agreement that they are a significant improvement on the current uncertain situation. The proposals now go to the House of Representatives and then possibly on to the Senate.

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