Missed Bottoms, Tanking Exchanges, Hamstering Mongooses and 20 Crypto Jokes

Sead Fadilpašić

Last updated: October 23, 2023 09:23 EDT | 4 min read

The crypto market saw another sharp correction exactly a week ago, with Nayib Bukele missing the “f***ing bottom”, after which BTC showed “overwhelming” institutionalization following a “significant deleveraging event” as the week began, and BTC and ETH corrected lower mid-week. Meanwhile, bittorrent surged following the news of the BitTorrent Chain mainnet launch, and EOS slushed gains as the EOS community voted to stop token vesting to Block.one. Vitalik Buterin discussed a “plausible roadmap” for obtaining a scalable blockchain but said it will probably take years before it “plays out”, and Chainalysis found that only 1 in 4 NFTs bought during minting result in profit, while BSC and Animoca Brands unveiled a USD 200m investment program to finance early-stage blockchain-based gaming startups.

Pantera’s CEO said that investing in crypto is a “fantastic hedge” against a bond market that will get destroyed when the US Fed stops its asset purchases, South Korea’s presidential candidate called crypto “a means of trading and investment”, and while nearly 90% of surveyed Aussie crypto owners have profited from trading or broke even in 2021, Grayscale’s survey found a rising interest in BTC as the company pushes for the first bitcoin spot-based ETF in the US. Visa is launching crypto advisory services to help clients understand various segments of the crypto industry, Jack Dorsey’s Spiral unveiled their Bitcoin Lightning Development Kit, and Ledger announced a crypto debit card, support for NFTs, and partnership with Coinbase and FTX.

Coinbase is gearing towards a trading fees compression, dYdX was down for nine hours due to a major outage that hit Amazon’s cloud-service network which sparked a decentralization debate, the myCryptoWallet exchanged tanked following a wave of complaints by users and allegations of missing funds, and the hacked BitMart said it intended to compensate affected users and resume its operations. Meanwhile, the USD 100m jury verdict in the Craig Wright court case brought even more confusion.

Six crypto CEOs testified about threshold issues and Bitcoin mining among other topics, with the ‘Brad Sherman meme coin ecosystem’ growing as Hamster pumped and Mongoose joined the party, while the CIA Director admitted that the agency has “a number of different projects focused on cryptocurrency” in progress, and a US court hinted that the IRS may have violated a Coinbase user’s privacy rights in a tax audit. Indian crypto violators could reportedly face prison time under a new proposal, Russia is set to create a crypto working group, the Japanese financial regulator is eyeing stablecoin and wallet provider regulations in 2022, and the Chinese Communist Party official who was expelled from the party for allegedly supporting crypto miners has been arrested. BIS said that multiple settlement platforms could emerge in the future with multiple assets and currencies, while it said that DeFi could play “an important role” in the traditional financial system, it also pushed for increased regulation.

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