Suddenly, crypto busting moves

All investments and trading are risky and may result in the loss of capital. Cryptoassets are largely unregulated and are therefore not subject to protection.

Fear itself may have stirred crypto out of bed. Large coins are gaining 1%-2%, but the real momentum is seen in the medium-sized assets.

Often lost in the middle of the pack, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) just caught our eye with a 12% one-day increase as of this morning.

A Bitcoin fork lauded by proponents as a faster, more efficient version of its forefather, BCH is about $342, having gained 18% in the past month. BCH is the 25th-largest digital asset in terms of its market capitalization, which is roughly $6.5 billion, or less than one-tenth the value of BTC.

Month-old meme stalwart ApeCoin (APE) now has a market cap close to $3.7 billion after climbing 10% over 24 hours as of this morning at 7 a.m. (EST). Ranked No. 40 by size, APE yesterday helped hotwire this mid-cap alt rally. The BYAC-NFT-associated coin has gained 24% in the past week.

Two of the top gainers over 24 hours are RUNE, native asset of the ThorChain, and Compound's COMP.

The latter (No. 99 on CoinGecko's list) is up 19% since this time yesterday. Earlier this week, Robinhood added support for COMP, native asset of Compound's decentralized lending/borrowing protocol.

Around the same time, Santiment said, per U.Today, large COMP transactions by "whales" began to spike. At $152 and with a total cap of $1 billion, COMP has gained 50% over the past month. Still, it remains a shadow of its former self, relative to its all-time high of $910 hit in May of 2021.

Also spiking: the fear level as measured by the crypto fear and greed index, a daily gauge of traders' emotions, and which hit 25/100, jittery enough for entrance into a cavern marked "extreme fear."

Left-Right political factions are clashing in Europe – over crypto regulations.

The European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs recently approved a draft version of its crypto regulation proposal, but it still has to be trilaterally negotiated among the European Parliament, European Commission and Council of Ministers.

Although a ban on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus-reaching mechanism, existentially threatening to Bitcoin, is off the table, and despite the lack of any specific Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations having been included in the latest draft of the committee's rules package – known as Markets in Crypto Assets or "MiCA" – there nevertheless remains elevated levels of consternation within the crypto industry over a separate set of rules put forth by the EC, specifically its Transfer of Funds Regulation (TFR).

What is the likelihood that the proposed rule – which includes a section that heavy-handedly targets so-called "unhosted" crypto accounts neither managed by a custodian nor centralized exchange – becomes law?

The odds were never that great to begin with and could possibly be falling lower, a key politician told Cointelegraph.

The TFR initiative, explained Germany's Stefan Berger, Parliament’s point person for diarizing matters related to the bill, came from the Left (Social Democrats and the Greens). Forthcoming negotiations, therefore, could still lead to the TFR language getting dropped, according to Berger, Cointelegraph said.

Parliament is split between the left and the right over decentralized commerce.

But Berger senses warmth from the Council of Ministers. "I am still optimistic that they'll see it a little differently,” he said.

The MiCA regulatory framework would cover a wide swath of crypto-related areas, including the status of all major cryptos and stablecoins as well as the oversight of crypto mining and exchange platforms.

Author Michael Lewis in "Liar's Poker" exposed in-plain-sight Salomon Brothers' bond market gluttony during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Fifteen or so years later, in "The Big Short," Lewis shone a light on the glaring excesses of the housing market.

Now in an interview with Yahoo Finance, Lewis boldly spells out a bifurcated path for this whole crypto thing which he thinks is either going to threaten world financial order, or, alternatively, go to hell in a handbasket, and Lewis also added that there is no way to be sure.

"The whole thing may come crashing down," he said. "Crypto is an act of faith, like gold, like the dollar. It's impossible to judge whether that faith is sustainable or not."