Long dormant XVG erupts

Most of today's positive activity is happening outside the confines of the Top 100, with solid gainers – such as Enjin, which is up 3%, and Zilliqa, up 4% – as well as some eye-poppers. Take Verge for example.

The 196th-largest coin shot up 30% in 24 hours, as of early this morning and has soared 237% in the past week.

Verge's native XVG, a veteran, privacy-centric warhorse last heard from six years ago, finds itself lumped into an emerging bracket of assets dubbed "dino coins," which is kind of a counter-category to meme coins, connoting old-standby currencies that are time tested and proof-of-work-reliant. Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin are also in this camp.

Moribund and dehydrated since surging above a quarter in late 2017, XVG (unbeknownst to anyone) tested a nickel in the springtime frenzy of 2021, and then fell below a penny – and off the proverbial map.

In the past two weeks, however, XVG has skyrocketed 460% to $0.0086497.

Meanwhile, shares of Coinbase shot up 13% the other day on news that a U.S. exchange, Cboe, had re-filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seeking the agency's permission to launch, along with giant money manager Fidelity, a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF); Coinbase found its way into that filing as being the specific crypto platform that Cboe plans to enlist as its partner in policing any market manipulation that might find its way to the inner workings of the proposed ETF.

The Fourth of July was no picnic for Bitcoin. The biggest crypto declined 2% in 24 hours and lost its grip on $31,000.

Meanwhile, BTC's wagon no longer seems hitched to the fate of U.S. stocks.

The 90-day rolling correlation between moves in BTC's spot price and moves in major stock market indexes has declined to near zero, the lowest level in two years, according to BlockScholes (CoinDesk).

Headquartered in the UK, BlockScholes bills itself an institutional-grade derivatives analytics platform. It is not to be confused with the "Black-Scholes" options pricing formula dating back to the early 1970s, around the time options were first invented and traded at the Chicago Board Options Exchange, known for decades as the CBOE (pronounced "see-bee-oh-ee"); this entity is now an electronic derivatives exchange operator known as "Cboe" (rhymes with Teebow) and is the above-mentioned exchange that wants to partner with Coinbase on a potentially groundbreaking spot BTC ETF.

Cboe is partnering with a slew of asset managers, including Fidelity, WisdomTree and ARK Invest, seeking the SEC's permission to launch a spot BTC ETF. BlackRock, meanwhile, has enlisted Nasdaq for the same kind of BTC marketplace surveillance that Cboe has agreed to provide via a partnership with Coinbase.

The entire lot of providers were forced to re-do their regulatory applications after blowback from the SEC over a glaring lack of specifics about which crypto exchange was going to be tapped for surveillance-sharing arrangements. Cboe re-filed, naming Coinbase as the exchange with which it plans to partner.

"The SEC would rather bring in a regulated BTC ETF led by more mainstream Wall Street participants and with surveillance from existing regulated exchanges, than having to deal with a Grayscale OTC product filling the institutional gap," Bernstein analysts wrote.

Bernstein takes a view that the SEC is likely to soon approve a spot BTC ETF, which is seen as bullish for crypto.

But Bernstein can't ignore the fact that the SEC remains worried about such a product, if only because Coinbase is not under the agency’s thumb. And so, despite the Cboe going to bat publicly for Coinbase, this does not change the view at the SEC about the spot prices for BTC being prone to shenanigans.

Coinbase officially being named the surveillance partner of several ETFs in their Friday resubmissions may have helped COIN shares pop, and even helped BTC get above $31,000; nevertheless, in the near term, considering the SEC is suing Coinbase, CoinGeek pointed out, "this could prove awkward."