Payments pair in play

XRP flirted with $2.90 early Wednesday after surging by 9% over the past 24 hours. A kindred digital asset, Stellar Lumens (XLM), also gained 9% as of early this morning. XLM tends to move in tandem with fellow payments-space token XRP. The latter was mentioned by a big Wall Street bank yesterday in a report forecasting the potential for massive inflows into new altcoin ETFs should such products come into existence in the coming months.

Bitcoin flung itself at $97,700 just around midnight as Tuesday gave way to Wednesday. As of 5:54 a.m. (EST), the largest crypto was $96,953.25, per CoinGecko. That reflects a gain of less than 1% relative to 24 hours ago. Total crypto assets sit relatively unchanged at $3.51 trillion.

A small sign of inflation relief came over the transom yesterday (via favorable PPI readings) although a more closely watched number (CPI) gets published today.

The SEC yesterday sued Elon Musk, alleging he failed to disclose in a timely enough manner his having amassed a 5%+ stake in Twitter (now X) in March of 2022, allowing the billionaire to purchase additional shares at artificially low prices, according to the complaint.

Alex Spiro, Musk’s lawyer, dismissed the lawsuit as a "single-count ticky-tack complaint."

As for TikTok, Bloomberg reports there's a scenario brewing in which the video-sharing juggernaut potentially winds up getting sold to Musk. A TikTok spokesperson dismissed the report as "pure fiction." Musk for his part has kept quiet.

Bloomberg, citing sources, said Chinese officials were evaluating Musk’s acquisition of TikTok’s U.S. assets as an option to circumvent a potential ban under U.S. legislation set to take effect Jan. 19. The measure was a response to data vulnerability concerns.

ByteDance, the Chinese technology behemoth behind TikTok, is inclined to fight the ban, Bloomberg said, citing sources.

Any day now, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to issue a decision on this issue. Trump, previously a critic of TikTok, has said he would like to delay the ban. Trump's inauguration is on Monday, Jan. 20.

"TikTok’s fate hangs in the balance as the ban deadline approaches," Decrypt said.

Bitwise has come out with a new survey of financial advisors who seem much more keen on crypto these days. The big takeaway: 56% of advisors surveyed said they were now more likely to invest in crypto after the U.S. presidential election. "We've been running the survey for seven years, asking what was preventing advisors from investing in crypto," Bitwise Asset Management CIO Matt Hougan told CNBC. "For six years the number one barrier was regulatory risk and regulatory uncertainty."

The election tore down this barrier, changing the game, Hougan said. "I think we are going to see a flood of financial advisors and family offices come into this space," he predicted.

In another major finding, some 22% of advisors said they allocated to crypto in 2024, double the response (11%) recorded by the Bitwise survey in 2023. That's mostly because of the advent of ETFs, Hougan said. "ETFs are the easy button for financial advisors," he said.

According to a new JP Morgan report, potential XRP and Solana ETFs could, were they to be created, together attract between $3 billion and $8 billion in inflows. That estimate extrapolates from the flows seen by Ethereum ETFs. In six months, those products garnered $12 billion, or about 3% of ETH's market capitalization (Cointelegraph).