Bye-bye winter?

Darn it, crypto condemnation is coming from everywhere.

There are sordid details from Sam Bankman-Fried's trial as well as a heavy dose of scrutiny about the digital domain's role in the crisis in the Middle East.

Yet, October's bad moon on the rise somehow keeps running into a cloud bank laden with decidedly positive sentiment. Consider the situation involving the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, weighing the possibility of approving spot-Bitcoin-related ETFs which are liquid, publicly traded, open-ended funds that behave like individual securities and which in theory could, analysts say, result in total crypto market cap eventually doubling to more than $2 trillion.

Interviewed yesterday by Bloomberg television, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler was asked about the agency's recent decision to not appeal a court decision in favor of Grayscale's bid to convert its closed-end BTC trust fund into an ETF; and while he skirted the direct Grayscale question ("now what happens?), Gensler's pivot-soliloquize-type response, kind of out of the blue, propped the door another inch.

"Just so the viewing public understands," the SEC head honcho said. "We have not one but multiple, I think it's eight or ten, filings that the staff, and ultimately the commission, are considering."

Gensler went on to emphasize a multi-pronged disclosure review process, similar to the one done prior to a company's IPO.

“The staff is doing work on those multiple filings,” Gensler reiterated.

The market is ravenous for breadcrumbs. After Cointelegraph published a report – that turned out to be false – about BlackRock’s spot BTC ETF being approved, BTC spiked to $30K.

CoinDesk indicated that even the potential for some kind of knee-jerk bullish price frenzy would keep bears at bay.

"Nobody will dare to short BTC now," said Matrixport's research chief, Markus Thielen, in a Telegram broadcast.

Possibly in anticipation of inevitable spot ETF approval, investors pushed BTC a touch higher in the past 24 hours, with BTC rising 0.5% to about $28,470 as of 9 a.m. (EST).

Total crypto remains $1.12 trillion, flat since yesterday.

Among the Big Ten, Solana has the largest one-week gain. Eighth-largest coin SOL is +13% in seven days as it eyes a move to a key mark of $25.

We spotted a lot of flat and slightly red altcoins. But Rollbit and Radix each are up 5%-10%. And, oh yeah, there is something called CryptoPawCoin that is up 300% in 24 hours.

“Signs indicate that crypto winter may be in the past," Morgan Stanley said earlier this week.

Crypto spring may well be on the horizon. Although, and let’s face it, for a lot of coins this fall – clearly it's still winter.

The second-largest crypto, Ethereum, has declined 5.7% in the past 30 days. XRP's battle to remain fifty cents? It isn't going well. The fifth-largest digital asset has fallen 8% in the past fortnight.

Then there is SOL, which, for all of its recent triumphs (+19.2% in the past month), is coming up on a grim one-year anniversary; and it is doing so in negative fashion.

In the wake of last November's FTX collapse, SOL sank from $30 to $10. A faint whiff of "back on track" aftershave was picked up this past summer with the $27 mark coming into view.

Last year at this time, SOL was $29. As of 9:12 a.m. (EST), SOL was $24.21.

"I was blindsided and horrified," a former FTX engineer told a courtroom on Monday.

You got that right!

Apparently, last September, Sam Bankman-Fried, former FTX CEO now on trial for fraud, let slip into conversation that, oh yeah, his trading arm had siphoned tens of billions of dollars away from his now-defunct crypto exchange.

It's a bad look for an industry raw and reddened from months of scrubbing tar off itself.

Another harsh spotlight has come upon the industry. It turns out at least a portion of Hamas' global financing network includes the use of cryptos. U.S. lawmakers have put the Treasury Department on notice that they have “grave concerns.” 

Despite foul odors carried by gloomy gales, there’s still genuine, palpable crypto optimism – it just won’t dissipate.

The spot BTC ETF approval thesis seems to be playing out on a path to fruition, with March of 2024 looming as a big bay window on a floodgate – just in time for the coming BTC halving event.

Also traveling from possible catalyst to possible catalyst is Ethereum. The network's co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has confirmed he has AI aspirations front of mind.

This comes in the midst of growing intrigue over the quiet but monumental mainnet launch of a new Ethereum scaling solution, Scroll, considered a promising new contender in the zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine space. Wait, what, is no one talking about the zkEVM space?

Other zkEVM solutions working to scale Ethereum, per Cointelegraph, include Polygon, zkSync, StarkWare and Immutable. Such competition is going to make the Ethereum ecosystem more robust, said Jordi Baylina, technical chief of Polygon Hermez zkEVM.

As for growing interest in AI-blockchain initiatives, there's a range of pioneering projects. These would include Cardano-backed SingularityNET, which is building what it calls the first decentralized AI network that allows anyone to "create, share and monetize AI services at scale," per U.Today.

And Render is another. It's a distributed GPU rendering network that connects artists and studios in need of GPU compute powers with mining partners. Generative AI image creation "requires new forms of authentication and provenance," the Render Network says on its website, pointing to its ability to provide granular digital rights management.

Buterin, who took part in an ask-me-anything (AMA) session hosted by Warpcast, was not specific about how AI might be integrated. But Buterin did say that he is considering the ways in which the Ethereum community could constructively come together to tackle AI-related issues that could harm humanity.