Kaspa cruisin'

Kaspa was hurtling toward its highbar on Wednesday night after Marathon, a dominant Bitcoin miner, announced that it quietly has been mining KAS all yearlong and plans to do more of it. All told, some 93 million KAS tokens worth about $15 million got hauled in by Marathon rigs over the past nine months.

"By mining Kaspa, we are able to create a stream of revenue that is diversified from Bitcoin," Adam Swick, Marathon’s chief growth officer, said in a statement released in a time when publicly traded miners are intent to show shareholders that they can do other things should the whole Bitcoin thing not pan out.

Kaspa's proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism, GHOSTDAG protocol, allows for multiple blocks to be produced simultaneously (unlike Bitcoin), which means more block rewards for Marathon, as CoinDesk explained. Marathon’s fixation is viewed as a positive catalyst for KAS’ price, if not necessarily the greatest news for the layer-1 protocol's bid to run in the most decentralized manner possible.

The all-time high for KAS came on June 5 when it reached $0.19. As of about 7:45 p.m. (EST) last night, KAS was close to $0.18 on a 10% gain over the prior 24 hours. When we checked this morning at 8:14 a.m. (EST), KAS was $0.176.

KAS was among the top performers in the ranks of the Top 100, alongside a couple of AI coins, FET and AGIX, each of which had also surged by double-digits, percentage-wise.

Although probably the most talked about crypto on Wednesday was Blast, the second-largest layer-2 after Arbitrum, and which attracted hype plus scorn (minus actual blowback) by teeing up its airdrop by way of a one-way token bridge, one that allowed users to deposit, but not withdraw, until the Ethereum augmentation chain went live. Blast wound up attracting $2.3 billion in deposits between November and March, according to CoinDesk.

Yesterday, it released 17% of total supply to developers, ETH-staking farmers of points as well as the users of Blur, Blast's NFT marketplace. BLAST started trading yesterday close to $0.03, as largely expected by key market participants but which must have been a disappointment to some overly optimistic scenario planners banking on a dime valuation. In typical airdrop fashion, BLAST sold off, before rebounding, sinking and then recovering anew. (BLUR did this, too).

As of last night, rollercoaster-weary BLAST was $0.02726. Its market capitalization as of last night was roughly $465 million, making BLAST the 148th-largest coin. Long-term plans include making everyone ditch traditional banks and take up crypto. 

Bitcoin has declined a smidgen (-0.2%) to roughly $61,180. This happened over the 24-hour period that concluded just before 8 a.m. (EST).

The $61K level has been under duress this week with various reports of large entities dumping massive amounts of BTC.

Even long-dormant wallets are sending coins to market. Lookonchain has spotted movement of 50 BTC from a wallet that traces back to 2010, when Satoshi Nakamoto was still active on online forums and BTC was worth a nickel.

"The movement of crypto to centralized exchanges is often seen as a bearish sign," Cointelegraph said. "Over the past year, several dormant BTC wallets have awoken."

Tonight's Biden-Trump presidential debate is an unprecedented moment in politics – and crypto.

Industry members, of course, are hoping the topic comes up when the candidates square off at CNN headquarters in Atlanta. Ahead of the super-hyped verbal slugfest, the burgeoning PoliFi sector is bobbing and weaving. The first and largest such token in this pack – drafting off the dynamics of the race for the White House – is MAGA (TRUMP) which was a few pennies when it appeared last fall.

TRUMP soared to $17.51, a record high, early this month. At last check, Thursday at about 8 a.m. (EST), TRUMP was near $9. In the latter part of Wednesday, it was $8.50, reflecting a slight decline since Tuesday. Also volatile over the past 24 hours is Jeo Boden (BODEN), trending lower within a range of between $0.17 and $0.12.

TRUMP is the 162nd-largest coin with a market capitalization of $400 million; BODEN (No. 436) has a market cap that's one-fourth that size.

Both candidates are courting single-issue crypto voters. The former president, Donald Trump, has gone all in on crypto while the current occupant of the Oval Office, Joe Biden, seems to have eased up on cracking down.

"What we are seeing right now is potentially the first presidential debate where crypto comes up as a question," Anchorage Digital's co-founder, Diogo Monica, told Bloomberg. "That would be amazing."

Back in 2019, Trump, then the sitting U.S. President, tweet-bashed Bitcoin as "not money and based on thin air."

Trump's new posturing is forceful enough, especially in contrast to Biden, perceived as hostile to the industry, that a Republican administration coming back into power has been adopted as a possible tailwind sustaining a rally that has benefitted from a new structural paradigm, i.e., in the corridors of power, crypto is money. 

Bernstein analysts see crypto as poised in the coming months to become a "Trump trade" if election sentiment shifts toward the controversial candidate who still vociferously denies he lost the last election. Polls have the two senior statesmen engaged in a dead heat.

This debate is a dramatic shift from tradition with candidates meeting up earlier than ever before, prior to party nominating conventions held later in the summer; and it is the first time a sitting president is debating an ex-president.