Ethereum uncorks ahead of reboot

Ethereum is sleeping peacefully after being up all night. As of the wee hours of Wednesday, ETH was up 3.7% over 24 hours, letting it all hang out after midnight, hitting $460. By 8 a.m. (EST), it was $459.

Over the past 12 months, ETH is up 142%. The Ethereum blockchain, a DeFi spawning ground, is one-tenth of the way there in terms of ongoing efforts to upgrade its network which'll sport a brand new model, changing from proof-of-work to a model that supports a "proof-of-stake" approach involving not miners but, rather, "validators" who stake minimum amounts of ETH and earn block yield rewards of up to 15% (CoinDesk).

European stocks, meanwhile, rose on Wednesday as the Covid-19 vaccine rally, not unlike infection and death rates, continued unabated. This party in a pandemic has some noticeably absent merrymakers i.e. tech stocks have, in a rotation trend, fallen out of favor.

Since Monday morning, traders have exchanged more than $2 trillion worth of assets, according to Reuters.

Bitcoin trading volumes have increased this week and BTC price-direction futures contracts are gaining (Decrypt).

NASDAQ futures were down early Wednesday morning but by sunrise they were flat after a hurtful Tuesday for FAANG stocks. They were cast aside like trash on the sidewalk, even as global markets threw a moonshine-infused, hillbilly-style whoop-dee-doo on reports of strides made toward a successful Covid-19 vaccine.

Amazon lost 3.5%; Facebook lost 2.3%; Google, 1.3%; Apple, 0.3%. Thank-you, FAANGs, for carrying us all this time, but now it's bargain-hunting season, traders seem to be saying.

Gold is a metal, and a most precious one at that. But, really, what is gold? Currency or commodity? Both?

The same philosophical debate surrounds Bitcoin, although, legally speaking, don't call it a security. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission doesn't, explicitly acknowledging the Bitcoin blockchain's decentralized nature, but perhaps not fully grasping the buying/selling/swapping/wrapping marketplaces for bitcoin the digital coin and myriad derivatives.

Whether XRP is a security is a fiercely debated question. The Daily Chain took a stab at settling it, citing a tweet from trader Peter Brandt. If the SEC understood cryptos, XRP would be classified as a security, Brandt said.

The SEC has not formally weighed in on the legal status of XRP, not in the same expressive way it has with Bitcoin.

Some written guidance from the regulatory agency – framing how XRP might be construed as a security – has been invoked in class-action lawsuits filed against San Francisco-based Ripple Labs, a private company and a large holder of XRP.

Price-wise, XRP has been flatter than hammered cheese. Its community is getting anxious. These lawsuits assert that Ripple sold XRP tokens in an unregistered securities offering. Ripple has insisted it is not a security; that it's a payments infrastructure entity. Which bears a tangential utilitarian fruit. That also happens to be tradable.

On Nov. 7, Ripple announced it is opening a new regional office in Dubai. This is potentially a signal of things to come, not just in terms of XRP but other major digital currency players leaving the U.S. because of regulatory ambiguity.

Swiss developer Cerealia SA last week said that its blockchain-based physical agricultural commodities trading platform has gone live after several years in beta. Trial transactions, involving grains, have settled between arrays of international counterparties, from Japan to Ukraine.  The platform initially is focused on exported Russian wheat. GrainChain is also promoting blockchain-abetted efficiency in the physical grain markets.