Crypto gets jolly

Yesterday's U.S. employment report revealed an increase in joblessness, possibly an indication that inflation could begin to wane, and that maybe Fed rate hikes could start to get delivered in smaller increments. This scenario and related wagering seemed to have sent the stock market higher.

Bitcoin followed suit. The largest crypto rose 2% in 24 hours, surging back over the coveted, closely monitored $17K mark. As of 9 a.m. (EST), BTC was $17,155, according to CoinGecko.

Ethereum jumped 2.7% to $1,277. Most of the largest digital assets greened up. Nothing too crazy. Among the Top 30, Quant was the big mover, gaining 4% since this time yesterday.

One of the biggest announced tech deals in history hit a major stumbling block yesterday. The Federal Trade Commission filed a legal complaint to challenge Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard on the grounds that it would have anti-competitive effects on the multibillion-dollar gaming industry.

Microsoft’s proposed purchase would give it control over “Call of Duty” and “World of Warcraft,” among other titles.

The Biden administration now gets another crack at reining in Big Tech.

In a potentially landmark case going back to 2020, the FTC is suing Meta to force it to unravel two prior acquisitions, Instagram and WhatsApp. And there's a separate antitrust trial that has just kicked off, one involving Meta's proposed deal to buy VR developer Within.

The FTC claims Microsoft could leverage Activision titles to hike prices, or steer players to its own platforms, such as Xbox or Windows. And then there's gaming services, into which Microsoft is leading a forceful charge by way of its subscription service, Xbox Game Pass, also viewed by the government as likely to become overly dominant in a cloud-based space in its nascence.

Microsoft shares climbed 1.2% on the news while Activision fell 1.5%, reflecting a merger arbitrage trade that for now remains pretty much a 50-50 toss-up. The road ahead is long. Note too that the European Commission also has launched a probe into the Microsoft-Activision deal.

GameStop, meanwhile, just reported $94.7 million in net losses in the third quarter. The retailer also announced it would no longer focus on crypto (Cointelegraph).

Binance caused a tsunami last month when it began dumping tokens tied to FTX.

Around the same time, a much smaller but still decent-sized splash accompanied the drop of Binance's exclusive NFT collection depicting the most iconic moments from the career of Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo (who in one of his less iconic moments was benched in Portugal's recent 6-1 win over Switzerland in the World Cup tournament's last 16 phase).

Also making waves heading into December was Binance's ongoing incineration of billions of Terra Luna Classic tokens.

The exchange has removed 6.4 billion LUNC from circulation in just the past month. LUNC spiked by as much as 19% last week when these latest figures were revealed (CryptoNews).

LUNC was sitting at $0.00017 as of Friday morning on a 5% gain over the past two weeks.

"Hope remains that LUNC's supply will continue steadily declining over the long term, with its price correspondingly moving up," CryptoNews said.

To date, Binance has burned 13.7 billion LUNC; the overall burn count for LUNC now stands at 35.7 billion.

However, the total supply remains nearly 7 trillion.