Fantom struts its stuff

Thursday saw U.S. stocks booming. The three big indexes all surged to record highs. Reddit (RDDT) debuted as a publicly traded company, listing on the Big Board, at one point nearly doubling, ending the session up 48%.

Crypto, meanwhile, lagged. Bitcoin fell 4.4% to $64,400 over the past 24 hours.

But there are a couple of coins setting themselves apart fantastically well. Yeah, we see you Fantom.

Not quite lurking invisibly in the shadows – Fantom's native FTM has been the best-performing non-memecoin over the past month – the project often tends to get overlooked, despite a ton of hype surrounding an impending upgrade touted as set to transcend "time to finality (TFF)," or how long it takes for a transaction to get executed, confirmed and added to a blockchain, irreversibly, forever.

That FTM’s per-coin price shall never cross sixty cents seemed to be some kind of edict etched in stone for the better part of a year. About three weeks ago, though, the 42nd-largest crypto leveled up, and then went full-on parabolic. “Fantom Sonic unlocks new possibilities for the ecosystem, particularly in DeFi platforms, games, high-frequency apps and IoT," said Reflexivity Research in a report published in February.

As of 9:06 a.m. (EST), FTM was $1.17 on a gain of about 11% in 24 hours.

To recap Wall Street's banner day yesterday: the Dow, a measure of a few dozen blue-chip stocks, gained 269 points, or 0.7%, to hit 39,781.5, which is a new record high; the broader, bellwether S&P 500 reached 5,241.53, also a record. And the tech-laden Nasdaq broke its record too, reaching 16,401.84, although no thanks to the index’s biggest by-weight constituent, Apple.

APPL shares sank 4% following the news that the U.S. Department of Justice, alongside 16 state attorneys general, filed a lawsuit alleging monopolistic practices, which Apple refutes. Apple is also under anti-trust scrutiny in the EU. As for the U.S. case, Apple insists that a loss would set a “dangerous precedent” by allowing the government to influence how technology markets develop (FT).

How the crypto industry fares going forward depends in large part on how much confrontational mettle remains in place at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, an agency that despite losing its share of battles over the past 12 months still seems to be maintaining a fighting spirit.

But if the SEC picks a battle with Ethereum, as has been reported, it will not end well, predicted Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, in a post on X.

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, some lawmakers are actually fixing to come together on crypto legislation ahead of the Presidential election.

Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis insists prospects for a crypto bill are advancing in a big, bipartisan way.

Lummis told CoinDesk that Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer, Senate majority leader, is open to a stablecoin bill.

"The urgency for regulatory clarity is underscored by recent crypto market rallies and bipartisan support," BeInCrypto said.

Lawmakers seem to be latching on to crypto as a potential voter issue at a time when the industry just underwent a whirlwind end to winter.

The total crypto market spent Valentine's Day hugging the $2T level. Thirty days later, total assets flirted with $3T.

As of 8:24 a.m. (EST), the overall market capitalization of CoinGecko's 13,473-coin universe stood at $2.582 trillion, down 2.9% since yesterday.

Bitcoin volatility, says Decrypt, is a sign that traders are second-guessing whether they've priced in the next BTC halving.

BlackRock has placed a tokenized asset fund on Ethereum. (Cue mental footage of NASA engineers in a control room, jumping and hugging).

Surely the money manager hopes to one day celebrate blockchain-run portfolios that can include ETFs connected with ETH.

However, the outlook for such products clouded up this week amidst reports that the SEC was embarking on campaign to categorize ETH as an unlawfully issued security, and that the agency was probing the Ethereum Foundation.

"Stop this insanity," griped Stuart Alderoty, Ripple's chief legal officer, on X.

"Sigh, again with the ETH misinformation," chimed in Paul Grewal, legal chieftain at Coinbase.

In a lengthy string of posts, Grewal highlighted instances where the SEC characterized Ethereum as a commodity.

Statements made by a former high-ranking SEC official, William Hinman, and also by Gary Gensler himself (before he became the SEC chairman), prove contradictory, as both are on record saying that ETH was not a security, Grewal pointed out.

The Coinbase executive also flagged past instances of SEC lawyers comparing ETH to BTC, which the SEC does not treat as a security.

As for the investigation into the Ethereum Foundation, CoinDesk, quoting digital asset lawyers, pointed out that it is a “voluntary inquiry” which the foundation freely disclosed in its GitHub repository, and not necessarily any cause for alarm.

Preston Byrne, partner, Byrne & Storm, P.C., told CoinDesk via email that it's “difficult to know the nature of the government inquiry that has been sent to the Ethereum Foundation, or whether the foundation is the target of that investigation.”