Very mild advances for majors

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission needs to "suit up" and put to more effective use all of its decades of experience rooting out fraud, said Senator Elizabeth Warren in an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal following the collapse of FTX.

"We’re already suited up," said SEC Chair Gary Gensler in an interview yesterday with Yahoo Finance.

The SEC reportedly has launched investigations into FTX. So too has the Department of Justice which is now apparently looking into whether Sam Bankman-Fried had a role in the downward spiral of Terra’s native assets earlier this year, according to the New York Times.

Terra's springtime collapse and continued Fed tightening spurred the onset of crypto winter, exacerbated by the ongoing FTX crisis. So far in 2022, as of early December, the value of the crypto market has been gashed by $1.3 trillion.

Regulatory crackdown worries are part of the downturn. Gensler declined to tell Yahoo whether the agency would craft newly tailored rules next year, although the top securities industry cop emphasized that the agency intended to enforce securities laws already in place.

“The rules are there,” he said. “The law firms know how to advise their clients to comply.”

Thus far, the SEC has initiated 100 total enforcement actions against crypto firms. Many of those actions have been undertaken on Gensler’s watch. Back in February, the agency charged BlockFi Lending LLC for failing to register the offers and sales of its retail crypto lending product; to settle the SEC’s charges, BlockFi, without admitting or denying the findings, agreed to pay a $50 million penalty, and to cease its unregistered offers and sales of the lending product.

In May 2022, the SEC announced that it would add 20 positions to the renamed Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit (previously just called the Cyber Unit), nearly doubling the staff.

Last month, the SEC announced that it initiated 760 enforcement actions across all financial markets in 2022 and that these actions led to a record $6.4 billion in fines and monetary recoveries for investors.

That haul represents a 64% increase compared to fines/recoveries in 2021.

Bitcoin price action remained fairly muted as the inexorable march to Christmas and New Year's hit full stride.

Holiday shoppers who did buy the BTC dip – as it touched $16,799 at noon on Wednesday – rushed home with 0.1% gains as of earlier this morning.

Ethereum eked out a +0.6% return in the past 24 hours, reaching $1,240. ETH has shed 4.6% in the past week.

Crypto volume, amid fears of contagion and redoubled regulatory scrutiny, has fallen off a cliff, Barron's declared.

We do not take big stablecoins for granted when we check the charts each morning. It's always reassuring to see those pegs in place.

That USDT, USDC and BUSD all rank among the largest coins in terms of overall trading volume isn't lost on Bloomberg commodity strategist Mike McGlone. He has a thesis about the dominance of stablecoins: it bodes well for crypto, particularly Ethereum with its technology making it possible to trade those digital dollars quickly and inexpensively (The Daily Hodl).

“There’s little in the long term to stop this advancing technology,” McGlone said.

McGlone added that he thinks crypto will go back to beating traditional asset classes next year.