Altcoins energized

Bitcoin and Ethereum are flatter than hammered veal, but several altcoins are pleasantly plump:

• XRP, after being singled out for demystification during a landmark hearing on Capitol Hill, has rallied 12% over the past 24 hours.
• Terra (LUNA) surged into the Big Ten and seems poised to try on a new all-time high. LUNA got to nearly $78 on Dec. 5. As of 8 a.m., LUNA was about $72, having gained 5% over the prior 24 hours, in part buoyed by news that a Hong Kong-based VC firm planned to put $50 million into the Terra ecosystem.
• Gala (GALA), a token affiliated with Gala Games, a blockchain-based gaming platform, surged nearly 20%. Amidst the metaverse/gaming token mania of November, GALA rocketed 350%.
• Near (NEAR), native token of a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol that we've never heard of, jumped 14%. It may have had something to do with trading app MoonPay supporting it (Motley Fool).

A crypto-native reserve currency protocol, Olympus (OHM) has been hailed as the future of money. It has also been called unsustainable to the point of being a Ponzi scheme.

OHM isn't pegged to the dollar. It freely floats, backed only by what’s held in the Olympus DAO treasury. OHM is run as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), governed by blockchain-based smart contracts.

But it is the full-fledged faith and backing of OHM's loyal, forward-thinking community ($250 billion in total value locked) that would seem to be the primary driver of its success, and not necessarily any new-fangled mathematical rebasing and yield staking tools, CoinDesk said. If the cryptosphere is ever to have its own decentralized reserve asset, something wildly volatile wouldn’t be entirely inappropriate.

OHM got as high as $1,400 in late April and fell below $200 in May. Over the past week, OHM has declined 38%. It's now $476, down 7% over 24 hours.

Efforts to seek clemency for Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who is serving life in prison on charges the dark website he ran was a criminal enterprise, is getting some financial support from the FreeRossDAO, spearheaded by members of the PleasrDAO community (Decrypt).

In order to position itself to win a collection of Ulbricht-created non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the PleasrDAO community amassed a treasury of more than $12 million worth of ETH in just a few days. The DAO says its mission is to "free Ross, advance prison reform, and share Ross's work with the world."

Fundraiser DAOs are essentially informal, unregulated Kickstarter campaigns, which is why they could be the next "crowdfunding gold rush," CoinDesk said.

Meanwhile, the popular ($6 billion raised and counting) Kickstarter platform has just announced that it will be supporting the development of an open-source protocol that would create a decentralized functionality running on a public blockchain (Crypto Daily).

As political theater, the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee hearing on crypto yesterday was something of a snooze fest, with tedious talking points along party lines and participants – including the top executives from six major crypto companies – reaffirming, with each carefully measured utterance, a shared exercise in futility.

The crypto overlords sang in unison. We need clearer rules. But nothing too onerous. Perhaps something bespoke?

Democratic lawmakers conveyed concerns about systemic risks and consumer harm. Committee Chairwoman, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), not a crypto fan, singled out Charles Cascarilla, the head of Paxos, telling him that she was worried about Facebook's digital wallet, Novi, which has embarked on a pilot program enabling person-to-person payments within a social media setting and which involves Paxos' Pax Dollar. Not to worry, Cascarilla assured her, as the pilot is small in scope and, as a New York State-chartered trust company, Paxos already follows a lot of rules.

“I really do believe we are building a new global economic infrastructure layer,” said Jeremy Allaire, the chief executive of the payments company Circle and who called for a hybrid regulatory model.

Also among those testifying on Wednesday were Brian Brooks, who was acting comptroller of the currency under President Trump and who is now chief executive of Bitfury, and Sam Bankman-Fried, chief of FTX, who suggested a “unified joint regime” integrating crypto with existing agencies like the SEC and CFTC.

Brooks was asked to explain in under two minutes what regulatory tweak he would do if made king for a day.

"I don't know why we believe that incumbent institutions are risk-free and anything new is highly risky," he replied. "If I have a platform built on a blockchain that is doing lending, I don't know why it's so hard for us to say that can participate in our banking system. If I decide that XRP is a security, why don't we let it list on a U.S. exchange? The problem is we treat crypto differently from other assets. The answer is just to recognize them for what they are. These are assets that represent some underlying activity."

Wow, impressive. King Brian just solved the XRP/SEC dispute in the time it takes to listen to a Ramones song.

Congress is not likely to pass any sweeping new rules package, at least not anytime soon, according to Reuters, citing analysts. Lee Reiners, the executive director of the Global Financial Markets Center at Duke University and former central banker, told the New York Times after the hearing that in his view there would be no substantial change in rules until there is a crypto-linked crisis that hurts “the proverbial widows and orphans.”