Crypto reanimates
What's being bought and sold*
TOP TRENDING ASSETS
*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. 31st October 2023.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
All investments and trading are risky and may result in the loss of capital. Cryptoassets are largely unregulated and are therefore not subject to protection.
What’s up
XRP, Solana, Sui Keep Uptober Alive
It's the final day of so-called Uptober and a troop of altcoins are ticking higher.
XRP reached $0.60 on an 8% gain in 24 hours. Solana could be near $40 by day's end.
THORChain (RUNE) gained 12%. So did Rollbit (RLB). BitTorrent (BTT) rose 11%.
Today is also Halloween. So maybe some of these projects are merely masquerading or only temporarily transformative, as if still captive to the recent full moon.
Definitely howling of late is Sui, a layer-1 smart contract platform mauled and left for dead less than a fortnight ago. But it has wandered through the graveyard – and back into the Top 100. Since hitting an all-time low of $0.364846 on Oct. 19, SUI has shot up 25%, according to CoinGecko. SUI remains 79% off of its all-time high of $2.16 reached this past May.
What's down
Biggies Shade Slightly Red
As of 7:45 a.m. (EST) on Tuesday, Bitcoin shed 0.3% as it continues to hang around $34,500 like some earthbound spirit unable to take the next step beyond.
Ethereum declined 0.5%. ETH is close to losing its newfound $1,800 handle. The veil that separates ETH from its coveted perch is thinning.
It's now a full week since ETF-inevitability-mania descended, catapulting crypto, but thus far, the SEC has not made any official announcement pertaining to any approvals of product applications filed with the agency by a slew of money managers.
An analyst at Bernstein in a research note said approval of a spot Bitcoin ETF is a "done deal." Early January is seen as the likely window.
Meanwhile, BlackRock supposedly spent crypto winter stockpiling its coffers with copious amounts of BTC, Coinspeaker said.
Mainstream adoption could boost overall liquidity, but what would Satoshi Nakamoto think of the world's largest money manager and the federal government forcibly sinking their fangs into decentralized money?
What's next
Meet The New Boss
Fifteen years ago today, a white paper, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," came out with little fanfare and as some of Wall Street largest banks were collapsing, requiring a taxpayer bailout. The Bitcoin paper's author or authors, under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, laid out a vision for a network that would timestamp transactions by "hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed."
“Nakamoto's paper didn't explicitly say 'the world needs a peer-to-peer system to move money around to replace Wall Street giants because they can't be trusted,'" CoinDesk's Nick Baker opined in an essay posted last night. "But that was the vibe as folks picked up on the idea and made it real."
Now that the likes of BlackRock and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange are joining in the dance, both feet flying, their centralized nature, as well as sheer enormity, raises tricky questions for an industry still largely driven by the core concept of trustless transactions.
Sam Bankman-Fried, Do Kwon and others appear to have demonstrated what can happen when "crypto natives" are designated as trustworthy shepherds, CoinDesk's Baker points out.
Baker wonders whether crypto users are willing to trust new institutional shepherds, or, as Satoshi might have hoped, "will they finally ditch the shepherds?"
Like it or not, traditional finance ("TradFi") is already entrenched in digital markets; it's now only a matter of the degree to which their involvement increases. And that will hinge on regulators' inclinations.
