AXS Nearing ATH; UnionBank Digital License

CRYPTODAY 023

1. Today’s newsletter (and probably Monday’s as well) is going to be shorter than normal. It’s been a crazy week and I’ve been doing back-to-back recordings and livestreams: WorldCryptoNetwork, #TeamArbo, Digital Pilipinas, Resistance Trader … plus we need to drive back to La Union this Sunday. I’ll be sharing links as some of these videos get published over the coming week.

   

   My last event for the week is tomorrow at 330pm, a panel at TokoCrypto where we’ll talk about rising trends in the region. I didn’t think I’d become a professional shill for Axie Infinity and Play-to-Earn quite so soon, but here we are ;)

2. If you’re wondering what triggered the recent price jump (the whole market is up by a good 10% since my last letter), it turns out that there actually was a decent amount of support in the $29,000 zone for $BTC, causing a nice little bounce back to $31,000 in the wee hours of the morning on Thursday. $AXS is up nearly 90% since Wednesday, and is now within $1 of its previous ATH of $29.20, which it hit on July 15th. Meanwhile $SLP is settling back down below 0.30 (PHP15.00), which implies that there’s a healthy amount of SLP entering the ecosystem again.

3. Bitcoin’s recovery was further reinforced by Jack Dorsey’s The B Word conference, which featured, amongst other folks, Elon Musk saying that he owned significant amounts of $BTC, $ETH, and $DOGE, and although he might “pump,” he wasn’t doing it to “dump.” If you feel like watching three extremely rich people talk about how they plan to save the world, the whole 1-hour conversation can be found here.

4. Far more interesting to me was ETHCC, an Ethereum conference that was livestreaming the day before The B Word. Vitalik Buterin took to the stage to talk about how Ethereum needed to start thinking beyond DeFi.

   

   The presentation touched on everything from the quality of discourse on social media to the funding of public goods, and it felt a hell of a lot more specific than Dorsey’s goals of bringing peace to the world via Bitcoin.

5. Unionbank has apparently secured a digital banking license from the BSP. If you don’t know what that is: in the Philippines, you are required to have physical locations in order to be licensed as a bank. A “digital” bank does not, and the expectation is that all of the banking services will be carried out online instead. Not having branches and tens of thousands of employees certainly helps reduce costs, but this is offset somewhat by the fact that the minimum capitalization is 1 billion pesos. The new entity will be called UnionDigital, and joins Overseas Filipino Bank, UNOBANK, and Tonik Digital, as the country’s fourth licensee. The BSP is aiming to bring formal banking services to 70% of Filipino adults by 2023.

6. We are expecting some news from Binance later today that will have a really big impact on the local crypto community. I was lucky enough to get the scoop, but I can’t write about it until it’s actually officially launched. Keep your eyes peeled today, and you’ll likely read my thoughts on the new feature here on Cryptoday next week.

See you all on Monday, cryptofam!