$BTC, $AXS down; $SLP, $FTX up
CRYPTODAY 022
Bitcoin broke below $30,000 yesterday, briefly touching $29,200 before coming back up to $29,700. It’s the second time we’ve closed the day below $30,000 since June 22nd ($28,800 is currently still our lowest of 2021). If you’re a Bitcoin fan, you’re probably reading a lot of tweets and posts this week still justifying a long-term bullish scenario for $BTC. On a long enough timeframe, anyone can be correct, but in the near term, I don’t think there’s any rational way to interpret this other than “bearish.”
The rest of the market is also looking pretty shitty today, and you can freely interpret that as either a buying opportunity or a forced holding situation.
I struggled to look for anything that was in the green, and funnily enough it turned out to be $SLP, which is up nearly 15% since yesterday. This makes sense based on what we understand about Axie Infinity. The game has been really unstable this past week, and the Axie players have been struggling to earn their daily SLP targets. What the increasing price of SLP is telling us is that there’s still a lot of breeder demand even if the platform is struggling to keep up. Overall this is a pretty bullish signal for the ecosystem, but it must eventually be balanced out by fresh SLP sell volume in order to be sustainable.
Speaking of bullish, FTX just announced a monster raise of $900M, the largest amount of money ever raised by a crypto exchange. Its Series B round included investors such as Sequoia Capital and Coinbase Ventures, and will be used primarily to do a series of acquisitions in the space. $FTT is up by 3% today, a relatively small bump considering how big this news is. FTX has been on a tear recently, sponsoring the MLB (yes, THAT MLB), the Miami Heat home arena, and the esports team TSM.
Opensea has just closed a $100M funding round, which values the NFT marketplace at $1.5B, making them officially the first unicorn startup in the NFT space. I don’t maintain my personal art gallery in Opensea, but one of the collections that I participated in, MyCurioCards, certainly does. It’s recently been enjoying a resurgence in popularity as NFTart historians dig up the oldest pieces in the space.
If you’re a DeFi fan, you probably saw news that Maker, the foundation behind the $DAI stablecoin, was shutting down. Maker is one of the original DeFi brands, and this is good news, not bad. In its final step in ensuring decentralization, the foundation has removed itself from the equation and turned over control of their stablecoin fully to the ecosystem at large. The stablecoin and lending protocol will now be guided by the Maker “DAO,” a “decentralized autonomous organization” composed of disparate entities all voting on the destiny of the project with $MKR tokens.
I’ve been more and more concerned about the state of global regulations this year, and this new proposal from the European Union is really troubling. The proposal aims to require cryptocurrency wallet providers to collect the identity information of their users.
#Cryptocurrency is one of the newest ways to launder money. Our rules will now apply to the whole of the crypto sector. We will ban anonymous crypto wallets and make sure that crypto-asset transfers are traceable.Imagine having to upload your ID before opening a Metamask wallet, or submitting a proof-of-address before downloading Electrum. For the vast majority of crypto investors, this probably doesn’t sound like a big deal. You’re all probably already submitting ID because you’re exchanging fiat for your tokens via centralized exchanges, but this is the first time where they’ve tried to lock us down at the level of open-source software. Governments are encroaching on the crypto space in ways that I didn’t even think were possible, and is an absolutely insane overreach.
Stay safe and stay dry out there, cryptofam! See you all on Friday.
UPDATE as per Atty Rafael Padilla: The EU proposal ONLY appears to apply to custodial wallet providers and NOT Metamask and Electrum the way I previously described. That's a big difference in impact, and I apologize for miscasting the news the way I did.