Rough week for crypto — take a look at what CT's thoughts are on the latest regulatory crackdowns.
Gm,
Last week we rang the bell to see if anybody’s still home.
Heck yes, there is.
At least for now. Because the SEC is coming after crypto with an eviction order to throw all of us out on the street.
This was a wild week.
The detailed play-by-play of it, summarized below.
Whose Threads Are a Must-Read?
Last week’s elephant in the room was the SEC lawsuit against Binance and Coinbase. The details of that and the reactions to it are covered in the “Talk of the Town” section, but Redphonecrypto wrote a separate thread on the current state of the crypto exchange market:
The TLDR:
- Each iteration of the crypto exchange landscape gets better, forcing pre-existing exchanges to innovate.
- Future competition will come from three places: TradFi/fintech, new exchanges and DeFi.
- Don't give up on crypto.
The topic was everywhere, as you would expect. Gary Gensler, already a crypto heel, is now in full Lord Voldemort mode to extinguish any kind of relevant status crypto still has. But Gary was not always so anti-crypto.
In fact, Ram Ahluwalia argues in his thread that Gary Gensler is the Anakin Skywalker of crypto:
In short:
- Chair Gensler was initially a crypto advocate, praising decentralized networks and Algorand.
- Gensler's shift to a crypto critic was likely due to his ambition to become US Treasury Secretary.
- Gensler's story is compared to Anakin Skywalker's transition from Jedi to Sith.
There was a spicy extra bit of information about Gensler that surfaced after the thread was written, so keep reading until the end…
Were there any non-SEC-related news or threads?
You bet.
It may not look like it now, but there will be a time when crypto analytics tools will come in handy again. And then you will be happy to have bookmarked threads like this one about the best crypto tools:
And while it most definitely may not seem like it now, there will be a time and a place for airdrops again, as well. One of the biggest future airdrops will likely be the Zk-Sync airdrop. Cyclop covered a best-of-threads to farming that one here:
Last but not least, NFTs are still around as well. Well, sort of. The market is a wasteland, but there was still a noteworthy new entrant to it. No other than Louis Vuitton entered the NFT market and Farokh explained the what, why and how here:
Elon Building Twitter
No drama or wisdom sections this week since the drama was crypto’s main event this week.
But we do have an update from Elon building Twitter. Several, in fact. One concerning the new monetization rules for creators:
The other update was Elon complaining on a Twitter space with Robert Kennedy Jr about ad spend leaving Twitter:
Maybe more ad spend would help Twitter to re-hire some engineers that tackle the recent account hacks? Those have become increasingly common among Crypto Twitter accounts:
Running the “digital public townsquare” is no easy feat, it seems.
Talk of the Town
Crypto Twitter experienced a Cambrian explosion of activity last week but not for the right reasons.
You’ve probably already heard about it, but if you have not, here’s the big news again:
The SEC is clamping down. Again.
Reason enough for the crypto haters like Stephen Diehl to run a victory lap.
Interestingly enough, ETH was not named as one of the coins that is a security. Early in the week, BTC withdrawals from Binance looked negligible, though Bitcoin proceeded to nuke to $25K over the weekend.
So how bad is this really?
According to Adam Cochran pretty bad for Binance and medium bad for Coinbase. It really can’t be that bad when the government itself uses the “illegal dealer,” can it?
Some, like Jon Wu, even argued this would be long-term bullish for crypto. At last, the SEC revealed its securities trump card, making it easier for future projects to play by its rules. It sure doesn’t feel like that now, but one can hope.
Reactions were predictably… downbeat. We thought this is America? Isn’t this America?
Gary Gensler evidently is on a revenge mission and isn’t particularly fuzzed about hiding it:
That became even more evident when two days after the Binance lawsuit this spicy bit of news broke:
Gary’s advances were rejected and now he’s committed to making the industry’s life a living hell? Could it be this easy?
It seems it could:
Amidst all of this, there was one group of crypto hodlers that remained unshaken. Unbothered. Moisturized. Happy. In their lane. Focused. Flourishing.
Ok, not quite. The lawsuit was a big topic among Bitcoiners. Some, like Cory Klippsten were rather, ahem, pleased by the SEC's actions.
But even the Bitcoin community isn’t fully in unison over this one. Others, like Udi Wertheimer, think the lawsuits will do damage to Bitcoin as well:
So who’s right here?
If you feel particularly adventurous, read the “lawsuit is bad for Bitcoin” side of the argument by Nic Carter or the “they had it coming” counterargument by Dylan LeClair.
So where does this leave us?
It isn’t a fair fight. Even non-crypto people like Mark Cuban acknowledge as much:
But as long as CZ doesn’t have to get the AKs out to defend his exchange, things aren’t looking great but not that bad yet either:
In case crypto really does go to zero soon, you may want to cash out your last $3500 and seek refuge in Apple’s new multimedia ski goggles:
Our Favorite Coinfession
The absolute state of crypto companies, Q2 2023:
Memes
The only upside of the SEC lawsuit nuke was that it gave memelords plenty of material to work with.
Last Tuesday was particularly interesting on Twitter. Hard to choose what to focus on between the SEC and aliens landing (again):
Our best hope remains the utter genius of the Coinbase legal team:
Also, Gary Gensler shouldn’t play hard offense if he cannot take a tackle:
That’s all for this week. Hoping for better next week, see you then!
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