This week in coins. Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.
On Tuesday, crypto fleetingly regained a trillion dollar market cap. The modest gains were wiped out the following day by a brief crash, and coming into the weekend, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) are both basically flat over the past seven days.
That’s better than some of the other notable names fared in the past week. XRP is down 5% in the past week, even after an incremental victory in Ripple’s case against the SEC that will allow Ripple’s attorneys to see emails about former SEC official Bill Hinman’s 2018 speech in which he labeled ETH not a security; Cardano (ADA) is down 7.5% even after pulling off its Vasil hard fork; Solana (SOL) is down 5% after the network suffered a three-hour outage Friday night; Dogecoin (DOGE) is down 7%; Avalanche (AVAX) is down 5%.
Uniswap (UNI) enjoyed a rally this week, up 9% over the last seven days after reports that Uniswap Labs, the development team behind the leading DEX, is currently in funding talks with one of Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds, alongside blockchain investment firm Polychain, to strike a deal that could would give Uniswap a $1 billion valuation.
Kristin Smith, executive director of the Blockchain Association, tells Decrypt's Dan Roberts and Stacy Elliott in our Decrypting Mainnet series at Mainnet 2022 that the crypto industry has "never been so close to getting some comprehensive legislation done" and that she's confident we'll see an actual crypto law by next year.
On Monday, Australia’s central bank said in a white paper that the country’s CBDC pilot should be completed by mid-2023. The pilot, which started in July, uses a blockchain currency called eAUD which utilizes JPMorgan’s enterprise-grade, private variant of Ethereum, Quorum, and at this point will not necessarily lead to a CBDC.
The following day, Christine Lagarde of the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve's Jerome Powell, and Bank of International Settlements’ general manager Agustin Carstens all called for broader DeFi regulation during an online panel hosted by the Bank of France.
During a fireside chat at the NYU School of Law that day, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chairman Rostin Behnam said that Bitcoin might “double in price” if it traded in a CFTC-regulated market. The chairman added that the crypto industry had “a massive opportunity for institutional inflows that will only occur if there’s a regulatory structure.”
And on Wednesday, 33 Paraguayan senators voted to reject President Mario Abdo Benitez’s veto of a bill aiming to regulate Bitcoin mining in the South American country. In July, Paraguay’s legislature approved the bill to create a clear-cut tax and regulatory framework that would allow miners to know where they stand while operating in the country.
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Public Keys is a weekly roundup from Decrypt that tracks the key publicly traded crypto companies. This week: Reading tea leaves during Circle and eToro quiet periods, Bitcoin miners selling a lot of Bitcoin, and Semler Scientific offering securities to raise cash to buy Bitcoin to secure a loan to pay the DOJ.
It’s oh so quiet
There was a jolt of excitement this week when USDC stablecoin issuer Circle told Decrypt the company is in a mandatory quiet period on account of having filed their S-1 a...
Kraken has reorganized its staff across multiple departments in recent months as part of a strategic move before its planned initial public offering next year.
A Kraken spokesperson told Decrypt that the company continuously evaluates its workforce to ensure it aligns with its strategic priorities.
“We’re approaching this with discipline and intention, making the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles and consolidate teams where redundancies exist, while continuing to hire in key areas of...
eXch crypto exchange will shut down operations on May 1 following links to the $1.4 billion Bybit hack and an "active transatlantic operation," the team said Thursday.
eXch is a privacy-focused crypto exchange known for operating without typical KYC, or know-your-customer) requirementsThe closure comes amid mounting allegations that eXch was complicit in the $1.4 billion Bybit hack in February, allegedly facilitating money laundered by North Korea's Lazarus hacker ring.
The exchange cited an "ac...
