Banks and Bailouts Stifle Wall Street While Investors Await Filecoin Launch

By Matt Hussey

Stocks saw a second day of losses as a pincer movement of poor quarterly earnings reports and a lack of clarity over a US stimulus squeezed prices. 

The Dow Jones Industrial Average slumped 0.6%, while the S&P 500 index fell 0.7%. The Nasdaq Composite was also down, closing 0.8% lower. 

The reason? Banks and bailouts. Wells Fargo, the world’s fourth-largest bank’s profit was less than half that of the same period last year, and Bank of America posted a drop in revenue and weaker sales, which comes after JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup also posted lacklustre results.

Morgan Stanley, Walgreens and Charles Schwab are due to report results today. 

The government meanwhile continue to send mixed messages over the possibility of a bailout before the election. 

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said achieving a deal before the November election would be “difficult.” This is despite a spokesperson from Nancy Pelosi’s team calling the most recent discussions “productive”. Talks are set to continue today. 

Crypto credentials

Crypto meanwhile had a steady day, with the market down just 0.15% over the previous day. Bitcoin and Ethereum moved by less than a percentage point while Tezos, Stellar, Cardano, Polkadot and Chainlink all saw losses in the 2-3% range. 

Bitcoin’s stability continues to be a shining light in the industry. Mark Yusko, CEO and founder of Morgan Creek Capital said yesterday Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies more broadly, was a way of avoiding the “fiat fiasco” of central banks printing more money and devaluing their currencies.

“A cryptocurrency allows you to opt-out of the fiat fiasco and have an asset that has a fixed supply. Then there’s ‘Oh, we can create lots of cryptocurrencies!’ No, you can’t. Each cryptocurrency has a user base and has a use case. It can be used as a medium of exchange, and Bitcoin, for example, is not a good medium of exchange. It’s too slow. But it’s a feature, not a bug,” Yusko said. 

But that’s not to say crypto is free from the drama of yesteryear. This time all eyes were on DeFi, in particular Dharma, a portal to decentralized exchange Uniswap. 

Critics allege it misled people into voting for a proposal that would allow a few companies to steamroll the network into passing any proposal they like. Much of it was bluster, of course, but the debacle pressed on open wounds in Uniswap's fledging governance system.  

Agustín Aguilar, founder of Pine.finance, a Uniswap dapp, told Decrypt that reducing the threshold encourages “the formation of a cartel,” given that it’d be easier for whales to pass proposals. Amid these concerns, Uniswap’s community fought back by taking more tokens to Uniswap’s voting system, thus preventing the two projects from immediately forming a cartel.

It’s a good thing that DeFi Pulse has recently released a new risk indicator to help navigate DeFi’s choppy waters. 

The Economic Safety Grade is calculated on a scale from 0 to 100 and measures a protocol’s risk of insolvency, with higher scores indicating a safer investment. It’s another sign of an industry working to break into the mainstream and become more accessible to novice users.

Another signal to new investors is Filecoin’s long-awaited mainnet launch. The decentralized file service that lets users rent out other people’s computer space, will launch its long-awaited mainnet—and along with it, its token, FIL—today. 

The event marks one of the most highly anticipated launches in the crypto industry in some time, and rather than waiting for the network and its token to go live, some exchanges including Kraken, Huobi and Gemini are already preparing to list the coin.

"This launch has been years in the making and we're expecting a surge in activity across the markets," says a spokesperson from AAX, the world’s first digital asset exchange powered by the London Stock Exchange.

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