“Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, told Acting Comptroller Michael Hsu that he is “concerned” about the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s (OCC) granting national trust charters.
The lawmaker specifically pointed to the three crypto companies that have secured conditional OCC trust charters in the past five months: Paxos, Protego and Anchorage, and asked that Hsu “reassess” the conditional trust charters.
These companies suggest that the OCC’s approval of their charters guarantees their business model is as safe, stable and dependable for customers as a local community bank. The fact is, given the many uncertainties present in the digital asset landscape, the OCC is not in a position to regulate these entities comparably to traditional banks.
I urge you to review the procedures and guidelines followed within the OCC regarding the evaluation and approval of the Anchorage, Paxos and Protego charters to ensure that the OCC’s supervision and licensing standards remain both rigorous and equitable among charter applicants.”
See Also: US Treasury Calls for Businesses to Report Crypto Transfers of More Than $10K to the IRS
“SEC chief Gary Gensler said Thursday that federal financial regulators should “be ready to bring cases” against bad actors in crypto and other emerging technologies. He said regulators should be ready to pursue deceptive private funds, accounting fraud, insider trading and a bevy of other potential regulatory pitfalls rippling throughout the capital markets.
As we continue to stay abreast of those developments, the SEC and FINRA [the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority] should be ready to bring cases involving issues such as crypto, cyber and fintech.
While hardly offering a playbook, Gensler’s remarks may bolster the perception that investor protection is a top priority for the Biden Adminstration’s SEC.“
See Also: Australian Minister Says Government Has ‘No Issue’ With Crypto Investment
“ETF provider Teucrium Trading filed an application with the SEC to launch an ETF that would trade on NYSE Arca and would track a benchmark of bitcoin futures contracts.
While the SEC has yet to approve the application of any bitcoin ETF, Teucrium could be hoping the Teucrium Bitcoin Futures Fund (BCFU) would have an advantage over applications that propose ETFs that are physically backed by bitcoin.”
“Bullish signs are everywhere at the time of writing. Funding rates are deeply negative; outflows from exchanges reached sky-high levels in the past 24 hours; and leveraged traders have been effectively washed out of the market with $8 billion in liquidations.
$46,000, around $6,000 or 15% above spot price, is apt to act as resistance should Bitcoin see a further impulse move on short timeframes. $46,000 is also where the significant 20-week weighted moving average (WMA) currently lies.”
See Also: Bitcoin Back to $42K, Nearly Recovering All of Wednesday’s Losses
See Also: Retail Traders Catalyzed Latest Bitcoin ‘Panic Sale:’ Chainalysis
See Also: Fallout: Ethereum fees skyrocketed as traders raced to unwind leveraged positions
“It is expected that investors will be able to buy and sell digitized equity in EnergyFunders’ Yield Fund I on tZero’s trading system, giving them access to returns from oil and gas projects.
EnergyFunders CEO Laura Pommer said that she was ‘pleased about this potential opportunity to provide a secondary market for trading our new EnergyFunders Yield Fund I in the same way that you might trade stocks, bonds or ETFs (exchange-traded funds) in a regular brokerage account.'”
See Also: Figure Raises $200M, Valuing Blockchain Mortgage Firm at $3.2B
“The study identifies 19 value drivers for cryptocurrencies within five clusters: financial factors, development activity, social media dominance, network usage, network size and sophistication. One of the report’s notable finds is that the number of online searches for Bitcoin is not a significant predictor of its price; however, social media presence is a real value driver for altcoins.
According to the analysis, the value of Bitcoin appears to be primarily driven by its stock-to-flow ratio. Another variable that could serve as a fundamental value driver for Bitcoin is the number of active addresses.
For Ether, the number of verified smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain tends to be a solid price predictor. Because the number of active users on the blockchain represents the popularity of Ethereum as an ecosystem of decentralized applications (DApps), there is a case for using the number as a valuation tool for ETH.
The prices of other blockchains designed to create DApps — such as Polkadot, Neo or EOS — are more correlated with Ether’s price than with their own network’s development activity, surprisingly. The other tokens analyzed in the report include payment coins such as Dash, Stellar’s Lumen (XLM) and Litecoin (LTC). These tokens’ prices are dependent on Bitcoin’s movements.”
See Also: Ether is a better commodity than Bitcoin, says NYU Professor
“Asset management would be a new business for Coinbase, which has billions of dollars in institutional assets under custody. The Osprey deal hasn’t been finalized, both sources said.
Although small in comparison, Osprey Funds competes with Grayscale, whose assets are also under Coinbase’s custody.”
See Also: What Coinbase’s Media Play Means for Crypto
“Despite launching to the Ethereum mainnet just two weeks ago, Uniswap v3 has already overtaken SushiSwap to rank as the second-largest Ethereum-based decentralized exchange by trade volume. The combined market share of v2 and v3 suggests Uniswap now represents more than 60% of all Ethereum-based DEX trade.
With v3 coming within reach of v2’s daily volume despite only holding 15% of the total value locked, or TVL, v3 appears to be realizing its mission of increased capital efficiency.
Watkins noted that v3 is the only automated market maker that turns over more than 100% of its $900 million TVL each day, beating out its rivals by more than 400%. V3’s turnover is equal to 104% of the platform’s TVL, Uniswap v2 ranks second with 20%, followed by SushiSwap with 16%.
Layer-two scaling is next on v3’s roadmap to lower fees for users.”
The Disrupt 