While operation choke point 2.0 set the industry back months (years?) in the fallout of the FTX collapse by targeting fiat on and off ramps such as the silvergate exchange network and signature bank, there’s been a lot of news the last two weeks about new players making it easier for fiat to flow in and out of the digital asset ecosystem.
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PayPal, which has 400M+ active accounts, launches stablecoin
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Visa enables fiat payments for ethereum gas costs
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Europe approves first spot bitcoin ETF
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Gnosis pay supports Visa debit card payments
Bridges
Crypto bridges refer to methods of moving tokens from one network to another, eg. ethereum to polygon, solana to avalanche, etc.
Bridges can be trustless (non-custodial and managed by code) or trusted (custodial and managed by a third party). In either case, treasuries holding reserves of bridged assets are the modern equivalent of trains carrying payroll shipments in the Wild West.
Both trustless and trusted bridges are vulnerable, trustless bridges via smart contract loopholes or trusted bridges via compromised private keys. Over 50% of all Defi exploits were bridge attacks totaling over $2.5B in lost assets.
While cross chain bridges operate at meaningful scale -- since 2021 there has been between $5 and $15B of wrapped BTC on ethereum and up to an additional $150B+ USD backed stablecoin -- fiat bridges, often referred to as on and off ramps to the crypto ecosystem, will be a key driver of digital assets crypto growing from a $1 trillion to a $10+ trillion asset class in the years ahead.
Macro
QT, for real this time.
Earnings recession was already here.
Soft landing headline frequency, contraindicator?
Equity rally concentrated in large growth names.
Stocks are expensive relative to bonds.
Yield curve still flashes warning sign despite long end steepening.
the inversion will end eventually and how it ends will be telling—whether the main cause is falling interest rates or new bets that the economy can withstand higher rates than previously believed.
Crypto
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56% of BTC hasn’t moved in 2 years
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29% hasn’t moved in 5 years
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More than 1m wallets hold 1+ Bitcoin
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miners accumulating again
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BTC a beachball underwater?
Crypto x Culture
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monument game
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fewos drop date (9/25 - 9/29)
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dunk genesis forge teased
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the met on roblox
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zynga launches sugartown
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paradigm on open problems of on chain games