DECENTRALIZED NEWS
Credits 🚀
Wall Street's top regulator, SEC Chair Gary Gensler, has confirmed that Bitcoin is the only crypto he can publicly call a commodity today.
Perennial Bitcoin bull Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy has grabbed up an extra 480 Bitcoins for about $10 million.
Jamil Nazarali, a long-time executive at Citadel Securities, has been tapped to lead the market maker's crypto venture that it's building with Virtu, Charles Schwab, Sequoia, and others.
Former Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Chris Giancarlo has been knighted in France.
Debits 🐻
BlockFi is being valued at less than $500 million by investors one a year after the lending platform was considering raising funds at a valuation of $5 billion.
Three Arrows Capital has been ordered to liquidate by a British Virgin Islands court.
Whit Ghibbs and Jodie Fisher have resigned as CEO and CFO, respectively, of Compass Mining.
Short sellers are loading up on wagers betting against Tether, the world's largest stablecoin.
The NFT market is on the brink of seeing less than $1 billion in sales, the first time in a year.
2019 Retail Forecast
Consumer spending will jump 4.07% this year between Black Friday and Christmas, according to IBM’s annual Holiday Retail Forecast. U.S. consumers are riding the positive tailwinds of low inflation and low unemployment.
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FOMO NO MO
The rich stay rich. While the crowds of regular folk who bought into the crypto craze over the last two years have been left reeling from the market's collapse in recent weeks, the pioneers, executives, and stalwarts of the industry are humming right along, David Yaffe-Bellany writes for The New York Times.
From the article:
The combined fortunes of the 16 richest crypto billionaires exceeded $135 billion in March, Forbes estimated. As of this week, the total was about $76 billion, but most of the loss was suffered by a single billionaire, Changpeng Zhao, the chief executive of the crypto exchange Binance, whose $65 billion fortune shrank to $17.4 billion.
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, whose wealth stood at $4 billion apiece before the crash, were each worth $3.3 billion this week, according to Forbes. They declined to comment.
For retail investors like Ben Thompson, 33, the reality is different. Mr. Thompson, who lives in Sydney, Australia, lost about $45,000 — half his savings — in the crash. He had dabbled in crypto since 2018 and planned to use the money to open a brewery.
“A lot of people who seemed quite reputable had a lot of confidence,” Mr. Thompson said. “The smaller people get taken advantage of.”
BUBBLE-O-METER
$19 billion
While North American banks tend to have assets-to-equity ratios of about 9 to 1, Celsius Network was operating with $19 billion of assets and about $1 billion of equity a year ago, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
THE LEDGER’S LATEST
The crypto stocks Wall Street hates most, as short-sellers ramp up interest in the harsh winter by Declan Harty
CoinFlex CEO says Bitcoin.com founder Roger Ver owes the company $47 million by Taylor Locke
SkyBridge's Anthony Scaramucci unleashes his predictions about crypto, Coinbase, and the odds of DeSantis beating Trump by Anne Sraders
Blackstone has raised an initial $3B for its second growth fund as tech stocks continue to plunge by Jessica Mathews
Leading crypto analysis firm reveals 'contagion in the markets,' saying Three Arrows Capital was 'victim' of the staked Ether 'depeg' by Taylor Locke
Are we already in a recession? ARK Invest's Cathie Wood thinks so by Will Daniel
Binance lays out 'key' difference between now and crypto's 2018 bear market, and comes out against bailing out 'bad' companies: 'Let them fail' by Taylor Locke
Investors—including Wall Street—helped to drive up home prices during the pandemic housing boom. Here's the proof by Lance Lambert
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
2019 Retail Forecast
Consumer spending will jump 4.07% this year between Black Friday and Christmas, according to IBM’s annual Holiday Retail Forecast. U.S. consumers are riding the positive tailwinds of low inflation and low unemployment.
Clink here for more
IF YOU DON’T KNOW, CRYPTO
ETF. While not exclusively a crypto product, exchange-traded funds are worth getting to know—and not just for the aforementioned decision from the SEC on Grayscale's Bitcoin ETF application. Basically, an ETF is a type of fund that holds a basket of securities meant to replicate the performance of a certain index, sector, commodity, etc. Take SPY, or the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, for instance. The product, you guessed it, tracks the S&P 500. The key point to know about ETFs is that they can be traded throughout the day like a share of a stock can. Mutual funds, on the other hand, trade once a day after the market's close.