September 13, 2022 / Unchained Daily / Laura Shin
Daily Bits✍️✍️✍️
- Bitcoin jumped above the $22,000 mark, outperforming ETH prior to the Merge.
- The ETHPoW team said the fork will be deployed within 24 hours of the Merge.
- Stone Ridge, a multi-billion dollar asset manager filed to liquidate its bitcoin strategy fund with the SEC.
- Nikhil Wahi, brother of ex-Coinbase manager Ishan Wahi, pleaded guilty to insider trading.
- Crypto exchange Huobi will delist seven privacy coins from its platform amid regulatory concerns.
- Heather Morgan, also known as “Razzlekhan,” is asking the judge to grant her access to crypto wallets.
- Argentina’s tax agency caught three clandestine crypto mining sites.
- Two Algorand executives are pushing Helium to move to the Algorand network rather than Solana.
- The Blockchain Association launched a new PAC to back pro-crypto candidates.
Today in Crypto Adoption…
- The CME Group announced plans to launch ether options.
- The Polygon network was chosen for Starbucks web3 ‘odyssey’.
The $$$ Corner…
- The NEAR Foundation launched a $100 million venture capital fund and lab for web3.
- Goldsky, a crypto data infrastructure platform, closed a $20 million seed round.
- NEAR-based wallet Sender raised $4.5 million in a round led by Pantera Capital.
What Do You Meme?
What’s Poppin’?
Fidelity Investments to Offer Bitcoin Trading
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Fidelity Investments is considering offering bitcoin to retail customers.
Fidelity is one of the world’s largest asset managers and handles over 34 million retail accounts on its brokerage platform.
The financial giant has been a supporter of Bitcoin for some years now. In 2018, it launched a bitcoin-trading business for hedge funds and institutional investors. In addition, earlier this year, the firm allowed companies to incorporate up to 20% of BTC into their 401(k) retirement plans.
The company hasn’t confirmed the plans with its clients yet. However, at the Salt conference, Galaxy Holdings Ltd.’s CEO Mike Novogratz said, “A bird told me that Fidelity, a little bird in my ear, is going to shift their retail customers into crypto soon enough.”
Fidelity’s move, though unconfirmed, follows BlackRock’s partnership with Coinbase to offer crypto trading to its institutional customers. It looks like big players are still interested in the industry despite the negative sentiment in the markets.
The news was taken very positively on social media, with many celebrating the potential mass adoption that this move could trigger. And, even though it is unclear if the Fidelity news was the catalyst, the price of BTC rose almost 3% yesterday, reaching a high of $22,439.
Recommended Reads
- Chainalysis on the Merge impact
- Madison Mariani on blockchain layers
- Ishan B on tokenomics
On The Pod…
Kevin Zhou, cofounder of Galois Capital, and Evgeny Gaevoy, founder and CEO of Wintermute, discuss how to trade the Ethereum Proof of Work fork, what the market is telling about the Merge, and whether the Merge affects Bitcoin. Show highlights:
- what will happen at the time of the Merge according to Kevin and whether there’s uncertainty
- when the ETH Proof of Work chain will emerge and how that affects trading opportunities
- the mistakes of the ETHPoW team, like repealing EIP-1559
- what percentage of ETH market cap ETHPoW will accrue
- what the first few blocks of ETHPoW will be like
- what the strategies are to earn the ETHPoW airdrop and what the on-chain activity looks like
- whether there is an “up-only” monoculture in Ethereum
- what stETH is, how it should be priced and what the futures market indicates
- where the value of a chain comes from and the likelihood of ETHPoW failing catastrophically
- how to protect from replay attacks
- the price action of ETH after the Merge
- how ETH becoming deflationary affects Bitcoin’s narrative as digital gold
- how the ESG-friendly image of Proof of Stake could affect the narratives of ETH and BTC
Book Update
My book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, which is all about Ethereum and the 2017 ICO mania, is now available!
You can purchase it here: http://bit.ly/cryptopians
