This week in coins. Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt.
That was it fifth week in a row of either flat prices or losses, but flatness suddenly looks a little more promising than usual. New data from Kaiko finds that Bitcoin is less volatile than shares for the first time in two years, as BTC appears to disconnect from the stock market.
Bitcoin and Ethereum have barely budged (up less than 2%) over the past seven days. BTC is currently trading at $19,202, while ETH is changing hands at $1,302 at the time of writing. =
Last week’s biggest losers among the biggest names was Solana (SOL), which fell 6% despite continued indicators of NFT growth at SolanaXRP, which fell 4% despite Ripple’s general counsel Stu Alderoty saying Ripple received the SEC emails it had been fighting, and Cardano (ADA), down 4%.
The biggest gainer of the entire top 20 was a rally of just 4% last week for Polygon (MATIC).
Crypto winter freezes
Regulators continue to dig into crypto. SE and CFTC are investigating bankrupt crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC) to see if it “broke rules by misleading investors about the strength of its balance sheet and failing to register with the agencies,” according to reports earlier this week.
3AC was one of the biggest victims of the industry’s liquidity crisis, which has continued ever since Terra’s collapse back in May. At the time it filed for bankruptcy, 3AC owed the least 3.5 billion dollars to its creditors.
On Wednesday, Berlin’s crypto-integrated bank Nuri announced that it was formwork operations due to the “insurmountable” challenges of attracting investment or a takeover bid.
Formerly known as Bitwala, Nuri filed for insolvency in August of the following year cut 20% of the workforce when the company struggled with the bear market.
Nuri also referred now bankrupt lender Celsius as “one of our most important business partners”, whose own insolvency “significantly worsened the situation and put us over the edge.” Nuri says that customer funds are safe and unaffected by the company’s insolvency, and that they can continue crypto trading until the end of November.
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Dispatches from Washington
On Wednesday, a copy of the pending Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act (DCCPA), a bill that outlines how the CFTC would regulate the crypto industryour uploaded to GitHub by Gabriel Shapiro, a crypto attorney and general counsel at Delphi Labs.
The DCCPA was introduced by Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and John Boozman (R-AR) in August and has garnered support from Coin base and FTX manager Sam Bankman-Fried to offer an alternative to what many have perceived as a regulation-by-enforcement strategy by the SEC.
Over 18 months and 6 court orders later, we finally have the Hinman documents (internal SEC emails and drafts of his infamous 2018 speech). Although they remain confidential for now (at the SEC’s insistence), I can say that it was well worth the fight to get them.
Stuart Alderoty, the general counsel of XRP ancestor Ripple, announced on Thursday the news that Ripple’s defense finally had got his hands on a trove of internal SEC emails and documents. Ripple has faced a lawsuit from the supervisory authority for nearly two years, after the SEC alleged that XRP was being sold as an unregistered security. The materials in question – called the “Hinman documents” – concern former SEC director William Hinman and his much talked about speech at a Yahoo Finance event in 2018 declaring that Ethereum – like Bitcoin – was “sufficiently decentralized” and not subject to federal securities regulation. Alderoty tweeted that after 18 months access to the collection was “well worth the struggle”.
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