The price of BTC tests $25K, despite the President’s holiday

Monday was a holiday in the US in honor of President’s Day, but crypto never sleeps.

Bitcoin opens the day in Asia up 1.9% to $24,815, while ether is up 1% to $1,701.

China-themed Tier 1s saw a big spike this week. Conflux is up 500% in the last week, while NEO is up 70%. Both are up around 40% in the last 24 hours.

Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at OANDA, says solid economic data from a reopened post-COVID China is going to drive up stocks and crypto prices.

“The bullish case for the Chinese economy remains solid, and the likely release of stimulus over the next couple of months as it picks up may exaggerate that,” he told CoinDesk in an email. “Domestic demand is going to be the cornerstone of the economic recovery, and policymakers seem poised to unleash it to its full potential.”

Although crypto and stocks may be on the rise, Erlam does not see gold going in the same direction.

“Gold traders do not share the eternal optimism that stock and crypto traders possess, and the past few weeks have highlighted that perfectly,” he said. “The yellow metal fell into a corrective pattern and has struggled to break out ever since.”

This week may be slow with the US holiday on Monday and not much planned for economic events in the US and Europe, but it could be the start of a breakout for bitcoin, with price gains based on enthusiasm alone.

“Crypto seems to exist in a world of its own, with bitcoin rising 2% again on Monday and looking at the highs of the past week again,” he said. “This could be a very pivotal level for bitcoin, and a breach of it could generate a lot more enthusiasm. And we’ve all seen what happens when enthusiasm and euphoria exist in crypto.”

Crypto regulation missing from Canada Inquiry Into Emergency Act

For observers of Canadian politics, the inquiry, led by Justice Paul Rouleau, was fascinating. But despite crypto serving as an important fundraising mechanism, and protesters using crypto to openly defy the country’s first-ever crypto-related sanctions, recommendations to strengthen controls on digital assets were absent from Justice Rouleau.

Disclosures from the hearings

Most of Rouleau’s recommendations address the cross-jurisdictional bickering that defined the first weeks of the protest.

Buried in the final pages of the report is Rouleau’s crypto-related recommendation – the 54th of 56.

“The federal government should continue its study of cryptocurrencies. This study should be informed by the findings of this commission,” Rouleau wrote. “Federal officials should seek to work with colleagues at other levels of government to take advantage of existing studies in this area and to ensure that any jurisdictional issues can be addressed.”

Bitcoin ‘believed government action’

Central to the financing of the protest was bitcoin.

Traditional crowdfunding platforms such as GoFundMe and GiveSendGo had exposure to Canadian bank rails, and were frozen after an Ontario Superior Court judge issued a Mareva injunction ordering the platforms and their banking partners to stop facilitating the convoy’s transactions.

But Convoy’s bitcoin remained outside the court’s control.

As CoinDesk reported last February, most bitcoin wallets were completely drained, according to data from the chain. Almost all of the 20 BTC (about $788,000 US at last year’s exchange rates) were moved to other, non-sanctioned wallets, with some landing on large centralized exchanges.

Among bitcoin’s true believers, this was an example of the digital asset’s perfect use: censorship-resistant money.

“Bitcoin proved to be a superb financial railroad as hundreds of thousands of dollars in BTC reached protesters despite government efforts to block donations,” Bitcoin magazine wrote in June. “Its use as a system to get hundreds of thousands of dollars in value directly into the hands of those blacklisted by the Canadian government may be the most potent illustration of that power to date.”

But this opinion is not universally shared within the crypto industry.

Last February, CoinDesk columnist JP Koning wrote that bitcoin was a poor way to fund the Ottawa protest and that it is not right to fund an illegal protest in any currency despite the government’s worrying use of the emergency law, which he wrote made him “very uncomfortable.”

“When a protest becomes illegal, it is the police’s job to step in and break it up. Any failure on their part to do so damages one of the other key pillars of a democratic society: the rule of law. If the law no longer works, Canada would quickly descend into a state of perpetual chaos,” Koning wrote.

In the US, there appears to be a holistic approach to cracking down on the crypto industry.

As Nic Carter, general partner at Castle Island Ventures, wrote in a recent blog post, the crypto-fiat crackdown is intensifying in the US. In early January, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) issued a joint statement advising banks against dealing with the crypto industry.

Carter writes that this reminds him of the Obama-era “Operation Choke Point”, a scheme he describes as marginalizing specific industries that operate legally by putting pressure on the banking sector.

Canada is not immune to the same environment of tightening crypto regulations. CoinDesk reported in February that Canada’s umbrella market regulator, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), is preparing for another regulatory push. A source who spoke to CoinDesk said the new proposed rules would make doing business in Canada too expensive for exchanges.

But the updates to those rules don’t come as a result of Trucker Convoy’s blatant defiance of the nation’s first crypto sanction.

Despite Rouleau and the authorities knowing that bitcoin was working as intended for the protesters, allowing them to keep their coins to fight another day, increased crypto regulations will not come as a result of this, but rather as a push to continuously redefining crypto. as a security.

It was a strong last week for bitcoin (BTC), with the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization posting its biggest single daily gain in three months. Bitcoin has risen in five of the past seven weeks. This comes as the future of US crypto regulation is in focus after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Terraform Labs and Do Kwon. SEC Division of Enforcement Director Gurbir S. Grewal said in part, “… The Terraform ecosystem was neither decentralized nor financial. It was simply a scam backed by a so-called algorithmic stablecoin.”