April 3, 2023: Regulators Remain Out of Touch, But Crypto Continues to Rally
- Perhaps it is unsurprising that, in the wake of FTX’s fraudulent and politically embarrassing demise, U.S. regulators would launch a campaign against digital asset companies, protocols, and people.
- What is surprising to many amidst this backdrop is how well BTC and ETH performed in the first quarter of 2023. The digital assets market continues to brush off (and sometimes rally in the face of) these regulatory actions.
- Senator Elizabeth Warren appears to be building an “anti-crypto” army. Meanwhile, Coinbase recently released a survey that suggests 20% of Americans own crypto, and the vast majority see an urgent need to update the financial system.
- States that have embraced the industry are proving that being pro-crypto is good for the local economy. Crypto-friendly politicians have been able to raise money from previously untapped pools of capital.
April 10, 2023: A Real-Time Example of Investing in DAOs
- Rook is a maximal extractable value (MEV) protection protocol that captures and redistributes MEV to users who generate it. Unfortunately, though ROOK was an interesting product, the situation deteriorated compared to its much larger competitor, Flashbots.
- Besides the low-usage product offering, 2 other issues have led to the community pushing for the dissolution of Rook DAO:
- Lack of product roadmap
- High burn rate of $6.9M annually
- Given the lack of viability of a full dissolution, the community found a creative solution by revisiting the “Incubator DAO.”
April 17, 2023: The Shanghai ETH Rally & Contrarian Investing
- If all you’ve done thus far in 2023 is fade consensus, you’re doing pretty well as a digital assets investor.
- The contrarian trade has worked all year. While some of the contrarian success has been due to the unwind of crowded trades, most of it was due to consensus just being flat out wrong, especially regarding interpretation of investor behavior around key events.
- This past week, the Ethereum blockchain successfully completed its 15th hard fork—Shanghai—which primarily activated staked ETH withdrawals and marked the completion of Ethereum’s transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus protocol.
April 24, 2023: Why the Politics of Crypto Are Different This Time
- This week's appearance by SEC Chair Gary Gensler before the House Financial Services Committee was his first in over a year and his first since the current Congress took over. The political shift quickly became obvious.
- Digital assets are likely to continue forming part of the political discourse. This will broaden awareness as observers choose their sides, either sticking to party lines or switching sides as the ideological divide widens.?
- To see it [crypto] take up so much of politicians' time, whatever the stance, is a sign that the industry has a seat at an ever-bigger table.
