🟪 Remarkable times
Positivity abounds. Crypto prices are soaring. The US appears to be open for business.
Michael McSweeney
November 24, 2024
Brought to you by:
I think it’s safe to call these remarkable times in crypto.
Positivity abounds. Crypto prices, led by bitcoin’s eye-popping performance, are soaring. The United States, buoyed by the crypto-friendly pledges of Donald Trump and his incoming administration, now appears to be open for business.
As someone who has lived through several crypto winters, the thought of seeing bitcoin touch $100,000 is nothing short of astounding. But, and forgive the cynicism here, it does give me pause.
As Byron Gilliam noted this week, Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy are, and have been, conducting an extended financial engineering experiment that has, by all accounts, pushed the price of bitcoin ever higher. Throw in the absolute furor around bitcoin ETFs — BlackRock’s product notched a $4 billion-plus day after the US presidential election — and you’ve got the potential makings of a bubble.
Do I think the bubble is going to pop tomorrow? No. There’s more time before Trump’s campaign promises face the reality of governing prioritization, and there are likely more pro-crypto administration appointments to come. I suspect the promised strategic bitcoin reserve will, at minimum, get a hearing, and to call such a discussion hyper-mega-bullish feels like an understatement.
But bubbles do deflate. Or pop. It might behoove the residents of Crypto Twitter/X to temper their expectations come next year. But we’ve been here before, and as always, it’s much more fun to pop a bottle of champagne than to put it back in the cabinet.
And now, on to the roundup:
— Michael McSweeney
Brought to you by:
Crypto is meant to be decentralized. But most enter through centralized exchanges and stay there. Magic Eden is changing that.
As the top NFT marketplace and Runes Exchange, we’re expanding to all tokens — memecoins, alts, and more. With fiat on-ramps, instant wallets, mempool protection, and cross-chain swaps, we deliver trustless, non-custodial trading.
This is crypto as it should be: permissionless, user-first, and fully on-chain.
AI agents are eating the crypto world, 0x’s Donovan Choy writes. From hackathons to memecoins, there’s a veritable craze going on — potentially leading in some interesting directions and use cases. Get Donovan’s take here.
Lightspeed’s Jack Kubinec sat down with Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley this week to chat solana ETFs — a product that, while not currently available, seems a touch likelier with Gary Gensler set to exit next year. Horsley himself said that now’s a "constructive time" to chat up the SEC on crypto products.
So many options — literally, if you’re thinking of the spot bitcoin ETF variety. Forward Guidance’s Ben Strack unpacks the landscape after this week’s rollout of a new class of crypto/trad products on Wall Street. One big takeaway? BlackRock stole the show.
OK, so bitcoin is nearing $100,000. Should we ask why? Byron (admirably) asks such a question. His take, in brief: "the proximate cause of bitcoin approaching six figures is that Michael Saylor appears to have discovered an infinite money glitch."
We’re back — and that means institutions, too, as the Empire team noted this week. CME’s crypto biz is reporting a gangbusters December, fueled no doubt by that come-on-just-touch-$100K-already bitcoin price. Dig in for more.
recent research
Research
In this report, each analyst on the Blockworks Research team lays out their highest conviction thesis for 2025.