First Mover: Crypto Gawks at GameStop, Sees Shades of Self

January 28, 2021

Everything you need to make sense of the crypto markets and beyond

Sponsored By:

By the CoinDesk Markets Team

Edited by Bradley Keoun

If you were forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive it, sign up here.

Bitcoin (BTC)

+2.9% $31,301

Ether (ETH)

+4.2% $1,292

(Price data as of Jan. 28 @11:48 UTC)

TODAY:

Price Point: Bitcoin was higher, around $31K, but the real action was in DOGE.

Market Moves: Just like many people off Wall Street, digital-market traders found amusement in the GameStop saga. But they also saw an opportunity for self-reflection. First Mover talked to Niall Ferguson, Caitlin Long, Mati Greenspan and Jonathan Mohan about this weird moment in traditional markets – and what it means for crypto.

What's Hot: Guggenheim's Minerd sees insufficient demand for BTC over $35K, Blockstream buys $25M of crypto-mining rigs from MicroBT, Grayscale eyes DeFi, Uniswap rallies, Fed maintains monetary policy at historically loose levels.

SPONSORED BY NEXO

Your digital assets deserve a savings account in their BEST INTEREST. Leading crypto lender Nexo treats you, your crypto and your fiat to industry-best Crypto & Fiat services, featuring:

* Up to 12% interest on digital assets, paid out daily!

* Yields available on BTC, ETH, LTC, BCH, XRP, XLM, EOS, TRX, LINK, BNB, PAXG, USDT, USDC, TUSD, PAX, DAI, HUSD, GBP and EUR.

* No minimum or maximum limits on funds deposited, offering infinite opportunities to earn.

* Full flexibility with no lock-in periods, so you can withdraw your funds anytime.

* #ZeroFees on all transactions.

* Military-grade wallet security and top-tier insurance on all custodial assets with SOC 2 Type 2 certified crypto custodian BitGo.

Get started at nexo.io

Price Point

Bitcoin prices were higher, though staying in their range over the past week between roughly $30,000 and $34,000.

"Signs of market exhaustion from the bulls are becoming more prevalent," said Lennard Neo, head of research for the cryptocurrency-focused Stack Funds.

And in what appears to be a crypto segue from the GameStop episode that has riveted global financial markets, CoinDesk's Tanzeel Akhtar reported Thursday that prices for the digital token dogecoin (DOGE) more than doubled after the Twitter account @WSBChairman posted the following: "A lot of you are talking about dogecoin. What's that? A meme crypto?"

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that, unlike most of the biggest blockchain projects, doesn't really have any serious technologists or programmers backing it, but it's often symbolized by the face of a cute dog, which has won praise from fans ranging from Tesla CEO Elon Musk to the adult-film star Angela White. It now has a market value of $1.7 billion.)

In traditional markets, European shares fell and U.S. stocks wobbled. Gold weakened 0.2% to $1,841 an ounce.

Market Moves

For cryptocurrency traders and analysts, one of the things that's so surreal about the GameStop saga is that it all seems so familiar.

Whether illegal or perfectly legit, so many of the hallmarks of the upstart trade, bred in a social-media den as a way of challenging mighty Wall Street's privileged position in finance, bear more than a passing resemblance to the kind of activity that takes place daily in digital markets.

Not that anyone in crypto's really bragging – just saying: The episode might serve as another example of how different markets might look and behave in a technology-enabled, decentralized future, where the balance of power isn't so concentrated among the always-winners.

In search of takeaways, First Mover reached out to the financial historian Niall Ferguson, former Morgan Stanley-banker-turned-crypto-banker Caitlin Long, Themys.io CEO Jonathan Mohan and Quantum Economics founder Mati Greenspan. Here's what they said:

1) The GameStop coterie isn't the only crowd taking on big finance: Just like the retail-trading raiders in the Reddit forum Wall Street Bets who took on short-selling hedge funds with billions of dollars of capital, the cryptocurrency industry was born as a way to fight back against concentration of power and wealth. The Bitcoin blockchain was invented as a peer-to-peer electronic payment system, designed to be free from the influence or control (or rent-seeking tendency) of banks. "In the plague year, a lot of people have started to experiment with investing in things they hadn't really touched before," Ferguson said in a Zoom interview. "The barbarians of the gates 30 years ago are the establishment now, and there are new barbarians at the gates."

2) Percentage moves, in the hundreds, are something to expect, even accept: As reported Wednesday by CoinDesk's Zack Voell, GameStop (GME) saw its stock price surge nearly 900% in five days. That's not unprecedented in digital markets. Sure, bitcoin (BTC) prices quadrupled last year. Ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, rose five-fold. But according to the website CoinMarketCap, there are at least 8,350 cryptocurrencies in existence, many of which nobody has ever heard of, and many of whose prices go up and down by ridiculous amounts nearly every day (see table below). The whole thing can sometimes resemble pink-sheet markets where hard-luck penny-stock traders sometimes finds good luck. But it's also apparently what happens when entrepreneurs and speculators get together in a lightly policed market environment. "There are certainly within the crypto markets a lot of scams and pump and dumps, but you gotta take the bad with good," Greenspan said in an audio interview over Telegram. "Overall what we’re talking about is the democratization and freedom of financial markets."

Digital tokens whose prices have increased by multiples just over the past seven days. (Messari) (EDITOR'S NOTE: We've never heard of any of these.)

3) Bookkeeping-by-blockchain might be more efficient than Wall Street's ledger systems. According to the firm S3 Partners, some 139% of GameStop's available shares were borrowed to "sell short" – meaning the traders sold the borrowed shares in a bet that the stock price would go down; the plan is that they'll buy the shares back to repay the stock loan after the price falls. Long, whose firm Avanti won a special-purpose banking charter in October from the state of Wyoming, says the GameStop's ratio shows that some big investors might have sold shares that they hadn't already borrowed, a practice known as "naked short-selling" that is generally prohibited but loosely enforced. It happens because of Wall Street's impossibility of instantaneously coordinating multiple ledgers of who owns what and when. With blockchain networks, the information is always being synchronized. "Bitcoin really does fix this, because Bitcoin is an honest ledger," Long said in a mobile-phone interview. "The reason why the crypto market is so riled up about GameStop is because the crypto market has known about the inaccuracies in Wall Street’s bookkeeping for years. This is just another in a long list of examples."

4) Many new investors appear to be in it not just for the money, but the fun, the entertainment, the joke, the thrill. GameStop as a franchise is a sort of punchline. Not only are almost all games sold online, but people certainly aren't flocking to the stores these days. Even the brand looks worn. "Some people are saying that the fundamentals are broken and that they don’t understand what happened with GameStop, and that it’s some kind of meme, or a joke," Mohan said in a mobile-phone interview. "In cryptocurrency we call that dogecoin (DOGE). It’s a well-understood phenomenon. Sometimes retail investors can aggregate demand, over a joke, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. That spirit and that essence is sort of bubbling out into the traditional equities market."

- Bradley Keoun

Bitcoin Watch

Omkar Godbole, the primary author of Bitcoin Watch, is out of the office.

What's Hot

GameStop backlash could lead to curbs on "memetic disturbances," or even "the squeezening," Preston Byrne writes in op-ed (CoinDesk Opinion)

Analogs

The latest on the economy and traditional finance

Goldman Sachs strategist joins chorus saying "buy the dip" in stocks (Bloomberg)

Samsung looking at "meaningful" M&A deals over next three years (Nikkei Asia Review)

Tweet of the Day

Valid Points: What's Next for Ethereum 2.0

The price of ether has reached an all-time high less than two months since the Ethereum protocol's historic upgrade. Research analyst Christine Kim and tech reporter Will Foxley break down Ethereum 2.0 and its sweeping impacts on crypto markets, weekly.

Valid Points features original insights on what lies ahead for industry stakeholders and investors. Subscribe to the Valid Points newsletter.

Disclaimer: The information presented in this message is intended as a news item that provides a brief summary of various events and developments that affect, or that might in the future affect, the value of one or more of the cryptocurrencies described above. The information contained in this message, and any information liked through the items contained herein, is not intended to provide sufficient information to form the basis for an investment decision. The information presented herein is accurate only as of its date, and it was not prepared by a research analyst or other investment professional. You should seek additional information regarding the merits and risks of investing in any cryptocurrency before deciding to purchase or sell any such instruments.

ATTENTION: Scammers have been sending fraudulent emails with links to sites disguised to look like coindesk.com. If you are in doubt about a link, type https://www.coindesk.com directly into your browser; do not copy and paste. Remember, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

First Mover

A newsletter from CoinDesk

See Previous Editions

Copyright © 2021 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.

250 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10003, USA

You can manage your preferences here or unsubscribe from all CoinDesk email.