The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day |
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With much of the globe celebrating Christmas, bitcoin (BTC) quietly appeared set to retake the $100,000 level after having fallen to below $93,000 just ahead of the holiday. The rally, however, stalled at just above $99,800 as Asia opened for business on Thursday morning and declined rapidly to roughly $95,000 only a few hours later. Bitcoin at press time was trading at $95,300, down 3.1% over the past 24 hours. The broader CoinDesk 20 Index was lower by 4.2% over the same time frame, with ETH, SOL, XRP, ADA and AVAX among cryptos in that gauge sporting 4%-7% losses. U.S. markets are open on Thursday, and stock index futures are pointing to modest early losses; gold and oil are marginally in the green.
Crypto's price action over the past 48 hours is surely on very low volume and bitcoin has still more than doubled year-to-date, but perhaps overlooked in declines over the past week is that the tailwind of lower interest rates might have become a headwind. The 10-year Treasury yield continued to drift upward early Thursday, now at 4.63% and within a few basis points of its 2024 high. The yield is now ahead by nearly 100 basis points since the Federal Reserve slashed benchmark short-term rates by 50 basis points in September.
Macro researcher Jim Bianco noted that the swift move upward in long-term rates following a Fed rate cut is nearly unprecedented in modern monetary history. "The bond market will keep selling (higher yields) the more the Fed talks about rate cuts in 2025," said Bianco. "If the Fed does not back off the rate-cutting talk, bond yields will go as high as needed to start breaking things, to break inflation." |
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A message from The central bank of Latvia |
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The central bank of Latvia, Latvijas Banka, has announced free pre-licensing consultations for crypto-asset service providers looking to pursue the EU MiCA license – the new EU-wide united license and legal framework for the crypto-asset industry. Latvijas Banka will begin accepting applications and issuing operating permits starting January 2025, when the MiCA license will go into effect.
Latvijas Banka has developed both licensing and pre-licensing processes to provide the best possible support for innovators in the financial sector.
The pre-licensing process offers individual consultations with Latvijas Banka experts, ensuring guidance on the viability of applications, regulatory compliance, and document readiness. Latvijas Banka emphasizes accessibility and responsiveness, ensuring prompt, human-centered communication with an average response time of 48 hours.
A license from Latvijas Banka provides the opportunity to scale fast across the EU market and passport the services cross-border.
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Yat Siu's X Account Hacked |
The X account of Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu, one of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024, was compromised and used to promote a fictitious token, the company said in a post on the social media platform. Animoca, a metaverse and gaming venture capital firm, posted a warning on its own account at 01:36 UTC on Thursday saying Siu's account had been compromised and the company was not introducing an official token or non-fungible token (NFT). The exploit was probably perpetrated through a phishing email that purported to come from X and be related to copyright infringement, according to ZachXBT. The crypto exploit investigator posted on Tuesday about several similar attacks that took place over the past month, allowing the perpetrators to get away with about $500,000 at the time. The false post from Siu's account promoted a token named MOCA on the Solana blockchain, according to a screenshot posted by ZachXBT.
Moca Foundation, a "community-owned foundation that aims to supercharge Mocaverse’s network effects," has its own Moca Coin (MOCA), which it describes as an "omni-chain network token." Mocaverse is an account and ID management system in which both Animoca and Siu personally have a stake,
According to a post from Mocaverse, control of Siu's account has been secured by X, which is in the process of verifying ownership. Related accounts remain untouched. "There is no compromise on Animoca Brands, Moca Network or MOCA Foundation official handles, and there are strict security measures in place," it said. Whoever is behind the fake MOCA token is active on memecoin-creation platform Pump.fun and has also created a number of NFT collections over the past two weeks, on-chain data show. The wallet holds about $67,000 worth of the USDC stablecoin, although it is unclear whether this is the direct proceeds of any phishing scams. |
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Floki Could See European ETP |
Meme-turned-utility project Floki is working with an unidentified asset manager to develop an exchange-traded product (ETP) tracking its FLOKI token that could be available to investors in Europe early in the new year, one of the developers told CoinDesk. If approved, FLOKI would be the only meme token other than dogecoin (DOGE) with an institutional product in Europe. “We've been actively working with a respected Asset Manager and an ETP Issuer to launch a Floki ETP (Exchange-Traded Product) for quite a while now, and after months of due diligence and painstaking effort, we've been told that the Floki ETP is on track to go live in early Q1, 2025,” lead developer B told CoinDesk in a Telegram message on Wednesday. The developers as seeking approval from the Floki DAO community to provide early liquidity to the product when it goes live. The vote runs for 48 hours and will end at 11:00 UTC on Dec. 27. They are seeking approval to allocate part of the FLOKI required for the ETP from a treasury wallet that holds 16 billion tokens, worth just over $2.8 million at current prices. Tokens in that wallet were purchased from the open market over three years after the passage of another community vote. If the proposal is approved, the FLOKI tokens would provide liquidity for the ETP while remaining Floki's property and could be withdrawn if there is enough third-party liquidity in the ETP. “The Floki ETP is currently in an advanced stage and will become tradable on the SIX Swiss Exchange, the largest stock exchange in Switzerland and the third-largest in Europe,” B said. “When it goes live, the Floki ETP will allow institutional investors, regulated entities and retail investors to get exposure to FLOKI in a regulated way.” B said the team could not disclose further specifics about the ETP due to non-disclosure agreements, such as opening prices, fund structure and institutional partners. FLOKI is up 1.1% in the past 24 hours, in line with the broader crypto market. |
Growth, Trust and Global Adoption on Display at Fastex Harmony VI Meetup Both literally and figuratively, Dubai sits at the center of trade and commerce. The roots run deep. Dating back to the spice routes of antiquity, the region has long connected East and West and served as a global hub. Now Dubai is a flourishing environment for blockchain and Web3, making it the perfect setting for Fastex’s Harmony VI meetup. Held at the Intercontinental Ras Al Khaimah, this summit of experts, founders and CEOs underscored Fastex’s leadership, growth and focus on one crucial concept: trust. Continue reading here. |
6 Bitcoin Mutual Funds in Israel |
Six mutual funds tracking the price of bitcoin (BTC) will debut in Israel next week after the Israel Securities Authority (ISA) granted permission for the products, Calcalist reported on Wednesday. All six will start operations on the same day, Dec. 31, a condition imposed by the regulator, Calcalist said. Final approval for the funds was granted last week. The funds will be offered by Migdal Capital Markets, More, Ayalon, Phoenix Investment, Meitav and IBI, with management fees ranging from as high as 1.5% to 0.25%. One of the funds will be actively managed, trying to beat bitcon's performance. They will initially transact just once a day, though future products will be able to trade continuously, Globes said in a Tuesday report, citing market sources. The ISA's approval comes almost a year after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) greenlighted spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the world's largest economy, during which the world's largest cryptocurrency has more than doubled to trade near a record high. The U.S. funds have gathered a net $35.6 billion of investor cash.
"The investment houses have been pleading for more than a year for ETFs to be approved and started sending prospectuses for bitcoin funds in the middle of the year. But the regulator marches to its own tune. It has to check the details," an unidentified senior executive at an investment house told Calcalist. |
The Takeaway: ICOs 2.0 in 2025? |
Regulatory overhaul in America and a thawing of crypto antagonism globally in 2025 will usher in a new generation of decentralized capital formation, which was first popularized in 2017 as “ICOs” (initial coin offerings). During the 2010s, crypto hadn't settled on a productive use case for Bitcoin and altcoins until Ethereum smart contracts enabled early-stage teams to raise capital from supporters dispersed around the world. We saw Ethereum bootstrap a global decentralized computer which spawned DeFi, NFTs and various crypto primitives funded by less than $20 million raised from a global community. Many other projects soon followed suit and we observed a new dynamic in which raising early-stage capital from a decentralized community almost always resulted in more value-add for the project and entrepreneurs than even the best, most well-intentioned venture capitalists could offer. With a decentralized investor group, entrepreneurs get free evangelists, beta testers and code contributors — i.e. free work that contributed to the project at hand. Also, the shorter liquidity time frame allowed for better risk-return profiles for early-stage investors. Unfortunately, ICOs were slowly choked off and signalled as “not in compliance” with regulations that were never exactly spelled out. By 2020, they had slowed to a trickle and 88% of ICO tokens were trading at below issuance price. Fast forward to 2025 and we can see the convergence of some important inputs that allow for the re-emergence of compelling investment opportunities, but with very different characteristics from ICO 1.0. Read the full op-ed here. |
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