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Donald Trump-backed World Liberty Financial just increased its holdings of Chainlink’s LINK token.
The project purchased another $1 million worth of LINK late Thursday, data shows, for the second straight day, increasing its LINK stash to $2 million worth of tokens. It additionally brought $246,000 worth of Aave’s AAVE, taking total token holdings to $1.2 million.
LINK is now World Liberty Financial’s fourth-largest holding after ether (ETH), bitcoin (BTC) and tether (USDT).
Backed by the Trump family, World Liberty Financial is a unified platform where users can borrow and lend cryptocurrencies, create liquidity pools and transact with stablecoins. WLFI serves as a governance token for the platform.
It uses data provider Chainlink's services for better integrating with the wider crypto ecosystem. Chainlink supports the platform by providing crucial pricing data and cross-chain interoperability infrastructure, per a November report.
Chainlink bridges blockchains and off-chain systems, providing smart contracts with access to real-world data, external APIs, and other off-chain resources. LINK tokens, among other are used to pay node operators for their services in retrieving and preparing off-chain data or performing computations. Part of investor demand for LINK tokens is directly tied to the utility and adoption of Chainlink's oracle services.
And the market is positively reacting to the Trump-linked purchases — LINK prices are up 22% in the past 7 days and more than 130% since World Liberty Financial first onboarded Chainlink, helping the token reach price levels last seen in early 2021.
LINK neared $30 in Asian morning hours Friday, data shows, with open interest (OI) on the token’s futures zooming to record highs above $860 million.
OI refers to the number of unsettled bets in futures markets. A bump in prices alongside rising OI is generally considered a bullish sign, as it suggests investors are willing to commit new capital to the expectation that the price will continue to rise. |
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A message from The Interchain Foundation |
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Cosmos is expanding: Skip joins the Interchain Foundation.
The Interchain Foundation has acquired Skip, one of the leading Cosmos teams, to bring their excellence in engineering, product strategy, and execution in-house and usher in an era of growth for Cosmos, and its vision for the interchain. Skip will rename to Interchain Inc. and become the ICF’s main subsidiary, concentrating product, vision, and go-to-market for the Interchain Stack and Cosmos, led by Skip co-founders Barry Plunkett and Maghnus Mareneck. This acquisition marks a departure from the ICF’s distributed product development model and starts a new growth-driven stage defined by the alignment between the Interchain Stack’s vision, and the vision for a Cosmos Hub that is at the center of the ecosystem, driving user and liquidity growth for the entirety of the Cosmos’ interchain ecosystem. |
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Who Dictates Bitcoin Now? |
Since Donald Trump won the U.S. election on Nov. 5, bitcoin (BTC) has soared from $67,000 to around $100,000. This has coincided with a huge rise in bitcoin's total trade volume which has now surpassed $100 billion. According to checkonchain data, bitcoin futures trading volume hit an all-time high of around $120 billion on Nov. 17, almost doubling since the U.S. election. However, since then futures trade volume has plateaued and steadied around $100 billion. The same can be seen with spot trade volume which has also doubled from around $6 billion to $12 billion. While the spot listed U.S. exchange-traded funds (ETF) trade volume has also picked up reaching $4 billion a day.
Bitcoin remains in a key trading range of $100,000, going above and below the key psychological area on multiple occasions. A lot of this has to do with the enormous sell pressure coming from long-term holders (LTH) or investors who have held bitcoin for longer than 155 days. Since September, LTHs have sold 843,113 BTC. In the same period short-term holders (STHs), those who have held bitcoin for less than 155 days, have accumulated 1,081,633 BTC. This works out to around 9,960 BTC sold by LTHs and STHs accumulating 12,432 BTC per day. To show the difference of trading volumes between long and short-term holders, we compare them to other big players in the industry, such as the self-described bitcoin development company MicroStrategy (MSTR). MicroStrategy holds 423,650 bitcoin or just over 2% of the total supply. In addition, U.S. ETFs now hold over 1 million bitcoin. Since September, MicroStrategy has accumulated 197,250 BTC, which works out to roughly 2,168 BTC per day. While, the U.S ETFs have accumulated approximately 205,000 BTC, which works out to 2,253 BTC per day. The U.S. ETF BTC balance has grown from 916,000 BTC to 1.12 million BTC.
In order for bitcoin to conclusively break higher of $100,000 we will need to see LTHs dial down on offloading their tokens or have bigger cohorts enter the space and pick up the buys. |
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MicroStrategy (MSTR), the software company founded by Michael Saylor, is not the only large-scale corporate buyer of bitcoin (BTC), JPMorgan (JPM) said in a Wednesday report. Crypto miners are also adopting the accumulation strategy.
The shift to building up bitcoin holdings is driven by growing pressure on profitability, which stems from the reward halving in April and a rising network hashrate, the report said. Hashrate is the total computational power used to mine and process transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain and is a proxy for competition in the industry and mining difficulty. "This likely prompted miners to hoard or seek further investments into bitcoin or diversify into AI/HPC businesses," analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote, referring to artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.
Miners such as MARA Holdings (MARA) have adopted a similar bitcoin-buying strategy to MicroStrategy, called BTC yield, in response to these challenges, JPMorgan said. MARA now owns 35,000 tokens ($3.5 billion) and is the second-largest publicly listed corporation in terms of bitcoin holdings.
The miners aren't alone. Medical-device maker Semler Scientific has also been actively buying the world's largest cryptocurrency, and now owns $144 million worth of crypto. January's introduction of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the U.S. has given institutional investors a more direct way to gain bitcoin exposure, the bank said. Shares of miners, which had been treated as a proxy for bitcoin, have underperformed as a result. |
Successful Trading Takes More Than a Bull Market Choosing the right exchange is crucial throughout the business cycle. This has been a very, very good month to trade in crypto. People who regularly read CoinDesk are making money just by checking their phone alerts. And yet, this environment isn’t as kind to the exchanges. Continue reading here. |
SocGen Repo French Central Bank |
Societe Generale said it carried out a blockchain-based repurchase agreement with the Banque de France in what it called the first such tokenized transaction with a euro-zone central bank.
The lender's digital assets-focused subsidiary, SG-Forge, deposited as collateral some bonds issued in 2020 on the public Ethereum blockchain in exchange for central bank digital currency (CBDC) issued by the Banque de France on its DL3S blockchain, it said in a press release. With the European Union's Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulatory framework already in place for stablecoin issuers, SG-Forge has maintained a high profile exploring ways to deploy its euro stablecoin, EUR CoinVertible (EURCV). The token was not involved in the repo transaction.
The Banque de France, meanwhile, has been energetically testing the feasibility of wholesale CBDCs to improve things like cross-border payments and settlement finality. Broadly speaking, blockchain-based repo transactions have proved to be one of the more compelling uses of the tech among banks.
“This transaction demonstrates the technical feasibility of interbank refinancing operations directly on blockchain. It illustrates the potential of a Central Bank Digital Currency to improve the liquidity of digital financial securities,” SocGen said in a press release. |
The Takeaway: Tigran Gambaryan |
After eight long, harrowing months locked up in a Nigerian prison, Tigran Gambaryan is finally back home in Atlanta, recovering from his ordeal. The Nigerian government finally agreed to release Gambaryan on humanitarian grounds in October to allow him to return to the U.S. to receive medical care for a host of conditions he developed while in Kuje prison including malaria, double pneumonia, and a herniated disc in his back that left him in excruciating pain and struggling to walk. In addition to releasing Gambaryan, Nigerian officials dropped the money laundering charges they’d been prosecuting him for since March, as a stand-in for his employer, Binance. The Nigerian government accused Binance of tanking the value of the naira by facilitating the movement of some $23 billion in untraceable funds in 2023. Equally unjust tax evasion charges against Gambaryan had previously been dropped in June. Binance, however, still faces both charges; the Nigerian government is seeking $10 billion in penalties. Gambaryan’s detention sparked outrage across the crypto industry and beyond. As Binance’s Head of Financial Crime Compliance, Gambaryan had nothing to do with his employer's actions, criminal or not, in Nigeria. And, as an American citizen, it was unthinkable for many, including several members of Congress, that he could be snatched by a foreign country – especially one that is an ally of the U.S. – and left to languish in a cell for nearly a year. And, perhaps most perplexingly, Gambaryan wasn’t just any American executive getting held for ransom – he’s a former federal agent, a one-time Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigator that was part of an elite group of early crypto tracers in the federal government. During his tenure at the IRS, Gambaryan had a central role in some of the biggest crypto crime busts in the industry’s history, including the takedown of child sex abuse video network Welcome to Video and darknet marketplace Alpha Bay, the seizure of nearly 70,000 bitcoins stolen from the Silk Road, and the recovery of 650,000 bitcoins stolen from Mt Gox. That Nigeria would detain any American executive to use as a scapegoat for their employer was bad enough. But that Nigeria detained Tigran Gambaryan, a former U.S. government employee, was an outrage.
Read the rest of Cheyenne Ligon's profile here.
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