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| What you need to know today in crypto and beyond April 20, 2021 Sponsored By: If you were forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive it, sign up here.
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Today's must-reads Top Shelf REVOLVING DOOR: Former top U.S. banking regulator Brian Brooks will become CEO of Binance.US, beginning May 1. “This is the company that's most likely to give the biggest incumbent, Coinbase, a run for its money,” Brooks, a Coinbase alum, said on CoinDesk TV. Meanwhile, Chris Giancarlo, the former top U.S. commodities regulator, aka “Crypto Dad,” joined BlockFi’s board of directors Tuesday as the company appears to ready itself for a public listing. CHASING THE DOGE: Dogecoin traders appear intent to push the price of the meme coin to $0.69, on 4/20, a date associated with cannabis. Yesterday, the coin leapt to a record high of around $0.43, giving the network a market cap of $50 billion, or enough to briefly supplant XRP as the fourth-largest cryptocurrency. CoinDesk has three things for you to consider about the joint celebration so you don’t get burned. CAN YOU DIP IT? Inflows into digital asset investment products nearly tripled to $233 million last week, according to a report Monday by CoinShares. Last week’s inflow of $150 million was the largest since early March, reflecting bitcoin’s (BTC) brief rally to an all-time high just below $65,000. Despite a market downturn, large institutional investors have apparently “bought the dip.” NYDIG did. AT STAKE: Deutsche Telekom AG, Europe’s largest telecommunications company by revenue, has bought a major CELO token bag, with plans on staking the entire investment. A mobile-first decentralized payments network, Celo connects wallets with phone numbers and is often cited as a potential competitor to the Facebook-led Diem stablecoin project (which, incidentally, plans to launch a U.S dollar-pegged crypto pilot this year). $1 BTC: PayPal will expand its crypto offerings to its Venmo payments app within a few weeks. Venmo’s 70 million customers will be able to buy, sell and trade as little as $1 worth of bitcoin, ether (ETH), litecoin (LTC) and bitcoin cash (BCH). – Daniel Kuhn
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Introducing Unlocked 101 at Consensus by CoinDesk 2021 New to crypto? Here's a crash course. Unlocked 101 is a free educational series of sessions designed to give you the tools to navigate crypto. Sessions will be hosted May 4–20 to prepare you for Consensus by CoinDesk 2021, our virtual big-tent event.
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Overheard on CoinDesk TV Sound Bite "Don't come complaining to the government if you lose your money."
– SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce on the dogecoin phenomenon, on CoinDesk TV's "First Mover."
A message from CoinDesk Can't Beat Them? Join Them: Why Crypto Company Anchorage Became a Bank Perhaps the old adage "every tech company wants to be a bank — someday, at least" is true. But why would a crypto company, given Bitcoin's philosophical roots, want to become a bank? And what does a crypto bank even look like, let alone do?
Join us for a chat with leaders from Anchorage, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Blockchain Association for an inside look on why and how Anchorage became the first crypto company to secure an OCC bank charter. We'll dive deeper into the topic at Consensus by CoinDesk, our big-tent event May 24-27.
Join us on Clubhouse on April 20 at 5 p.m. ET.
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BOSAGORA Launches on Binance Smart Chain To Improve on DeFi
What others are writing... Off-Chain Signals Someone cloned Beeple’s $69 million NFT, exposing a “fatal flaw” in ERC-721 tokens (Nifty News)WeWork now accepts crypto payments and won’t convert them to fiat; Coinbase is a partner and a tenant (Company blog) Gaming giant Ubisoft is a Tezos validator (Decrypt) Shepard Fairey, the artist responsible for the Obama “Hope” poster, says an imposter account is selling his work as an NFT on Rarible (Decrypt) PwC states the obvious: The Bahamas launched its “sand dollar” so is technically beating China in the CBDC race (PwC) – D.K.
Putting the news in perspective The Takeaway It’s a joke. Get over it.
That’s essentially the take from Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal today. The Shiba Inu phenomenon has nothing to do with decentralization or stores of value or any other high-minded crypto concept, he writes. It’s beyond serious explanation.
“Nobody can talk with a straight face when it comes to dogecoin,” he writes. “... Really, all the talking points go out the window with DOGE.”
“Bitcoiners who have made an extraordinary sum of money in a short period of time love to talk about how they’re taking on the [Federal Reserve] or taking on the banks or enabling some kind of peaceful revolution … Basically, dogecoin is like bitcoin stripped of the virtue signaling.”
The ultimate meme-coin has jumped from less than $0.02 at the end of January to more than $0.40 last night. Its market cap is now $50 billion-plus, according to CoinDesk’s numbers. And the momentum shows no signs of slowing. Today is #DogeDay on Twitter and the coin is set to win more internet friends.
Brands are noticing. Last week, meat stick maker Slim Jim unveiled its dogecoin “strategy,” pushing another ATH. And today the Mars confectionery company is promoting its Snickers and Milky Way brands with “Dogecoinrise” labels.
There have been many attempts to explain DOGE, including on these pages. CoinDesk’s Emily Parker said it represented a victory of “collective belief” and a longing for a purer form of crypto (i.e., for bitcoin before it became a mainstream thing).
Adam Levine, our podcast editor, said last week that DOGE had become “the joke currency to beat” in light of the Slim Jim news.
“Just as bitcoin is the consensus pick for people looking for ‘predictable moneyness’ in their currency, dogecoin is looking like the consensus pick for people who want ‘meme-y wackiness’ in their currency,” he wrote.
He added: “Everybody wants to be in on the joke, which pushes up the price, which makes the joke even bigger. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. Sort of like bitcoin but for the luls.”
Weisenthal isn’t having any of this high-mindedness, because the point of DOGE is essentially anti-intellectual.
This may be hard to take for people who believe in crypto’s ameliorative potential. But Weisenthal is surely right that you can spend too much time trying to understand the mind of the internet. Dogecoin is a joke and it’s funnier because the price goes higher and more people are laughing at it. That’s it.
Whatever the long-term implications of meme-culture for companies, let’s leave the intellectualizing for another time. On Dogeday, we can all just enjoy the fun of seeing a run-away phenomenon gather yet more steam.
– Ben Schiller
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