The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day |
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No More Micro in MicroStrategy |
MicroStrategy (MSTR) has changed its name to Strategy in a move to simplify its brand and reflect the focus of the company, it announced Wednesday. Strategy’s new logo includes the famous Bitcoin “B”, signaling the company’s Bitcoin Treasury Strategy, and the name's new primary color is orange. “This brand simplification is a natural evolution of the company, reflecting its focus and broad appeal,” a press release stated. MicroStrategy, founded by now-Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, was primarily a software and infrastructure company since its 1989 debut. In the past five years, however, it has gradually shifted to become primarily focused on the accumulation of bitcoin, with its operating software business only a small fraction of the company valuation. Last year, the company began calling itself a Bitcoin Strategy Company. Strategy later announced a net loss of $670 million for Q4. |
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FDIC Rethinks Crypto Guidance |
As U.S. senators prepared to gather for a hearing about U.S. debanking of crypto clients, the interim chief of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said his agency is overhauling its digital assets supervision and revealed more correspondence on Wednesday in which FDIC officials steered banks away from cryptocurrency business.
Travis Hill, the acting FDIC chairman tapped by President Donald Trump, has thrown open more of the agency's past documents and said the U.S. banking regulator will be reconsidering its previous crypto guidance that deliberately kept banks an arm's length away from what had been seen as the unregulated volatility of crypto. The past letters between the FDIC and bank have been the focus of a court Freedom of Information Act battle between Coinbase and the agency, in which the courts had directed the regulator to share more information. Meanwhile, Hill said the FDIC will be "providing a pathway for institutions to engage in crypto- and blockchain-related activities while still adhering to safety and soundness principles," according to a statement issued before the start of a Wednesday hearing in the Senate Banking Committee on this topic. "I directed staff to conduct a comprehensive review of all supervisory communications with banks that sought to offer crypto-related products or services," he said. "While this review remains underway, we are releasing a large batch of documents today, in advance of a court-ordered deadline of Friday."
Hill, who will run the FDIC until Trump puts forward a permanent candidate, characterized the agency as deliberately making it impossible for banks to handle crypto business.
"Requests from these banks were almost universally met with resistance, ranging from repeated requests for further information, to multi-month periods of silence as institutions waited for responses, to directives from supervisors to pause, suspend, or refrain from expanding all crypto- or blockchain-related activity," he said. |
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Ondo Finance Dives Into Tokenization |
Ondo Finance, a leading tokenized real-world asset (RWA) issuer, has unveiled a new offering to accelerate the onboarding of traditional assets to blockchain technology. Ondo on Tuesday introduced Ondo Global Markets (Ondo GM), a platform dedicated to providing on-chain access to stocks, bonds, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The specific details regarding which stocks, bonds, and ETFs will be available is not known yet. Ondo, with a market cap of over $600 million, is already the world's third-largest tokenized Treasury issuer, according to data source rwa.xyz. The new offering will help bypass what Ondo calls a broken investment ecosystem characterized by high fees, restricted access, platform fragmentation that locks millions out of capital markets and stifles innovation. "By leveraging blockchain technology, we can bring institutional-grade financial markets onchain, making them more accessible, transparent and efficient," Ondo said on X. Drawing inspiration from stablecoin liquidity, Ondo GM will allow the creation of freely transferable tokens linked to stocks, bonds and ETFs with controls in place that determine who can access, buy, or sell the tokens. Ondo's inaugural summit will be held in New York on Feb. 6. The platform has promised major announcements each day leading up to the event. |
StanChart: BTC to $550K in 2028 |
The price of bitcoin (BTC) could balloon to $500,000 by 2028, lifted by increased investor access and diminishing volatility that will help keep it serving as a unique hedge against issues plaguing traditional finance, according to Standard Chartered.
The largest cryptocurrency is likely to become less volatile as the year-old U.S. exchange-traded fund (ETF) market matures, Geoffrey Kendrick, the global head of digital assets research, wrote in a note. Access to BTC is improving under the Trump administration and institutional inflows into spot bitcoin ETFs are set to keep on growing, he wrote. The two influences are set to raise bitcoin's share of an optimized two-asset portfolio with gold, which “should lead to price appreciation longer-term as the portfolio continues to move towards their optimal/logical state,” Kendrick wrote. This is “enough to drive Bitcoin to $500,000 before Trump leaves office." The bank’s year-end price target for the cryptocurrency is $200,000. The 2026 target is $300,000. Bitcoin is currently trading around $98,000, and the bitcoin-gold ratio has recently hit its lowest level since mid-November as the precious metal surged amid ongoing concerns of a U.S.-China trade war and increased Chinese demand. |
The Takeaway: DeepSeek AI Better For Web3 |
By Nathan McCauley, Anchorage "Debanking" has become a buzzword in Washington lately. The term refers to a controversial practice where crypto companies and other businesses have been cut off from banking services, allegedly due to pressure from federal regulators. Many in our industry have dubbed this "Operation Chokepoint 2.0," comparing it to a previous Obama-era initiative that discouraged banks from serving certain legal but high-risk industries. The issue has sparked heated debate, with multiple congressional investigations examining whether regulators improperly pressured banks to deny services to crypto firms and other businesses. I'm testifying before Congress about it today because my company experienced it firsthand, despite being a federally-regulated bank ourselves — and because debanking is widely misunderstood. To address this threat to American values, we first need to understand what happened. Rather than regulators issuing clear, transparent rules on who banks can serve, debanking operates through a shadowy and democratically unaccountable process whereby regulators warn banks against serving certain types of customers not based on the individual risk they pose, but on hostility or bias towards an entire industry. Banks, facing the threat of enforcement action, penalties, or worse, are left with no choice but to comply. And law-abiding individuals and businesses are cut off from basic banking services, which can be devastating. Here's what it looked like for us: in June 2023, we received an urgent call from our bank of two and a half years. Despite an established banking relationship — we were even in active discussions about expanding into new partnerships — the bank abruptly informed us they were closing our account in 30 days because it was not comfortable with our crypto clients’ transactions, even though we told them the funds at issue were client payments for custody fees, and that these were fully documented as part of our rigorous compliance process. Our contact refused to provide any further explanation or allow us to speak to the bank’s risk management team. The irony was stark: we ourselves are a federally chartered bank, regulated and supervised by the OCC, subject to the same stringent capital, liquidity, and risk management expectations as any other national bank. Not once in the course of our partnership had our banking partner ever raised an issue with our account. We were a great bank customer — well-capitalized, well-regulated and well-run. Yet out of the blue, our bank abruptly cut us off with no explanation or recourse. While we were eventually able to find banks willing to partner with us, the impact of being nearly shut out of the banking system was devastating. It was extremely disruptive to our business and our clients, and contributed to the difficult decision we made in 2023 to lay off 20% of our workforce. And we weren’t alone. Legitimate American businesses across our industry found themselves scrambling for basic banking services, spending time and resources on workarounds rather than innovation and growth, causing major disruption and even driving some out of business. Regulators' actions amounted to a de facto ban on banking the crypto industry, made even more destructive by its seemingly arbitrary enforcement — no one knew why some firms retained access while others were cut off, creating a climate of constant uncertainty. To be clear, if regulators had enacted such a major policy decision through proper channels, like formal notice-and-comment rulemaking, that would be one thing. But no rule was ever proposed, publicly debated, or subjected to legal scrutiny. Nor did Congress ever pass legislation to authorize the choking off of large parts of an industry from the federal banking system. History shows us that without a permanent fix, this will happen again. Just over seven years ago, the FDIC apologized for the first iteration of “Operation Choke Point” — a concerted campaign to cut off banking to industries disfavored by regulators — promising to retrain its examiners. Fast forward to 2023, and those same debanking efforts, this time with a different politically disfavored industry, occurred again. Without action, Operation 3.0 is only a matter of time, and any industry could be the next target.
Read the full op-ed here.
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