⚠️ Watching the dollar. Crypto's time will come soon.

DX=F $104 — If we go below that, a new rally will start for #BTC and all crypto.

Right now $104.705. We're in the border zone of big changes.

🚀 or 📉 ?

Trading reading list for Conceptual understanding.
📚
Список чтения для концептуального понимания в торговле.

1. Trading and Exchanges - Harris
2. Option volatility & Pricing - Natenberg
3. Hedge fund Market Wizard - Schwager
4. Man who Solved the Market - Zuckerman
5. Market Microstructure in Practice - Lehallecry
6. More money than God - Mallaby

#BINANCE:

под ударом сейчас
~
now is under attack

reuters.com/article/fintech-crypto-binance-doj-idUSKBN2SW0ZY

👾 Pancake Swap | Important news - Launching LP Farms on Aptos

Pancake to announce the launch of Farms on Aptos. Liquidity Farms is now available for all major trading pairs. Other major features such as pools and IFOs are still being developed and will appear very soon.

🔗 Link to the news: https://twitter.com/AxieInfinity/status/1603655777830719488

The fact that Cathie Wood continues to buy Coinbase stock in large quantities is alarming. Coinbase will be the biggest beneficiary if Binance gets hit.

Crypto regulation in the US will start with the exchanges. Which one to start with?

👨💻Why would the DeFi sector benefit from the collapse of FTX?

The bankruptcy of FTX was a systemic crisis for the entire cryptocurrency industry, showing the unreliability of centralised trading platforms run by people who have their own interests at heart. Access to user assets can be a challenge for cryptocurrency exchange management, as evidenced by the sad experience of trading platform Sam Bankman-freed, who faces a decent sentence for breaking the law. The FTX founder is accused of misappropriating user funds, misusing company assets and money laundering (source).

Amid a loss of confidence in centralised exchanges, users began withdrawing their assets en masse from most cryptocurrency exchanges, especially in the first two weeks after FTX was declared bankrupt. At the same time, interest in the decentralised finance sector was growing, with DEX Uniswap even ranking second in terms of trading volume after Binanse for a while in mid-November. More and more investors are turning their attention to decentralised trading platforms.

According to Naschkei Capital, in 2022, $14 billion was invested in the DeFi sector, spread across 725 cryptocurrency projects. In addition, the number of users of decentralised protocols increased 44% quarter-on-quarter to more than 5 million wallets.

However, the correction in the cryptocurrency market did not bypass the DeFi sector, in the last month the total amount of blocked funds in decentralized protocols decreased by 10% - to $39.6 billion, according to DeFiLama. MakerDAO is leading the way with $5.9 billion, with Lido ($5.76 billion) and Curve ($3.69 billion) in second and third place, respectively. At the same time, the total volume of trading on decentralized exchanges for the month of November grew by 80% compared with October and reached the value of $104.5 billion.

In addition, in 2022 even institutional investors began to show interest in decentralised finance products. Among them is Pennsylvania's well-known Huntingdon Valley Bank, which has received credit approval from MakerDAO with an initial debt ceiling of $100 million.

However, the DeFi-industry representatives also have their own unsolved problems. The first is the presence on the market of fraudulent schemes in the form of scams involving user funds with the subsequent withdrawal of all liquidity from the project by its creators. Secondly, there are periodic hacker attacks and breaches of protocols.

There are also non fully decentralised organisations that masquerade as DeFi, but have all the drawbacks of centralised platforms. Lack of liquidity is another major problem that the industry is trying to solve by using revenue farming and providing rewards to liquidity conduits.

The competitive advantages of the DeFi sector over the traditional financial industry are, firstly, ease of access - most protocols simply require a cryptocurrency wallet to be installed. Secondly, decentralised services give customers full control over their funds without the need to trust a third party, i.e. interaction with the service will take place without intermediaries. Thirdly, it is possible to launch a DeFi product for any project, without the permission of banks and regulators.

In essence, decentralised protocols are of interest to users because they offer a more efficient and transparent way to conduct financial transactions. DeFi aims to become an alternative to the banking sector and replace the traditional technologies of the current financial system, using open source code for its tasks.

With users' trust in centralised exchanges declining, new ways to attract liquidity and more secure protocols, there remains a strong possibility that the decentralised finance space will continue to grow next year, ahead of the pace of 2022.

🤔 Do you think the DeFi sector will continue to grow?

👆This is not bad news for Ripple. Not everything is going as the SEC planned.

📜 Pantera Capital has its December investor letter out today

Below is a short summary of the contents of the letter and my comments:

1. The FTX problem and regulated crypto exchanges

The collapse of FTX had nothing to do with blockchain technology itself. It wasn't crypto that failed. Bitcoin and all other protocols worked fine. So Pantera Capital recommends not panicking because there are regulated crypto exchanges that are working fine.

The list shows the exchanges in the fund's portfolio and they are all American: Coinbase, Kraken and Bitstamp (Pantera Capital's CEO is part-time chairman at Bitstamp). I emphasise these points to explain the absence of Binance. But I remain objective, so I agree with the following point in the letter: "proof of reserves" has a flaw - only the asset side of the balance sheet is covered, but not the liability side. So an external audit is necessary for exchanges that want to regain real credibility.

2. Comparison with the introduction of the internet in the US

The letter notes that the crypto industry in the US is now experiencing the exact opposite of the introduction of the internet in its day. The US government literally created the internet and then gave the early internet companies many financial (and not only) advantages. As a result, all the largest Internet companies in the world are in the US .

So far in the blockchain era, the US approach to regulation has had the opposite effect. This has prompted 95% of blockchain trading to go offshore. Similarly, 95% of blockchain's market capitalisation is in projects located outside the United States. A clear comparison is in the image.

3. DeFi is the future

According to the authors, crypto is not the problem, and we got another lesson in the failure of centralisation and weak regulation. Pantera Capital also notes the advantages of DeFi.

"DeFi is the future of finance, and while it has some unique early failures, it is certainly a solution to the risks and limitations of centralised finance of the past, such as lack of transparency, risks of backroom deals, amicable transactions, insolvency, mismanagement of money, fraud, etc."

Do you know what Daubert Motion is? A new date announced.

This is a motion to suppress expert testimony before a jury.

The new date of January 13 is not exactly good news. The copy on admitting (or not admitting) expert testimony has been breaking for a long time. This issue should be resolved before the settlement agreement.

Let's talk about Sam

Yesterday the news broke that Sam had been released on 250 million bail, which means he does have the money. The first information was that the authorities had promised not to release him on bail, but in the end they did. By the way, I was just discussing his fate with a friend yesterday and told him what I thought about Sam, he said that the story is very interesting and so I decided to share it with you.

We have to start with the fact that FTX was the first company to provide futures for the US market, albeit veiled, but still, it's very important. Next, they have carefully tried to undermine Binance's credibility, almost all of the high-profile claims have been made by Reuters, to whom Sam has been pledging dough. Don't ask me how I know this, let's assume I have a good acquaintance. Just as actively involved in this boycott were the SEC who will be investigating FTX and Sam.

Sam was hiding in the Bahamas, where the authorities have no right to extradite their citizens, much less extradite them. But as we see Sam ended up in the states, what magic.

I recall that the SEC has designated FTT tokens as securities. It turns out that he "cheated" people, literally, by not paying taxes accordingly, etc.
And you know what to say at the beginning of the meeting when it comes to taxes and such?
- You have committed crimes against America, against its people, and you will be judged with that in mind.

Failure to pay taxes is very scary in the states, especially if it is on a large scale, so they judge harshly. They can easily give you 20 years, and I'm not making this up, it's public information.

Sam's fate.
Everything Sam did was known in advance to the authorities, only they probably did not realise the scale of the potential failure because they did not check the liquidity. It's not like the U.S. is some kind of Cancun where you can turn over billions under the noses of the authorities.

The launch of derivatives in the USA could not have happened without the participation of the SEC, so they know exactly what Sam is up to. I think there is even an official document where they approved FTX derivatives.

Now they will judge him very "strictly", but not right now, but in a month and a half, to defuse the situation a bit. There will be a barrage of American wrath on Sam. Further he will apologize, will beg the lord and all American justice, he promises that will return everything, that will work till the end of the days and to pay off each penny.
Spoiler He will be believed!

Also all class action suits will be set aside as the jury will take into account that Sam really didn't know what his charges were doing. And his love, who will act as a witness, she will be reclassified as a suspect, she will become one herself without realising it.

Eventually Sam gets out. He'll start up a project again, only he'll do what he's told from above. He'll be a pawn, or rather he was, he just lost it in the moment and believed in himself. No one will give him a 100 year sentence. This is just a classic method of collective appeasement, when people demand some measures and are promised something to comfort them, and then they are going to score because a new event is taking place.

So it is like this. It is not certain that it will be exactly the same, I am not a clairvoyant, but the trajectory of events will not be very different.

#XRP:

As I wrote, the situation changed after another court ruling on #LBRY. The SEC won in another court on a similar issue and in that leverage SEC. They will probably be waiting for a summary judgment now. My understanding is that a draft settlement agreement was already worked out, but has now been put "on the shelf".

Now you just need to keep a close eye on all of the documentation that is filed with the court, which I will do.

The next date is January 12. There will be new information at that time.

You also need to watch the agenda of Congress (especially the House of Representatives).

The deadline for a settlement is Jan. 12-March 3. The odds will increase as we move through these calendar deadlines.

well said.