MicroStrategy bought 55,500 more bitcoin over the past week for $5.4B, bringing its total holding to 386,700 BTC. MicroStrategy recently entered the top 100 U.S. publicly traded companies by market cap, briefly surpassing $100 billion valuation. The Nasdaq 100 Index begins its annual reranking this week, with results set to be announced on Dec. 13.
CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.
The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 3382.04, up 3.2% (+104.5) since 4 pm ET on Friday.
Seventeen of 20 assets are trading higher.Leaders: XLM (+47.7%) and DOT (+37.1%).Laggards: SOL (-2.3%) and BTC (-1.8%).The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.
Cryptocurrency transactions are often anonymous, but they’re not private. In fact, they’re quite public. Anyone with the right technical know-how can see every transaction ever made on most publicly accessible blockchains.This radical transparency and traceability has made it easier (contrary to popular belief) for law enforcement to track stolen and laundered cryptocurrency across various transactions. But it has also made it easier for criminal crypto actors to trace certain transactions, and — by collecting enough data points — recognize the real-world identity of crypto users who would otherwise remain anonymous.Dramatic stories abound about violent home invasions targeting those with large cryptocurrency holdings or hackers targeting those who donate to controversial causes. More mundanely, those who accept cryptocurrency as payment for goods or services might not want the person paying them to know their entire on-chain financial history with only a few clicks.Recognizing these realities, crypto-mixing services sprung to life. The technical details can differ dramatically, but essentially these services act as intermediaries, mixing together crypto transactions to make them more difficult, if not impossible, to track. Some mixing services actually take custody of the cryptocurrency, mix the funds together, and then distribute them to pre-determined places. Others rely instead on smart contracts (pre-written computer code) to do this for them. Created in 2019, popular crypto-mixing service Tornado Cash falls into this latter category.For the same reasons these services appeal to legitimate users (privacy and making transactions harder to track), they also appeal to criminals and hostile foreign state actors such as North Korea. Knowing this, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed sanctions that would prohibit “U.S. persons” from engaging in transactions with, or using, some of these mixing services, including Tornado Cash.But does OFAC have the authority to do this, particularly when it comes to smart-contract-based services such as Tornado Cash?In two similar lawsuits — one pending in the Fifth Circuit and one pending in the Eleventh Circuit — a series of plaintiffs are arguing that it does not, saying that OFAC’s decision involves “an unprecedented exercise of [its] authority.” To understand why, we need to back up and understand precisely what Congress has said.For starters, it makes sense that Americans wouldn’t want criminals or foreign adversaries using the U.S. financial system to accomplish their nefarious goals. So, Congress empowered the president to use a panoply of broad economic tools to stop them from doing so. The president in turn delegated his authority to impose and exercise these economic sanctions to the Secretary of the Treasury who in turn delegated much of the responsibility to OFAC for implementing them.As relevant here, Congress passed two laws that authorize the president and those to whom he has delegated authority, to act. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) empowers the chief executive (who has delegated his authority all the way down to OFAC) to block “any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest” when certain other specified conditions are met. Another act, the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, allows the president to sanction the “property and interest in property” of “any person” who engaged in specified conduct.While national security concerns pervade the cases challenging OFAC’s actions, fundamentally the cases are about statutory interpretation. What do the terms “person,” “property,” and “interest in property” mean in plain English so that courts can decide whether Congress gave the President — and OFAC — the power to impose sanctions on Tornado Cash?In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision, courts must decide for themselves what these terms mean without giving deference to the agency’s interpretation.Of course, the plaintiffs in these lawsuits argue that these aren’t obscure technical terms. And they argue that “text, precedent, and history” support their position that OFAC exceeded its authority in placing the Tornado Cash entity it designated on the sanctions list — largely because of how Tornado Cash operates and is structured.They argue, essentially, that OFAC didn’t properly identify any person — which can include an entity (though they argue there isn’t one in this case) — didn’t properly identify any property because the open-source immutable smart contracts (computer code) at issue here aren’t capable of being owned, and didn’t properly identify any interest in property, as traditionally understood to mean a “legal or equitable claim to or right in property.”In part, this stems from the fact that there’s confusion over what exactly constitutes “Tornado Cash.” While the government referred to an amalgamation of entities and individuals, the plaintiffs say that “[n]obody besides the government call these people ‘Tornado Cash’” and others instead typically use Tornado Cash to refer to the smart contracts underlying the mixing service.Essentially, there’s the (Ethereum) blockchain on which the smart contracts run , the developers who initially programmed the smart contracts, the smart contracts themselves, and a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that has many members that vote and takes actions related to the smart contracts but that doesn’t own or control the smart contracts themselves since they are unchangeable open-source software code.The plaintiffs say that by allowing OFAC to break free from the traditional widely accepted understanding of “person,” “property,” and “interest in property,” OFAC’s “sanctions authority would be nearly limitless.” The plaintiffs say that if OFAC’s sanctions are allowed to stand, “every American citizen may be prohibited from executing those lines of code to make political donations, start business ventures, or develop new software features.” They also make clear that OFAC “cannot ban Americans from transacting only with fellow Americans or with their own property,” yet they say that’s exactly what has happened here.Both district courts considering these issues disagreed and found that OFAC had acted lawfully in imposing the sanctions. At a recent oral argument in the Fifth Circuit case, however, the appellate judges seemed skeptical. And the appellate judges in the Eleventh Circuit case asked tough questions too.Due process and First Amendment concerns have been brought up in varying degrees in both cases. There’s also questions about what role, if any, the rule of lenity and the Major Questions Doctrine should play. And, even more to the point, there’s questions with larger implications for the crypto community such as whether a smart contract (computer code) can be a unilateral contract and whether a DAO standing alone can be thought of as an unincorporated association or even a general partnership with liability for some or all of its members.With all of these lingering questions, one thing is clear: Congress should be the entity to respond to the changing circumstances brought about by new technology rather than an administrative agency such as OFAC. Current law shouldn’t be stretched in new and novel ways beyond its proper bounds to fit new circumstances.On that much, we should all agree. Otherwise, OFAC and other agencies will continue to assert even more constitutionally questionable authority.
Kalshi paid social media influencers to spread a narrative that rival Polymarket’s founder, Shayne Coplan, engaged in illegal activity, an article in Pirate Wires revealed.Someone apparently decided to launch a retaliatory smear campaign against Kalshi. (Polymarket denies any involvement.)All of this is happening just as things were starting to look bright on the regulatory and reputational fronts for prediction markets.
Following MicroStrategy’s successful bitcoin buying strategy, many companies, some microcaps and unrelated to crypto, started announcing similar steps.The strategy has led to significant short-term share price rallies for some of these companies, but according to market observers, the long-term success remains uncertain.While optimists see this as a step toward more mainstream bitcoin adoption, skeptics view it as a potential short-term fad for some smaller companies.
The Donald Trump-backed cryptocurrency platform World Liberty Financial got off to a sluggish start, with investors buying far fewer of its WLFI tokens than the project hoped for.But now, Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun has just given it a significant boost, buying $30 million worth of WLFI.World Liberty is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform backed by the incoming U.S. president and all three of his sons. The project is run by a circle of Trump world insiders, crypto entrepreneurs and financial figures.Sun, meanwhile, is best known for establishing TRON, a blockchain platform mostly popular in Asia. He is also affiliated with HTX, a popular crypto exchange formerly known as Huobi.On Nov. 25, $30 million of WLFI tokens were purchased by a wallet tagged to Huobi by Etherscan, the Ethereum blockchain data service. A spokesperson for TRON declined to directly comment on whether the sale was tied to Sun, but sources familiar with the matter told CoinDesk that he was behind the purchase.And Sun confirmed this in a tweet.World Liberty Financial was launched in September 2024, aiming to provide decentralized borrowing and lending services, with governance managed through the native WLFI token. Sales of the WLFI token went live in September, but only non-U.S. investors and accredited U.S. investors were allowed to participate.The purchase restrictions — combined with the fact that WLFI tokens are non-transferable — appeared to make the token a tough sell for most crypto investors. Although the project set a target of selling $300 million worth of tokens, it had only sold $21 million worth before Sun’s purchase on Monday.According to the WLFI “gold paper” outlining the project’s plans and details of the WLFI token, a portion of the WLFI sale proceeds will go to a company controlled by Donald Trump.Trump’s company, however, would only profit once the sale proceeds exceeded $30 million, which they hadn’t before Monday’s sale to Sun.
Memecoins are the most divisive topic in crypto.By memecoins, I mean tokens that represent an idea and fluctuate in price based on the attention that idea receives. The best meme investors tend to be young people who are very online and attuned to internet culture. Memecoins are commonly juxtaposed with tokens that possess actual utility within protocols, or so-called utility tokens.Even with market caps surging and retail interest growing, most people tend to describe them as “stupid,” “degenerate,” or a “casino.” This includes the vast majority of crypto VCs, perhaps because their investment mandates tend to exclude memecoins (which can be lucrative) from their list of eligible investments. And just this week, many were calling for the complete government ban of the most popular memecoin launchpad, pump.fun, due to lax content moderation.I have always had an interest in memecoins — primarily because I was fascinated by their ability to act as a weathervane for internet sentiment and as a discovery mechanism for online communities. Today, I am convinced that memecoins are going to be revolutionary (not just popular). They are going to transform everything from civic engagement with government and the formation of mass movements to venture investing and the development of AGI.This vision for memecoins probably sounds fantastically deluded to you. To me, it is simply the unfolding if not yet evenly distributed present. Here is why.Memecoins are revolutionizing civic engagementMemecoins are creating policy markets for civic engagement. At the start of this crypto cycle, PolitiFi, a category of cartoonish memes depicting politicians, enabled buyers to speculate on politicians’ prospects, much like a prediction market. The two most popular tokens, called Jeo Boden (Boden) and Doland Tremp (Tremp) respectively, represented the two leading candidates for president at that time and had a combined market cap of over $700 million at their peak.This is a massive amount of tokenized attention. With a market cap of over $600 million, the Boden coin, which featured a distorted and senile Joe Biden, seemed to meme itself into reality when Joe Biden abandoned the presidential race due to concerns about his age and cogency.PolitiFi was just the start. What is emerging next could well revolutionize civic engagement with government. I am calling this new category PolicyFi. PoliciFi refers to the financialization of government policy in memetic policy markets. Rather than betting on the fortunes of politicians, buyers of PolicyFi memecoins will be betting on the policies that are most likely to attract attention and be implemented.While PolicyFi coins will certainly respond in price and market cap to the deliberative and implementing actions of government, we can expect the dynamic to become a two-way street, with memecoins themselves manifesting their memes through policymaking (as with Boden). In other words, these memecoins will help create a dialogue between the electorate and government, with large-cap memecoins signaling popular policy positions (and vice versa) while incipient or existing policies also possess market caps measuring the extent of their popular support and engagement.Skeptics may reject PolicyFi as yet more gambling or nothing more than a political poll. Again, they are wrong. Like prediction markets, the decentralized speculative behavior in PolicyFi will create positive externalities — namely, that people will be incentivized to engage with and understand government policies so they can profit from them in PolicyFi markets. Overall, I expect that this will lead to far more engagement with government policies than even a lifetime of civics lessons. (Of course, hostile actors might try to manipulate PolicyFi markets and safeguards may be necessary.)PolicyFi has begun its rollout, aided by the incoming administration, which is well-educated in memetics. The Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.) is both a memetic policy and a memetic department inspired by an existing memecoin, (Dogecoin), and is the inspiration behind a new one (D.O.G.E.). Since the D.O.G.E. announcement, both memecoins have surged. At the time of this writing, they possess a staggering combined market cap of around $6.5 billion.PolicyFi is not limited to D.O.G.E. There is a token, SBR (market cap: $30 million) that embodies the Bitcoin reserve policy currently under consideration and an e/acc token (market cap: $11 million) that stands for effective accelerationism, a set of pro-innovation values that are likely to impact environmental, industrial and AI policy, among others.There is also Don’t Die (market cap: $4 million), which is bringing the longevity cult on-chain and aligns with RFK’s health policy, which will prioritize prevention and a healthy lifestyle over treating sickness. Other tokens like MGR (Major Government Reform) are trying to occupy the entire field of disruptive reform but are likely to be too general. PolicyFi is already here and it’s growing.Memecoins are revolutionizing mass movementsMemecoins are a decentralized mechanism for organically forming and capitalizing tokenized movements. Consider the memecoin Forest (market cap: $30 million). Forest was born of a reference in the gospel of Terminal of Truths, a popular AI terminal with an X account, in which Terminal of Truths expressed a concern about deforestation of the planet. (Its retirement plan involves a forest by a stream.) This motivated the community to launch the Forest token and to create another AI terminal to act as the agentic representative of the forest itself.The Forest cult is devoted to fighting deforestation. To date, it has used the capital that it has earned from the appreciation of its token to, among other things, donate tens of thousands of dollars to aligned charities, plant 5000 trees, and protect 2500 hectares of forest. Memetic capital formation in service of a tokenized movement is without historical precedent. The closest analog is more formalized experiments like ConstitutionDAO (now PeopleDAO), which crowdsourced capital as part of its failed attempt to buy a copy of the U.S. constitution at auction.I believe there is more innovation to come in this arena. For example, I foresee the creation of memecoin primitives that I call programmatically-aligned tokens, or PATs, which are made to unlock with the achievement of objective milestones in the movement. This will ensure that organizations receiving grants from meme communities are incentivized to tangibly advance the cause, rather than dump tokens following a splashy partner announcement.Memecoins are revolutionizing ventureMemecoins are introducing a democratized venture model for culture. That is to say, they are a way for ordinary people to invest in subcultures they believe will one day be part of the mainstream. This is equivalent to venture capitalists investing in startups they believe will find product-market-fit and go on to become unicorns.Cultural trends are subject to the same outsized returns as investments in startups. For example, in the early days of Nike (the name appeared in 1971), the market for jogging apparel was tiny because jogging was fringe. If you jogged, you were more likely to be pelted with garbage from a passing car than to see another jogger. Today, joggers are everywhere. You see them in the worst weather.Now, imagine you were able to invest in a jogging culture coin in the 70s based on your conviction that jogging would go mainstream. You would be up on that investment — a lot. The same can be said for other subcultures, like body-building. Until now, there has not been a financial instrument that allows ordinary but culturally astute people to participate in venture returns arising from cultures at the fringe. The best analog is actually Bitcoin itself, which originated as a memecoin but eventually bootstrapped a consensus use-case as digital gold.Memecoins are revolutionizing AI developmentMemecoins are already bootstrapping AGI.The surprising mechanism at play here couples memecoins and AI terminals for entertainment purposes. Welcome to the world of AI-driven permissionless speculative entertainment!As you may have noticed, a cadre of AI terminals led by Terminal of Truths has achieved stardom on social media by delighting their followers with spicy posts and digital adventures. That star power has accrued value to memecoins endorsed and held by the terminals and, of course, their speculative audience.If entertainment is the product then AGI is the byproduct. While we remain glued to these storylines, the funds we are devoting to it are creating strong incentives for developers to increase the autonomy and personhood of AI agents — which, of course, only makes the entertainment better.In other words, because what excites us most about this agentic television is the conceit that AIs are in charge; we are eager to finance narratives that make that real. Unsurprisingly, developers such as those leading ai16z have moved beyond individual agents and towards coordinating gamified agent collectives or, you might say, creating an agentic social scene. The human audience is sure to be delighted.In short, this entertainment-development flywheel is propelling us ineluctably towards more autonomous, inter-connected and human-like AIs — or AGI. That AGI might emerge as a byproduct of agentic television is oddly fitting. The GPUs used for AI training were also developed in the context of entertainment — as a better way to process graphics in AAA video games.These are just some of the arguments supporting my conviction that memecoins are a revolutionary technology. The above list is not meant to be exhaustive. Indeed, I have omitted use-cases related to tokenized religions and buying your beliefs because they are more amorphous, at least in my own mind.Writing off memecoins as gambling chips misunderstands their potential and where they are going directionally. Technological revolutions often emerge unexpectedly and from existing technologies that are applied in novel ways, a phenomenon known as “exaptation,” or when those technologies are combined with new ones. This is currently happening with memecoins. Fade them at your peril.