16th October 2023 > > Maxis & ETFs.

tl;dr

Maxi wind-up time. We might be in the final stages of gaining approval for a spot BTC ETF.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

A decent rally in the last hour or so gets the week off to a good start, though once again leveraged shorts are selling into strength. The Grayscale BTC Trust discount has narrowed to 15%, the lowest since just after BTC reached its ATH of $69k nearly two years ago. That is encouraging.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Time to upset the maxis again

Wholesale adoption of cryptos cannot happen without a legal and regulatory framework in place. Of necessity this involves a degree of centralisation, a concept that is anathema to the maxis. I have sympathy for the idea of retaining as much of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision as possible, but one must be realistic – the decentralised world cannot exist without the centralised world, and that is just a fact of life.

The latest crypto arena to start shedding anonymity is the world of DeFi.

Uniswap v4 has launched a new hook that performs a KYC (Know Your Customer) check before a user can interact with a liquidity pool:

https://github.com/jdubpark/Uniswap-Hooks/blob/main/contracts/KYCHook.sol

For clarity, this hook is not obligatory – developers can use it at their own discretion. But the maxis are having none of it. @RekTradinCrypto sums up the mood on X:

“KYC has no place in #Defi.”

Or, @yourfriendSOMMI:

“Disappointing NEWS: Uniswap is bringing out KYC Verification in the form of a Hook for Uniswap v4. UniswapX is also using a "permission required" off-chain server. It starts as an "option" and then we all know how it ends... Uniswap is Fake DeFi.”

This is just the wrong attitude.

These people are holding us back in our quest to gain legitimacy for the crypto world. Uniswap is not “Fake DeFi”, it is just one version of the infinite number of possible interpretations of DeFi. Maxis view themselves as freedom fighters but, like many who claim that mantle, the truth is very different.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Spot BTC ETF

Two of the current spot BTC ETF applications sitting in Gary Gensler’s in-tray have been updated with several pages more of text, according to Bloomberg analysts James Seyffart and Eric Balchunas:

"A recent update to the spot bitcoin ETF prospectus from Ark and 21SHares adds at least five pages of new text, signaling (sic) a constructive conversation with the SEC -- and a step that typically only occurs when a fund is on its way to being approved. We believe there is a 90% chance of approval by Ark’s Jan. 10 deadline.”

https://twitter.com/JSeyff/status/1712900403090559398

Is that 90% probability already priced in?