Author: Coindesk

As BTC rose past the $93,000 mark last week and inflows into the U.S.-listed spot ETFs and crypto stocks surged, JPMorgan’s retail sentiment score rose to a record high of 4. The measure is designed to gauge the sentiment of retail investors toward cryptocurrencies, especially bitcoin, based on the activity in the family of BTC products, including spot ETFs. Read the full article here

“Despite bitcoin’s election-fueled rally, its 260-day complexity is not yet close to the 1.2 level that would signal the start of another crypto winter,” the BCA Research team led by Chief Strategist Dhaval Joshi said in a Nov. 14 note to clients. “Hence, while we should expect a near-term retracement, bitcoin’s structural uptrend is intact with an ultimate destination of $200,000+.” Read the full article here

“There’s a gap in the stablecoin market here in Europe, and we see that as an opportunity,” Arnoud Star Busmann, CEO of the firm’s payments-focused subsidiary Quantoz Payments, said in an interview with CoinDesk. “We are confident that our tech and regulatory compliance put us in a good position to fill that gap, especially now that we have strong partners like Kraken and Tether.” Read the full article here

Metaplanet started buying BTC in April this year as a hedge against Japan’s debt issues and volatility in the yen. Since then, it has accumulated 1,018 BTC worth $92.33 million, according to data source Bitcoin Treasuries. The company has also used options strategies to boost its holdings. Read the full article here

In December 2020, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Ripple Labs, accusing the company of conducting an unregistered securities offering by selling XRP, which the SEC classified as a security. In July of last year, a U.S. court ruled that Ripple’s XRP sales to institutional investors qualified as securities transactions. However, it also determined that sales of XRP on public exchanges did not fall under the definition of a security. In October, the SEC appealed against this ruling, seeking further clarification on the legal status of XRP. Read the full article here

Donald Trump and the Republican Party at large had a strong 2024 election, winning the presidency, Senate and House. This almost certainly guarantees crypto legislation will advance and become law sometime in the next two years. It also heralds a potentially softer approach from regulators toward the sector. Read the full article here

Other top-tier banks/wealth management operations, including Morgan Stanley, Cantor Fitzgerald, Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of America, UBS and HSBC, didn’t add to or subtract much from their positions. A new entrant was Australian investment bank Macquarie Group, which purchased 132,355 shares of IBIT worth $4.8 million. Wells Fargo, which has a very minor stake in the ETFs, held most of its shares in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) and Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust (BTC). Read the full article here

People are policy, and Trump surrounds himself with an orange-pilled group. VP-elect JD Vance owns Bitcoin, and has a long track of engagement with crypto, even authoring a market structure bill as a senator. Vivek Ramaswamy, the new co-lead of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been a crypto bull for some time. Trump’s transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick is a bitcoin and stablecoin megabull (his company Cantor Fitzgerald custodies for Tether). Musk himself, who is becoming a right-side Soros of sorts, has dabbled in crypto for years. Read the full article here

The trend of more of the older wallets that held bitcoin from its early days coming out of the woodwork could continue, as they might be able to bag massive profits at current price levels. Such moves could limit any additional price upside, even though some traders are still optimistic that bitcoin could reach $100,000—a key psychological level of resistance—by year-end. Read the full article here

“I think that happened with Covid. Your eyes open even more … I think the monetary system, once you do go around it and with inflation, how it’s stealing from us. I’ve tried to tell friends, and they’re still not listening. But bitcoin just fits today. It’s more of a store of value,” Boyd said. Read the full article here