What’s up everybody! This is Thomas Bahamas and you are here for episode number 28 of Solana Weekly. Here to drop some alpha on what's going on and where we're going. I think the theme of this week is holy s**t, the SEC is coming for crypto. Full force attack with them bringing up charges against Binance and then Coinbase. It's time to be careful with your coins folks and we will plan on digging into this more. Let's move to Solana and check out the volatility:
Sol Price: 20.23 - down a total of 2% from 20.68, and it’s all over the place, so much volatility I can’t even get the price right because it keeps changing. We’re getting hit with the FUD from all angles, with the SEC calling SOL a security, and now we got Jim Cramer calling it a counterfeit coin. We stay bullish long term, but it’s all over the place right now. Breaking: had to delay this because Sol dipped almost two dollars to $18.50 while I was trying to record and had to hit that long button. Pls recover, looks like it’s starting to and we’re back at 19.
Sol Eth: .01039 down from .01107 which is down 6%. Was listening to DonAlt give a breakdown and he is basically saying all you need is Eth, it’s the only coin showing strength in the market and looks good vs BTC. If you look at the chart it has held up well and as we see Sol couldn’t hold on as well.
Sol BTC: .0007253, down from .0007631 down a total of 5%.
Overall the markets tanked and recovered pretty quickly. The news cycle lasted super quick as usual and rather than let the lawsuits get in the way we saw Coinbase go on the offense start tweeting their side of the story out. I'm not sure that was what did it or if people just saw a dip and went for it, but I'm glad we recovered and the volatility is back. Kind of feels like it’s just hanging on and people are degening.
Let’s get into the news of the day.
Seems like the entire Solana twitter ecosystem including me is shadowbanned, so that’s interesting.
The turtles were doing some new launch and the whole contract was compromised, and turtles were on the loose! I think it’s under control now, but gotta be careful out there.
Zero monke business continues to moon, around 30 sol now, the Bitcoin ordinal project he did is over 4 Bitcoin, so it is still free. Crazy to see the price differences haha.
It also appears that Bern and Token 22 was integrated into Jupiter and we got a +90% wick from it. That other exchange Fluxbeam was bad and no one wanted to use it.
The SEC started off with a Binance lawsuit on Monday, and yesterday even went as far as to seek a temporary restraining order to freeze Binance US assets. Kind of insane they are going this far. With this enforcement action we are seeing a run on the bank on their exchange. Only problem is that as a crypto exchange they hold all the reserves and are doing just fine.
The core of what they are going after is that they were accused of running an unregistered exchange, unregistered broker dealer, and settlement of those assets. Of course they included Solana in this which we are not happy about, as well as ADA, Matic, FIL, SAN, AXS, CHZ, FLOW, ICP, NEAR, VGX, DASH, NEXO.
My favorite part of this is that in 2018 they had a Binance employee say we are running a fking unlicenced securities exchange in the USA bro. Upon further reflection of this it was taken out of context and the compliance officer was actually making a joke and pretending to give an opinion of the SEC. It’s interesting to see the way that the SEC is approaching this because they aren’t just enforcing this in the courts, they are making their case in public with the court of public opinion. Is it the last ditch effort to get people while FTX and all the other class of 2022 scams are fresh on everyone’s minds? Probably.
Next day they go after Coinbase. The same type of charges and also bringing up their staking program. They also call Solana a security as well as other tokens. Notably both of these avoid Eth.
Overall take: We kind of knew this was coming, but damn. It's pretty intense. My first reaction was that this is bs and the SEC is overstepping, which it sounds like they are, but also there seems to be serious problems with Binance and there were no real differences between us and .com and they were actively allowing us residents on their platform and trading against them.
I'm glad the coins came back and we're pumping, but it almost seems like an all out war on crypto at this point. Coinbase has been the most compliant company in Crypto for years and often times made a lot less money because of it. So if they go down there is no real hope for crypto. They are standing up and taking the fight back to them and it at least appears as if they have a good case and we can get some sort of regulatory clarity out of it. It's hard to comply with rules that aren't clear and Coinbase has been toeing that line since it started. I have a soft spot for Coinbase because it was one of the only options in 2016 when I was just learning about crypto, and also I'm a huge fan of Brian Armstrong. We need America to allow innovation in business and to just shut down a massive growth opportunity seems like a losing bet.
I think we're seeing the tide shift in the public, we have two presidential candidates that have actively stated they are pro crypto and anti CBDC. The current administration stands for so many things that are just against what we need that there its not going to sustain.
I think this isn't the end of the fud, it always seems like it's over at the bottom and lets just hope that's where we are at.
I still think the political climate will end up being extremely bullish leading into the election year. The current administration must print money to make the economy look better to try to win the next election, while that's just going to be kindling to the fire on the opposition.
With that I'd like to say we keep our eyes on the prize and add to the long term stack. Get your coins off exchanges and self custody them.
I think the bullish side of this is that there are solutions popping up that do just that. I had a call with Ottr Finance and they solve for this. They are a self custodied Solana wallet at the core, but have so much more packed in it, it's like the coolest version of Venmo.
They offer an on and off ramp to your bank account.
They offer staking, buying different tokens, sending money p2p, sending crypto as a gift a lot like tiplink, you can have money deposited through direct deposit from your work (benefit here is it shows up quicker in your Ottr acct than bank account and you don’t have a crypto buying history in your main bank acct.)
Y axis podcast is live, the man, the myth Tristan is back from a podcast hiatus and interviewed Armani for a banger of a comeback. Forgot how good he was at this.
He released it onto twitter as a video and that seems to be the new platform for podcasts after Tucker Carlson released his first episode of Tucker on Twitter with over 30 million views instantly.
Lastly I’m going to finish with a crypto concept I just heard and haven’t heard in a while. Triple entry accounting.
Cryptocurrencies employ this system through their underlying blockchain technology. Every transaction on the blockchain involves an exchange between two parties (the double-entry) and is then confirmed and sealed into the blockchain, providing a non-disputable and transparent record (the triple-entry).
So essentially the block explorers that we all use like solscan, solanafm and etherscan are actually a crucial piece of infrastructure that show the competitive advantage of a crypto transaction vs a fiat transaction. Don’t believe me, you can look on Venmo at your dumb friends that publish their transactions in the feed and you’ll see a couple of their transactions. If you know their wallet address, you could see every single transaction back to when that account was created. This is a type of transparency that it unseen and is what protects us. None of this government protection has anywhere near as much protection as the block explorers do. All we need to do is use them, we just need to get everyone flipping jpegs to understand that’s just an entry to this beautiful web 3 we are building.
That’s it for this week, thank you for joining and hope to see you and some friends next week.
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