It’s almost here. Bitcoin is on the verge of hitting $100,000, trading at ~$99K on Friday after a ~11% rise over the past week.
Adding to the excitement were BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) options making their debut on Nasdaq, driving nearly $2B in notional trading volume on their first day. The options that allow investors to hedge or leverage their Bitcoin exposure have the potential to significantly juice the market as more come online. Meanwhile, Bitcoin dominance continues to rise, suppressing altcoin price action in the interim, though there are signs this may end soon.
2️⃣ Gary To Leave SEC As Agency Makes Progress on SOL ETFs
It’s official — SEC Chair Gary Gensler will resign on January 20th, ending our industry’s suffering under his tenure.
Also on Thursday, it was announced that the SEC has begun engaging with ETF issuers like VanEck, Bitwise, and 21Shares on spot SOL ETFs, leading some to think these ETFs may come sooner than we expect. To add to the good news further, the SEC was also ordered to throw out their “broker” rule, which formed the basis of their case against Consensys.
3️⃣ Vitalik Joins the ANON Movement powered by CLANKER
With AIs spawning tokens left and right, Vitalik Buterin’s purchase of ANON, a token that enables anonymous posting on Farcaster using zero-knowledge proofs, grabbed everyone’s attention on Wednesday. Deployed anonymously through the AI token creator, CLANKER, ANON drew larger engagement after the launch of anoncast.org, a zk-powered Farcaster client allowing users holding 15K ANON to post anonymously.
CLANKER itself has drawn a lot of attention recently after it also spawned LUM, a token created in conversation with the Higher community’s Aether agent. Now, anyone on Farcaster can launch tokens via CLANKER simply by responding to it. If you want to make your own, you can learn how to do so below.
The “Solana killer,” Sui, fell victim to similar challenges as it experienced its first major outage this week. Transactions halted for two hours due to a bug in its transaction scheduling logic, before being resolved with a new patch.
While this affected price in the short term, the larger response came from the Solana ecosystem, praising how smoothly and swiftly Sui handled the outage. This didn’t stop the chain from announcing a partnership with asset manager Franklin Templeton on Friday, showing these outages may just be part of growing pains (fingers crossed).
5️⃣ MicroStrategy Sells More Debt, Citron Opens Short
As expected, MicroStrategy is continuing its push to buy more Bitcoin, increasing its debt offerings to raise $2.6B for additional Bitcoin purchases and general corporate needs — all part of its 21/21 Plan to secure $21B over three years for Bitcoin investments. Despite this bold approach driving a 521% increase in MicroStrategy’s stock value earlier this year, this week brought significant challenges.
The premium MicroStrategy (MSTR) had accrued, which made people skeptical, led to a sharp drop after the infamous activist short-seller Citron Research announced a short position on the stock. Citron criticized the disconnect between MicroStrategy’s stock price and Bitcoin’s fundamentals, suggesting the stock had become overheated, even though they remained bullish on Bitcoin itself. Following the announcement, MSTR’s shares dropped by as much as 20%. Only time will tell whether or not this will be a reckoning moment for MSTR.
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