BTC/ETH prices per CoinDesk Indices; gold is COMEX spot price. Prices as of about 4 p.m. ET
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The collapse of crypto exchange FTX might not have happened if the firm was under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s watch, the agency’s head argued Thursday.
CFTC Chair Rostin Behnam, testifyingbefore the Senate Agriculture Committee at the first of several congressional hearings expected on FTX, said his agency couldn’t have prevented the collapse because FTX wasn’t an entity regulated by his agency.
Behnam asked the lawmakers for broader authority to directly oversee spot cash market exchanges, which aren’t regulated by any federal agency now (tokens that are deemed securities are overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission).
Most of the senators didn’t seem to make much of a distinction between FTX US, the company operating within the U.S., and FTX.com, the global exchange based in the Bahamas. FTX.com has been facing broader issues, including apparently sending customer and corporate funds to Alameda Research, a trading firm that’s affiliated with FTX.
Benham said the DCCPA would have banned the commingling of customer and corporate money and also require better corporate governance and actual bookkeeping. He said this sort of activity would have been prohibited if the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act (DCCPA), the bill sponsored by committee heads senators Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and John Boozman (R-Ark.), had been in effect.
Benhnam suggested revisiting the bill to ensure it addresses possible misconduct that may occur at other companies.
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In a highly anticipated interview at Wednesday’s DealBook Summit, former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried expressed regret over his exchange’s collapse, but clung to the narrative that its failure was due to a bet gone wrong. During the interview with the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin, Bankman-Fried didn’t answer many of the questions investors would want answered, nor did he deliver the mea culpa many crypto industry observers have hoped to hear from the 30-year-old former crypto billionaire. “I didn’t ever try to commit fraud,” he said.
“Gas tax:” Coinbase has disabled non-fungible token (NFT) transfers on its iOS wallet appbecause of a dispute with Apple over the company’s in-app purchase policy. Taking to Twitter on Thursday, Coinbase said Apple is demanding it pay its gas fees using Apple software, which would make those gas fees subject to Apple’s 30% app tax.
U.S. Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s remarks on Wednesday signaled a likely slowing down in interest rate hikes as soon as the central bank’s mid-December meeting, causing mixed results in equity markets. The S&P 500 index and Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 0.09% and 0.56%, respectively, while the Nasdaq Composite was up 0.13%. Nicholas Colas, co-founder of the market analysis firm DataTrek Research, wrote in a note that as much as Powell is “trying to contain investors’ animal spirits by talking about persistently high interest rates, markets are rejecting that message.” Colas added, “Instead, [markets] are looking through his rhetoric and think they see the inflection point for monetary policy.”
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Market Insight: BTC vs. ETH: MA Crossovers
Ether’s (ETH) price has outperformed bitcoin over the past 10 days, increasing 15.4% versus BTC’s 7.7% rise.
Momentum in the ETH/BTC pairing over the same time period spiked 39%, using the 14-period Relative Strength Index (RSI) as a proxy for price acceleration. The RSI is a technical indicator that measures the magnitude of price changes for an asset. It can be used by investors to determine the speed of price movement, allowing it to be compared to past price levels.
The current RSI for the ETH/BTC pair is 57.22. Filtering for RSI levels above 55 but below 58 for data dating to 2017 yields inconclusive results. In more than 1,845 observations, the RSI for the ETH/BTC pair has fallen within this range just 116 times.
Polygon: Polygon-based applications can soon run on fully decentralized application programming interface (API) operating on indexing service The Graph, away from the current hosting service. Joining Web3, The Graph Network will allow Polygon developers to find the data they need to improve the efficiency of their decentralized applications (dapps), according to a Thursday post. Polygon’s MATIC token surged earlier in the day and was recently trading up 0.1% in the past 24 hours.
Solana: Orca, a Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX), has integrated with payments heavyweight Stripe to power its fiat-to-crypto transactions. Users will now be able to make fiat purchases for tokens such as USDC and SOL via an on-ramp built inside Orca using Stripe’s fiat-to-crypto system. SOL was trading around $13, down 1.6% in the past 24 hours.
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Disclaimer: The information presented in this message is intended as a news item that provides a brief summary of various events and developments that affect, or that might in the future affect, the value of one or more of the cryptocurrencies described above. The information contained in this message, and any information liked through the items contained herein, is not intended to provide sufficient information to form the basis for an investment decision. The information presented herein is accurate only as of its date, and it was not prepared by a research analyst or other investment professional. You should seek additional information regarding the merits and risks of investing in any cryptocurrency before deciding to purchase or sell any such instruments.
