Market Manipulation is Back, Baby!

In case you live a completely normal life away from the deranged world of crypto Twitter, you missed the 2 hour panic yesterday where it looked like CoinTelegraph of all people broke the news of a Bitcoin spot ETF being approved by the SEC.

This was of course fake news, denied by everyone from Larry Fink to the SEC themselves. However it didn’t stop the price of Bitcoin from going completely haywire, initially pumping close to 10% off the news to $30k, before retracing completely by falling to $27k and then settling around $28.5k where it sits now.

Do I really think that CoinTelegraph was trying to manipulate the market via tweet, generating $50 billion in volume and liquidating over $150 million in shorts?

Probably not. But you never know, there was some dicey behavior in the market.

Stupider things have been done in this industry, and they’ve been done by people with less power than the person running the CoinTelegraph Twitter account.

Regardless of where the blame lies for these poor liquidated traders, the fact that this single headline (from a historically unreputable source) cause such volatility in the market shows clear pent up demand for whenever the news inevitably hits.

The Bitcoin ETF is absolutely not priced in. Until then it seems like certain people are bending the illiquid and low volume markets to their will.

Uniswap is Now a Fee Extractor

People are big mad about Uniswap’s newest announcement that they will be taking 0.15% fees on certain token swaps via their interfaces moving forward. These are not fees that go to Uniswap token holders or the protocol but Uniswap Labs itself.

Random, completely unrelated side note: anytime somebody begins a tweet storm with why they work in crypto you can add a grain of salt to what you are about to read.

Uniswap Labs taking 0.15% on swaps conducted using their front end is completely fine in my estimation. Most exchanges take some sort of service fee for their use, whether they be a centralized crypto exchange or stock broker, and Uniswap has a right to implement the same thing on its users as well.

The folks who are this price sensitive will simply interact with the contracts directly and avoid this fee or use an aggregator or router that avoids the fee on their behalf. For everyone else we will simply pay the 0.15% and go about our business and thank the builders for creating the greatest casino on earth. It will be a great moment when they are able to share some of the spoils with their holders as well, but that time is far in the future.

Friend Tech: It’s Finally Over?

For only the fifth time over, net sells on Friend Tech outpaces net buys, this time by the largest amount by far.

This is likely just a temporary dip for this app which seems to have 9 lives. As you can see from the chart above, flows are very volatile but somehow the users always come back.

That said, some of the moves the team has made have been made in order to disincentivize points farming, which will lead to a sustained decline in TVL. Especially as other parts of the ecosystem start to see life, we could see a lull in Friend Tech activity until very close to the token launch.

Paradigm-backed token launches are always highly anticipated events and this one will be no different. There have been valuations thrown out anywhere from $50 million to pushing into the billions. As wide as that range is, it might not even be wide enough. If the token launch is around the time of the Bitcoin halving, any valuation between $0 (highly unlikely) and $10 billion (not super likely but look at Worldcoin in this market) would not shock me.

Here’s to hoping for better times, 11 figure valuations, and the rising tide of a real ETF that lifts all boats for the next two years.

Until then - Stay Decent!