Monday was a holiday in the US in honor of Presidents’ Day, but crypto never sleeps.
Bitcoin opens the day in Asia up 1.9% to $24,815, while ether is up 1% to $1,701.
China-themed Layer 1s have had quite a rise this week. Conflux is up 500% in the past week, while NEO is up 70%. Both are up about 40% in the past day.
Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at OANDA, says solid economic data from a post-COVID, reopened China will push stocks and crypto prices higher.
“The bullish case for the Chinese economy remains solid, and the likely release of stimulus over the next few months as the pace picks up could boost that,” he told CoinDesk in an email. “Domestic demand is becoming the cornerstone of the economic revival and policymakers seem poised to unleash it to the fullest.”
While crypto and stocks may be on the upswing, Erlam doesn’t see gold moving in the same direction.
“Gold traders do not share the eternal optimism that stock and crypto traders possess, and the past few weeks have highlighted that perfectly,” he said. “The yellow metal fell into a corrective pattern and has been struggling to get out ever since.”
This week could be a quiet week with the US holiday on Monday and not much scheduled for economic events in the US and Europe, but it could be the start of a breakthrough for bitcoin, with price gains based on enthusiasm alone.
“Cryptos seemingly exist in a world of their own, with bitcoin surging another 2% on Monday and rewatching past week highs,” he said. “This could be a really critical level for bitcoin and a break from it could generate much more enthusiasm. And we have all seen what happens when enthusiasm and euphoria exist in cryptos.”
Crypto Regulations Missing From Canada Emergency Law Investigation
For observers of Canadian politics, the investigation, led by Judge Paul Rouleau, was fascinating. But despite crypto serving as a major fundraising mechanism, and protestors using crypto to openly defy the country’s first-ever crypto-related sanctions, the Justice Department’s Rouleau lacked recommendations for strengthening controls on digital assets.
Revelations from the hearings
Most of Rouleau’s recommendations address the inter-jurisdictional bickering that characterized the first few weeks of the protest.
Buried in the final pages of the report is Rouleau’s crypto-related recommendation – the 54th of 56.
“The federal government should continue its investigation into cryptocurrencies. This study should be based on the findings of this committee,” Rouleau wrote. “Federal officials should seek to work with counterparts at other levels of government to take advantage of existing studies in this area and ensure that any jurisdictional issues can be addressed.”
Bitcoin ‘defied government crackdown’
Bitcoin was central to the funding of the protest.
Traditional crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe and GiveSendGo had exposure to Canadian bank rails and were frozen after an Ontario Supreme Court judge issued a Mareva order ordering the platforms and their banking partners to stop facilitating the convoy’s transactions.
But the convoy’s bitcoin remained out of the court’s control.
As CoinDesk reported last February, most bitcoin wallets were completely empty, according to on-chain data. Nearly all 20 BTC (about $788,000 US at last year’s exchange rates) were moved to other, unsanctioned wallets, some of which ended up on major centralized exchanges.
Among bitcoin’s true believers, this exemplified the digital asset’s perfect use case: censorship-resistant money.
“Bitcoin proved itself to be a sovereign financial rail as hundreds of thousands of dollars in BTC reached protesters despite government attempts to block donations,” Bitcoin magazine wrote in June. “Using it as a system to put hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of value directly into the hands of those blacklisted by the Canadian government is perhaps the most powerful illustration of that power to date.”
But this view is not universally shared within the crypto industry.
Last February, CoinDesk columnist JP Koning wrote that bitcoin was a bad way to fund the Ottawa protest, and that funding an illegal protest in any currency is not right, despite the government’s disturbing use of the Emergency Act. which he said made him “extremely uncomfortable.”
“If protest becomes illegal, it is the job of the police to step in and break it up. Any failure on their part to do so harms one of the other important pillars of a democratic society: the rule of law. If the law no longer functions, Canada would quickly slide into a state of perpetual chaos,” Koning wrote.
In the US, there seems to be a government-wide approach to cracking down on the crypto industry.
As Nic Carter, general partner at Castle Island Ventures, wrote in a recent blog post, crypto-fiat off ramps in the US are getting tighter. In early January, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) issued a joint statement discouraging banks from doing business with the crypto industry.
Carter writes that this reminds him of the Obama-era “Operation Choke Point,” a scheme, as he describes it, in which specific industries that operate legally are marginalized by putting pressure on the banking industry.
Canada is not immune to the same environment of tightening crypto regulations. CoinDesk reported in February that Canada’s overarching market regulator, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), is preparing for a new regulatory push. A source who spoke to CoinDesk said the new proposed rules will make doing business in Canada too expensive for exchanges.
But the updates to these rules don’t come as a result of the Trucker Convoy’s blatant opposition to the country’s first crypto sanction.
Despite Rouleau and authorities knowing that bitcoin was working as intended for the protesters, allowing them to keep their coins so they can fight another day, increased crypto regulation will not come as a result of this, but rather as a push to crypto continuously defined. as security.
It was a strong last week for bitcoin (BTC), with the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization posting its biggest daily gains in three months. Bitcoin has gained in five of the past seven weeks. This is because the future of US crypto regulation is in the picture after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) indicted Terraform Labs and Do Kwon. SEC’s Division of Enforcement Director Gurbir S. Grewal said in part, “…the Terraform ecosystem was neither decentralized nor financial. It was simply a fraud backed by a so-called algorithmic stablecoin.”
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