Welcome back to the Flarnchain newsletter! I'm getting started VERY late tonight, so let's jump right into it. Today, Uniswap Labs (https://app.uniswap.org/swap) was just served a Wells Notice, from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), presumably in advance of some sort of formal lawsuit. According to Cornell Law School, a "Wells Notice" is:
a letter sent by a securities regulator to a prospective respondent, notifying him of the substance of charges that the regulator intends to bring against the respondent, and affording the respondent with the opportunity to submit a written statement to the ultimate decision maker.
It's basically a letter that's saying "Hi! We are going to bring charges against you, better get ready to feel our wrath" or something like that. It's also a huge bummer, after the SEC has been overzealously pursuing Coinbase in another lawsuit regarding it's Staking Program. It seems that the SEC is swinging for the fences and trying to take down the two biggest US crypto institutions:
Coinbase (which is the onramp into crypto for most people who use crypto in the US)
Uniswap (which is the largest decentralized trading platform on earth, and is operated out of NYC)
I don't have a ton of time to get into the details, or really rant about either of the cases at length, but let me just tell you my opinion. I think they are both stupid lawsuits and not in keeping with the primary objectives of the SEC which are to:
Inform and protect investors <- not apparently important
Facilitate capital formation <- clearly not important
Enforce Federal securities laws <- we are here
Regulate securities markets <- doesn't really happen
Provide data <- not in any way that's meaningful for retail investors
The SEC primarily seems to exist to protect the vested interests in finance to ensure that retail investors can get dumped on by Jim Cramer stock picks each and every week, like an atomic clock.
Alright. Enough opinion for one night. Let's talk about some facts.
The crypto markets
This week the crypto markets are like.. kind of sideways, but kind of up. There's been a bit of a rally these past couple of days, but overall markets have seemed kind of choppy for the past week. Bitcoin is hovering around $70k, which is now not a new number (crazy), and Ethereum is hovering right around $3,500. ATOM continues to languish in the ~$11.00 range, which continues to disappoint me every week I write this newsletter.
The total crypto market cap is right around $2.75 trillion. I think things will get very interesting if the market cracks through $3 trillion. We are about 9 days away from the next Bitcoin Halving.
Here's the 1 month bitcoin chart:
When we zoom out to the 3 month chart, we can see that this looks a lot like what might be described as a "consolidation phase" where markets kind of take a breather to go sideways before fresh capital is ready to be deployed... hinging of course on upcoming macroeconomic and other cyclical factors (the 4 year cycle is real people).
Okay there's your market update. Bitcoin is a proxy for the entire crypto market.
Next up ~
Market Animal
This weeks market animal is aaaaaaaaa Unicorn (
). Why? Because Uniswap's logo is a unicorn, so it felt like I should make the market animal a Unicorn in solidarity with them.
Anyways, what even is Uniswap. It's the world's largest decentralized exchange, and it has done over a trillion dollars in volume traded since it's inception in 2018. It uses a technology known as an Automated Market Maker (AMM), which allows anyone to swap assets permissionlessly ~ permissionless means that it's free to use without any trusted 3rd party intermediary, this means that the application is "trustless", because instead of trusting someone to do the right thing, you use it as an open-source exposed program - both at your leisure, and at your own risk. Like going to a playground and swinging on the swing set, but instead for finance.
So... I did my best to draw a unicorn, which as been minted as Market Animal #166 on the Stargaze blockchain.
Alright, that's a wrap.
If you read this, hope you enjoyed it!
Have a wonderful rest of your week,
Cheers!
-Flarn
