Monday was a holiday in the United States in honor of Presidents Day, but crypto never sleeps.
Bitcoin opens the day in Asia up 1.9% at $24,815, while Ether is up 1% at $1,701.
China-themed diaper 1s have seen a surge this week. Conflux is up 500% over the past week, while NEO is up 70%. Both are up around 40% in the past day.
Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at OANDA, says strong economic data from a reopened China post-COVID-19 will drive crypto stocks and prices higher.
“The bullish case for the Chinese economy remains strong, and the likely release of stimulus over the next two months as it picks up could accelerate that,” he told CoinDesk in an email. -mail. “Domestic demand is going to be the cornerstone of the economic recovery, and policymakers seem poised to unleash it to its full potential.”
While crypto and stocks could be on an upward trajectory, Erlam doesn’t see gold going in the same direction.
“Gold traders don’t share the eternal optimism that equity and crypto traders possess, and the past few weeks have demonstrated that perfectly,” he said. “The yellow metal fell into a corrective pattern and has struggled to exit ever since.”
This week could be slow with the US holidays on Monday and few economic events expected in the US and Europe, but this could be the start of a breakout for bitcoin, with price gains based on enthusiasm alone. .
“Cryptos seem to exist in a world of their own, with bitcoin rising 2% again on Monday and again looking at last week’s highs,” he said. “This could be a really pivotal level for bitcoin and a break from it could generate a lot more excitement. And we have all seen what happens when excitement and euphoria exists in cryptos.
Cryptography Regulations Absent From Canada’s Emergencies Investigation Act
For observers of Canadian politics, the investigation conducted by Judge Paul Rouleau was fascinating. But despite crypto acting as an important fundraising mechanism and protesters using crypto to openly defy the nation’s first-ever crypto-related sanctions, the absence of Justice’s Roll were recommendations to tighten controls on digital assets.
Audience revelations
Most of Rouleau’s recommendations deal with the inter-jurisdictional wrangling that defined the early weeks of the protest.
Buried in the final pages of the report is Rouleau’s crypto-related recommendation – number 54 of 56.
“The federal government should continue its study of cryptocurrencies. This study should be informed by the findings of this Commission,” Rouleau wrote. “Federal officials should seek to collaborate with their counterparts at other levels of government to leverage existing studies in this area and to ensure that any jurisdictional issues can be resolved.
Bitcoin ‘defied government repression’
Bitcoin was central to the funding of the protest.
Traditional crowdfunding platforms such as GoFundMe and GiveSendGo were exposed to Canadian banking rails and were frozen after an Ontario Superior Court judge issued a Mareva injunction ordering the platforms and their partners banks to stop facilitating convoy transactions.
But the convoy’s bitcoin remained outside the court’s control.
As CoinDesk reported in February last year, most Bitcoin wallets have been completely depleted, according to on-chain data. Almost all of the 20 BTC (about US$788,000 at last year’s exchange rate) was moved to other unauthorized wallets, with some landing on major centralized exchanges.
Among true bitcoin proponents, this was an example of the perfect use case for the digital asset: censorship-resistant money.
“Bitcoin proved to be a sovereign financial railroad as hundreds of thousands of dollars in BTC reached protesters despite government efforts to block donations,” Bitcoin Magazine wrote in June. “Its use as a system to put hundreds of thousands of dollars in value directly into the hands of those who had been blacklisted by the Canadian government may be the most powerful illustration of this power yet.”
But this opinion is not universally shared within the crypto industry.
Back in February, CoinDesk columnist JP Koning wrote that bitcoin was a bad way to fund the Ottawa protest, and funding an illegal protest in any currency isn’t fair despite the government’s worrying use of the Emergencies Act, which he said made him “very uncomfortable.”
“When the demonstration becomes illegal, it is the task of the police to intervene and disperse it. Any failure to do so on their part undermines one of the other essential pillars of a democratic society: the rule of law. If the law no longer worked, Canada would quickly descend into a state of perpetual chaos,” Koning wrote.
In the United States, there seems to be a whole-of-government approach to cracking down on the crypto industry.
As Nic Carter, General Partner of Castle Island Ventures, wrote in a recent blog post, crypto-fiat offramps in the US are getting tighter. In early January, the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) issued a joint statement discouraging banks from dealing with the crypto industry.
Carter writes that it reminds him of Obama-era “Operation Choke Point,” a ploy he describes as marginalizing specific legally operating industries by putting pressure on the banking sector.
Canada is not immune to the same tighter crypto regulatory environment. CoinDesk reported in February that Canada’s apex market regulator, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), is bracing for another regulatory push. A source who spoke to CoinDesk said the proposed new rules will make doing business in Canada too expensive for exchanges.
But the updates to these rules are not due to the trucking convoy’s blatant disregard for the nation’s first crypto sanction.
Although Rouleau and the authorities know that bitcoin was working as intended for the protesters, allowing them to keep their coins so they can fight another day, increased crypto regulations will not result, but rather as a push to continually define cryptography. as a security.
The past week has been strong for bitcoin (BTC), with the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization posting its biggest daily gain in three months. Bitcoin has gained in five of the past seven weeks. This comes as the future of U.S. crypto regulation takes center stage following the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit of Terraform Labs and Do Kwon. SEC Law Enforcement Division Director Gurbir S. Grewal said in part, “…the Terraform ecosystem was neither decentralized nor financial. It was simply sustained fraud. by a so-called algorithmic stablecoin.”