Weekly Outlook: Different Lanes – Berkay Aybey

After Trump’s cryptocurrency move, we saw Harris also return to a moderate policy and try to strengthen the dialogue channels again. In this context, a second comprehensive meeting was held between Harris and leading private sector representatives of cryptocurrency. In addition to the previous one, Lael Brainard and Wally Adeyemo attended this meeting. These names are the main managers who will directly affect cryptocurrency policy in the current Biden administration. Therefore, it should be evaluated as an important step that shows that Harris attaches serious importance to these meetings.

While Harris is re-establishing the dialogue channels, Trump and his team have already overcome these parts. Trump, who directly issued NFTs and found support for his campaign with crypto products, is now launching his own initiative through his sons. Trump’s sons Trump Jr. and Eric Trump both made announcements via tweets that they will make a big announcement and that the future is in DeFi. Trump is expected to establish a cryptocurrency initiative through his sons. The two candidates have very different paths in the cryptocurrency field. However, with his current power, Harris is also likely to make a rapid breakthrough.

Montenegro’s legal system has become quite questionable because of Do Kwon. Because questions such as which decision is final and which is not, how strong is the interference of politics in the law, are increasingly ambiguous. We have seen many court decisions for Do Kwon’s extradition, one from the US and one from South Korea. The last decision was made to extradite him to South Korea “definitely”. However, the decision was suspended again upon the request of the Minister of Justice. When this turned into such a long story, Kwon’s lawyer started to speak openly, stating that the Minister of Justice was constantly obstructing court decisions because he had given his word to the US.

One of the special investigators in Kwon’s case is the Prime Minister of Montenegro. The case has become as politicized as it can possibly be. The competition is getting fiercer, as the country that wins Kwon’s extradition also has the potential to make serious money.

Last week, following the law on the use of cryptocurrencies in international trade, Putin signed a new law legalizing cryptocurrency mining and trading. While companies must obtain a license for mining, individual miners do not need to obtain a license if they do not exceed the specified energy consumption limits. It was known that Russian oligarchs made a special request to Putin 1-2 years ago to do mining. It was not a surprise that mining was also allowed along with the use of cryptocurrencies in trade. It can be expected that oligarchs in particular will quickly start mining Bitcoin with additional facilities to their existing energy facilities, similar to those in the US.

The law states that foreign digital assets are only allowed to be transferred on the Russian-based blockchain. It can be said that the aim here is to intervene at any time. Most likely, synthetic versions of assets defined as foreign digital assets will be created in the style of “wrapped” so that consumers can interact with synthetics instead of these assets directly.

Last week, both the FTX and Ripple lawsuits came to an end. FTX was ordered to pay a $12.7 billion fine in its legal battle with the CFTC, and FTX and Alameda were also banned from trading, escrow, and market-making activities.

In the Ripple-SEC case, it was known that Ripple would be found guilty of selling XRP to institutions. While the SEC wanted a $2 billion fine, the court found a $125 million fine appropriate. It can be said that Ripple has overcome the SEC obstacle quite ideally. It was announced that the company’s growth plans will continue. Ripple’s stable money project RLUSD, which it wants to build on its own XRP infrastructure, continues to be tested on XRP and Ethereum.

BlackRock’s marketing of its own fund via the BUIDL token in the cryptocurrency market has received a good response. Recently, some stablecoin projects have also started to prefer BUIDL to diversify their reserve assets.

Another Wall Street giant, Franklin Templeton, has launched a token called BENJI to compete with Blackrock in this field. The BENJI token, which represents the fund opened under the name OnChain US Government Money Fund (FOBXX), will operate on the Arbitrum network.

Grayscale has established 2 new funds for SUI and TAO tokens. Ethena has also activated its stablecoin on the Solana network and started accepting SOL as collateral. The Lightning Network has integrated USDT into its infrastructure. A synthetic token called USDT-L was created for the USDT to be transferred on the network. The USDTs represented by the synthetic token will consist of tokens on the Ethereum network. The $12 million stolen from the Ronin bridge was fortunately seized by a white hat hacker. The hacker returned the assets and received a $500,000 reward for finding the error and reporting it to Ronin. Immutable has decided to close its own NFT market. Instead, alternative 3rd party entrepreneurs’ marketplaces are supported.