 December 4, 2020  The top stories in bitcoin, crypto and more – all in one place, delivered daily Sponsored By:  By Daniel Kuhn If you were forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive it, sign up here.
Top shelf Traders have begun unwrapping tokenized bitcoins. The U.S. Treasury Department will keep a vigilant eye on digital innovations. And trading volumes on OKEx have plummeted.
Forced burn Ripple Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz tweeted the community could force the burning of billions of the protocol's XRP native tokens held in escrow to prevent the drop in price that would likely occur should those billions in frozen tokens ever flood the market. On Dec. 2 a Twitter user asked the CTO, "If Nodes, validators and the community at large got together and we agree that it's better for the community to burn the 50 billion XRP Ripple has in escrows, would that be possible?" Responding to the tweet, David Schwartz implied that majority rule would win in such a decision.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury wants state and federal regulators to keep a vigilant watch on digital asset innovation, which could upset the balance of the current financial system. According to a report released on Thursday by the Financial Stability Oversight Council, digital assets are a "particularly good example" of both benefits and potential risks associated with innovation. The report highlighted the ambitions by nations around the world in their experiments with central bank digital currencies (CBDC) as a way to "enhance the global standing of their own currencies and enable faster payments."
Wrapped bitcoin, the bitcoin-backed token on Ethereum now worth over $2 billion, has seen an increase in burns (or "unwrappings") by some of its largest users as the Ethereum-based decentralized finance sector continues to cool. BitGo clients including Three Arrows Capital and Alameda Research are exchanging an increasing amount of their tokenized bitcoins minted earlier this year for real bitcoins as the bullish cryptocurrency market continues to center on bitcoin (BTC, -1.30%) and Ethereum's decentralized finance takes a back seat for now. In the months following DeFi's red-hot summer when bitcoins were wrapped faster than they were mined, the sector has cooled significantly.
A sharp drop in OKEx's trading volume and stablecoin reserves – tether in particular – may reveal an ongoing exodus of its users after the popular crypto derivatives exchange unexpectedly halted all crypto withdrawal activities for about five weeks. Data from analytics service CryptoQuant shows that the amount of tether held in OKEx wallets has dropped to 6.69 million from 275.0 million between Nov. 25 and Dec. 1, down 97.6% in less than a week. At the same time, total daily trading volume on OKEx has declined significantly during the same time period – down approximately 67.7% from Nov. 25, according to data compiled by CoinDesk. The volume of tether traded on OKEx plunged 70%.
The creators of stablecoin platform Terra announced the launch of the Mirror Protocol Thursday, a way to mint crypto assets that mimic the value of shares in publicly traded companies like Apple or Tesla. The new protocol will also bring a new liquidity mining opportunity to Terra's Tendermint-based blockchain. Known as mAssets, these tokens will track the price of U.S.-based equities in the real stock market, using an oracle system that's able to check prices every six minutes. "The retail investor is at the center of this growing demand for U.S. equities and global equity derivatives. The stock market is no longer the exclusive purview of Wall Street's suits, whether in New York, London or Tokyo," Arrington XRP argues in its report.  Introducing Valid Points, a CoinDesk Newsletter CoinDesk is staking 32 ETH in Ethereum's historic upgrade, and research analyst Christine Kim and tech reporter Will Foxley are breaking down Ethereum 2.0 and its sweeping impacts on crypto markets, weekly. Using data direct from CoinDesk's own Eth 2 validator node, Valid Points features original insights about what the future of Ethereum looks like for industry stakeholders and investors.
Learn why CoinDesk staked 32 ETH in the new blockchain protocol and follow our journey and insights by subscribing to Valid Points here.
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Quick bites
 Looking Back, Moving Forward: Crypto's Most Influential in 2020 Each year since 2014, CoinDesk has identified the crypto community's "most influential" members. The community needed influencers to spread awareness, build confidence and set precedents for the digital currency industry to reach its full potential.
These evangelists broke through all the white noise and ushered in a new wave of enthusiasts into the space. To recognize their contributions, CoinDesk launched its "Most Influential" franchise to highlight individuals who moved the needle.
Over two days, Dec. 7-8, a special CoinDesk Live series looks back to the first list and takes stock of the industry's progress, and zooms forward to reveal CoinDesks' seventh Most Influential list to recognize the latest pioneers who helped take the industry forward.
Watch CoinDesk Live: Most Influential 2020 on CoinDesk.com, YouTube and Twitter, Dec. 7-8.
Sponsored Content
Circle: Are Central Bank Digital Currencies Already Late to the Party?
At stake Price point! I was reading that CNBC story on the Dutch family that bet it all on bitcoin. In 2017, a small business owner sold all his assets – company, house and accumulated detritus – and moved his family of five into a van. "We stepped into bitcoin because we wanted to change our lives," Didi Taihuttu told CNBC.
That's wild! The media also quoted Taihuttu's price prediction for a $200,000 bitcoin by 2022. He's a man that acts on instinct and knows things in his gut. It's seemingly worked out for him so far. CNBC went on to quote several price predictions from the respected and respectable folk in crypto.
Mike Novogratz, CEO of merchant bank Galaxy Digital, reportedly said bitcoin could reach $60,000 by next year. While a Citibank report geared for institutional clients made the case that one BTC could change hands for $318,000 by December 2021. That's really wild!
Unquoted was Bloomberg's recent, and more modest, prediction that bitcoin could hit $50,000 sometime next year. That's more than double the price of bitcoin's all-time high! And infers a $1 trillion market cap!
A lot of good data gets thrown into price predictions. There's technical analysis of candles and wedges, there are surveys of high-net individuals and comparisons to similar movements in both bitcoin's historical charts as well as analogue assets (want to understand bitcoin today, study gold in the 70s!).
But I wouldn't put much store in them. This time three years ago, computer whiz and self-declared madman John McAfee had such strong convictions that bitcoin would hit $500,000 within three years (this year, incidentally) he would ingest his genitals.
After decades of target prices that were well off their mark, it's reasonable to suggest that most claims on bitcoin's future price are more gut than calculus, more wager than assured. Sometimes it pays off. But understanding that one BTC is always one BTC, you'll never be wrong.
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Price Point! Bitcoin at $50K? $60K? $318K?
A Beginners Guide to Bitcoin
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