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Diversification has always been an integral part of smart risk management.

Three years after its $205 million initial coin offering (ICO), Filecoin has said its live network is about to launch.

• In a post Sunday, the blockchain-based storage provider said the mainnet will launch at block 148,888, currently expected on Oct. 15.
• Designed as a decentralized alternative to Amazon Web Services or Cloudflare, a data retrieval service, Filecoin raised $205 million in a 2017 token sale – the most raised in an ICO at the time.
• Having originally committed itself to a mainnet launch in mid-2019, the project has sustained industry interest with 230 projects and 1,000 developers set to begin work on Filecoin when live.
• More than 400 miners from around the world participated in this month’s “Space Race” testnet phase where network data capacity increased by more than 325+ pebibytes – seven times the entire written works of mankind, in all languages.
• In the coming weeks, the project said it will continue adding storage, optimize operations and undergo final tests, as well as allow community members to prepare their own systems ahead of the launch.
• Approximately 3.5 million native FIL tokens – used to buy and sell storage on the network – will be distributed to Space Race participants.
• As Filecoin has refused to say anything that could sway FIL’s initial price, it’s unknown how much the 3.6 million tokens might be worth in dollar terms.
• According to Filecoin block explorer Filfox, the network had reached a block height of 99,876 at time of writing.

See also: Inside the Craze for Filecoin Crypto Mining in China

EDIT (Sept. 29, 15:30 UTC): A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the amount raised in the ICO as well as the amount of FIL distributed to Space Race participants.

Related Stories

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• EY Releases Enterprise Procurement Solution on Ethereum Blockchain
• $2B Locked: Uniswap Now Bigger Than Entire DeFi Industry Just Two Months Ago
• Bitfinex Launches Tether-Settled Perpetual Contracts Based on European Equities

A company based in St. Vincent and the Grenadines is in hot water with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for allegedly allowing U.S. retail investors to partake in leveraged trading of cryptocurrencies and precious metals.

• The firm, Laino Group Limited (trading as PaxForex), is accused of illegally conducting retail commodity transactions and not having registered as a futures commission merchant (FCM).  
• From around 2018 on, PaxForex is said to have unlawfully traded bitcoin, ether, litecoin, gold, and silver without conducting transactions through a registered contract market, violating the Commodity Exchange Act.
• It is further alleged to have acted as an FCM, with staff and agents soliciting and taking orders for retail commodity transactions, without being registered as such with the CFTC.
•  “This action shows the CFTC’s continued commitment to ensuring that entities offering leveraged, retail transactions within our jurisdiction – including those involving digital assets – register with the CFTC,” according to James McDonald, CFTC Division of Enforcement Director . 
• The commission is seeking disgorgement of “ill-gotten gains,” penalties and restitution, as well as permanent registration and trading bans.
• A civil enforcement action was filed Monday at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

Also read: OCC’s First Issued Guidance for Stablecoins Brings More Questions

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Ebang has said the knock-on effects of the coronavirus outbreak caused revenue to fall by half in the first six months of 2020.

• Total net revenue for the Nasdaq-listed mining equipment manufacturer slumped to $11 million in H1 2020, down 50.6% from $22.35 million made in the same period the year before, per an SEC filing last week.
• In a statement, Ebang chairman and CEO Dong Hu linked the drop in revenue to the pandemic, which had led chip suppliers to reduce capacity and caused a chronic shortage of raw materials that severely disrupted Ebang’s business.
• By way of a silver lining, though, while net revenue was far below last year, Ebang saved more than $10 million in operating expenses and losses in H1 2020.
• As per the unaudited financial results, comprehensive net loss fell from nearly $17.6 million in the first half of 2019 to just under $7.3 million in H1 2020
• Hu said the disruption caused by the pandemic meant the Chinese-based company had optimized its revenue structure and started to explore new revenue streams.
• Earlier this year, Ebang announced plans to launch its own offshore crypto exchange, something CFO Chen Lei said could double total revenue by 2022.
• Ebang took $300 million in revenue in 2018, the tail-end of the initial coin offering (ICO) boom.
• Despite the H1 drop in revenue, the market seems to have responded well to Ebang’s efforts to diversify: shares were up 2.5% to $9.85 at time of writing, close to double the $5 value at its Nasdaq debut in late June.

See also: Pandemic Will Speed Bitcoin Adoption, Says DBS Bank Economist

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• EY Releases Enterprise Procurement Solution on Ethereum Blockchain
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• Bitfinex Launches Tether-Settled Perpetual Contracts Based on European Equities
• The Bahamas Reveal Details, October Date of Landmark Central Bank Digital Currency Debut

Why is the marriage of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized finance (DeFi) happening now? It’s debatable but you can make an argument that it comes back to DeFi’s favorite robo-advisor for yield: Yearn.Finance.

Lately, everything in DeFi seems to link back to Yearn.Finance in some way.

The excitement in DeFi has shifted to the NFT market, with something like a Weird DeFi moment getting ever weirder, as groups form up to mint rare digital artifacts to be attained in unique ways and financialize their ownership, thanks in part to picks-and-shovels work undertaken by the yeomen of online collectibles.

Related: First Mover: Bitcoin Low Exchange Balance Looks Bullish but Chart Looks Bearish as $11K Nears

The plethora of strange new experiments has been led in particular by the token MEME, inspired by a tweet from ConsenSys staffer Jordan Lyall. To explain MEME, though, a lot of other developments need to be visited first.

NFT basics

Reminder: NFTs are one-of-a-kind tokens made possible by Ethereum’s ERC-721 standard. Pioneered by CryptoPunks, then standardized and popularized by CryptoKitties, crypto collectibles started much like trading cards (trading cards that could make babies, at least in CryptoKitties’ case), but they were always envisioned to have more potential than baseball cards.

Ever since Napster, ownership and rights of digitally distributed intellectual property has been a problem.

“It’s hard to own that media, but you can do it pretty cleanly using tokens,” Priyanka Desai, VP of operations at Ethereum startup OpenLaw, told CoinDesk in a phone call.

Related: $2B Locked: Uniswap Now Bigger Than Entire DeFi Industry Just Two Months Ago

Desai’s been talking to NFT pioneers lately as she helps to put together a new decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Flamingo whose investors are focused on NFTs.

Read more: NFTs Are Here. But Where Are They Headed?

NFTs have not captivated investor attention until quite recently, because lending, borrowing and risk management – what we now call DeFi – has taken up all Ethereum’s oxygen in 2020. So Ethereans largely lost interest in NFTs there for a while – and who could blame them? You could buy them and sell them, and sometimes games would come together, but they seldom held players’ attention for very long. There were more dynamic markets to game; art’s fine but money is money.

Even when there had been buzz, some projects would rise up only to fade away, revealing a weakness in the NFT specification. CryptoStrikers, for example, a sports memorabilia project launched during the World Cup is long gone (soccer-focused Sorare has emerged in its wake).

Also gone: Panda Earth and CryptoJingles and more, and with them the various artworks that made NFTs more than just a weird string of numbers in an Ethereum wallet (these days, teams are using perpetual data storage solution Arweave to address the issue of NFT impermanence).

The NFT–yield farming crossover event

There has been years of fertilizer but somehow the excitement engendered this summer by yield farming has come to NFTs this fall, and so the harvest is ready.

And here’s how Yearn could have helped: When the DeFi gateway created Y.Insure, a way to do KYC-free insurance on any crypto asset, it used NFTs to represent the policy with insurers. 

“Insurance policies have unique properties, so ERC-20 didn’t make sense since it needed to include covered address+amount+duration,” Yearn’s lead developer, Andre Cronje, told CoinDesk via Telegram. (ERC-20 is the token standard that launched a thousand coins.)

So, once reminded of ERC-721’s existence by DeFi’s top Chad, the industry ran with it. 

Read more: Yearn, YAM and the Rise of Crypto’s ‘Weird DeFi’ Moment

Was it exactly a causal relationship? Who knows. The larger point of NFT and DeFi coming together is more about a growing mood than a clear chain of events. Weird DeFi showed how open finance could become more elfin; elves need toys; NFTs were right there.

Blockade Games is a company looking for every way it can to push the properties of tokenized game assets to their limit. 

“People want to play,” Blockade CEO Marguerite deCourcelle told CoinDesk in a phone call. Also known as “Coin Artist,” she just issued her own NFT, as well. 

“Crypto communities have always been trying to be games,” she said.

The financialization of NFTs

A lot of people in crypto are rich and that makes all the best stuff too expensive for the cryptoletariat.

As much as people like owning expensive stuff in crypto, they like owning stuff they can sell whenever they want even more (call it a liquidity fetish). NFTs had managed to be expensive but they had not managed to be liquid, not until DeFi-thinking intervened.

“The general trend is, ‘OK, NFTs are cool but it’s a relatively illiquid asset class compared to tokens,'” said CoinFund’s Jake Brukhman.

Brukhman has always been bullish on NFTs, never losing that focus even as other investors fully turned their attention elsewhere.

“NFTs are actually a financial asset class and they need financial infrastructure,” Brukhman said.

Read more: Gemini’s Nifty Gateway Bets on Celebs to Drive Interest in Crypto Collectibles

The stranger products are emergent phenomena of that financialization. Brukhman gave the example of Ark Gallery, which is a DAO for CryptoPunks. The punks were made pre-ERC-721 and have become quite valuable as early, cool and rare (there are only 10,000 such punks, each completely distinct). Ark allows people to crowdfund a punk (owning a fraction of the token) and then voting on whether or not to sell it if there’s an offer.

If there is a successful offer, everyone gets a proportionate share of the payment, based on how much they own. This has made CryptoPunks trade at ever-higher prices, allowing more people to feel like they had a piece of one. It’s clear that the spikes in volume have gone much higher this year when viewed on NFT data site NonFungible.com.

NIFTEX has taken that even further. Launched early this year with funding from Digital Currency Group (CoinDesk’s parent company), NIFTEX started off creating indices for NFTs, such as digital real estate or digital cards. But the real innovation kicked off when the firm fractionalized expensive NFTs into what it calls shards (really, just ERC-20 tokens – fungible slivers of previously singular digital assets).

The shard system works somewhat like what Ark Gallery does, except only someone who holds one of the ERC-20 tokens that represents partial ownership of an item can make an offer. The offer automatically succeeds if it fails to receive enough objections in two weeks, with a clever strategy built in to punish low-ball bids.

NIFTEX did its first fractionalization in May and, like Ark, the firm is seeing a lot more liquidity. Shard holders own a fractionalized, extremely rare Axie Infinity card called Almace that saw over 1,000 ETH transacted in its first week after sharding. Joel Hubert, one of the two co-founders, estimated its liquidity all year would have been more like 300 or 400 ETH in a few trades, without sharding.

On NonFungible, Axie Infinity shows appreciably more dollars getting transacted even if the volumes are only bumped up slightly. 

Read more: $100K in Early Prizes Looks to Lure the NFT-Curious to Decentraland

“I like where we’re at because Ethereum is all about experimentation,” Hubert said.

The larger point to all of this is that content is finding a path to fair remuneration on the internet. 

Added Flamingo’s Desai, “When you start talking about how content creators are paid, that’s where DeFi comes in; and when you start talking about property of creators, that’s all NFTs.” 

NFT mining

For her personal NFT, deCourcelle used NIFTEX to sell off a portion of her shards, into tokens called COIN. She said she wants people to see it as “play money.”

“First thing we’re doing is the most basic sort of farm,” she said, driving home the intended playfulness. COIN holders who add to the Uniswap pool can stake their liquidity provider (LP) tokens and earn another token, CRED, which will offer advantages in Blockade’s games, as well as additional COIN.

Rewarding liquidity with a fresh new token is a particular kind of yield farming: liquidity mining.

Of course, that’s not the only or first mining in the digital property space, and mining is what this whole story is about: DeFi and NFTs merging to create weird new forms of yield that get the imaginations of investors and BUIDLers firing.

The pioneer in the NFT mining industry was arguably Rarible, a marketplace and minter. It growth-hacked its user base by airdropping RARI tokens to anyone that had transacted in a respectable amount of NFTs. It was a governance token that it used to turn its marketplace into a DAO.

Rarible further rewarded users for transactions on the platform, which has generated a substantial amount of questionable volume, but also has helped persuade creators that the additional benefit to transacting there makes it an advantageous place to list work, Brukhman said.

Read more: The Fast-Growing NFT Market Is Problematic Yet Promising

So now NFT fans have fractional ownership, auctions, sales platforms: all the things that seem like normal, natural pieces of the puzzle for setting up a dynamic market.

But the buzz stems from the fact that stranger things are getting built.

Bold experiments

First off, there’s Aavegotchi, a small startup with funding from the money market Aave, among others. Aavegotchi has a clever variable rarity structure described well in a recent report by Delphi Digital.

In short, Aavegotchis are little playable avatars that can be used in the game world the company is building, both as protocol governance and to play actual games. There’s a lot of ways they can change and be upgraded (called “rarity farming”), but if too many players “improve” their character in the same way, it can effectively lose rarity.

Like in the DeFi game Based.Money, it’s all about guessing how other players will move.

What’s really interesting about Aavegotchi, however, is this: Every character represents a real stake on Aave. The owner can liquidate the stake at any time, but their Aavegotchi will disappear. So it’s a test to see what happens to playability when characters have real value above and beyond their gaming value.

Read more: Aave Becomes Second DeFi Project to Overtake MakerDAO for Most Crypto Deposited

For Blockade CEO deCourcelle, this linkage makes complete sense; DeFi will always look like a shell game until it’s financing things of real value, stuff someone would just buy because they want it. 

Are people going to do that with their houses or will they do it maybe with fun digital stuff first?

“All these DeFi projects are looking for the core economic leap for all of these microeconomies,” she argued. “As a game developer, you have already designed an economic loop that’s valuable.”

Don’t Buy $MEME

But the real experiment is MEME.

As noted, MEME started with a jest from Lyall. One of MEME’s insiders (a so-called “Citadel” member) is Jackson (who sticks to one name and is also on the team making the payments platform Flexa).

He made a bold case for MEME to CoinDesk in a phone call, saying:

“The project is on a roll where the whole NFT/DEFI narrative is kind of tied to MEME and kind of leading the pack.”

Folks in Lyall’s cohort got interested in his humorous nudge, a Telegram group formed and a stranger spun up the code to make the MEME token.

“It was like: What can we build?” Jackson said.

He describes himself as someone who typically sticks to projects that make sense to him, where the business case is easy to see. MEME has felt completely different, he said. It’s been more like a vibe and a crew first, with purpose coming later.

This is much like what DeFi Pulse’s Scott Lewis argued about the vegetable tokens of distant early September, saying that the future may be defined by groups first galvanized by an image, only to decide what to do together later.

“I, daily, deeply contemplate what I’m learning from this,” Jackson said of MEME.

For now, Lyall told CoinDesk over Telegram, MEME is just paying cool artists (largely out of pocket) to make compelling NFTs and giving people a way to buy them – by locking up MEME and earning points in the MEME system (they aren’t really tokens because they aren’t tradeable so far).

If people like the images locked onto MEME’s NFTs, they might want to figure out how to own them. “Relative to the other hot projects in DeFi, we’re a lot more accessible,” Jackson said.

That’s something everyone we spoke with pointed out: People get content, whether it’s stuff for video games, art, music or literature. People have made NFTs of a lot of weird stuff.

Read more: Non-Believable Tokens: The 7 Strangest Crypto Collectibles Explained

“This is the media art bent to what’s happening in DeFi,” Desai said.

MEME is doing something that has yet to be seen in the crypto space: testing a product first, then sorting out the business plan later if they see traction. It’s an old script in Silicon Valley, but in crypto, everything credible has largely needed to make sense as a business upfront, the only question being whether people would come.

And MEME won’t be the last. A different cohort of crypto luminaries tried to imitate MEME with FEW but that ended in a shillacious disaster. ROPE still lingers out there, and it’s not clear what that is, besides leaning more on a 4chan aesthetic.

And, off in the background, there is SHROOM, which has been perhaps the least explicative. Its sole blog post mentions a decentralized exchange or DEX, though, which could be a hint. A market with puzzles wired in could be the trick, and that could be what NFTs meeting DeFi unlocks.

“NFTs, just as art? The value proposition is a little. But once you have a game? The value is inherent to the game,” deCourcelle said. 

Related Stories

• Bitcoin Balances on Exchanges at 2-Year Low and That May Be a Bullish Sign
• Degens for Hire: Based.Money Is Launching Moonbase, a Place for DeFi Projects to Find Community

There’s a degree of transparency in cryptocurrencies that doesn’t exist in traditional markets like stocks and bonds: Thanks to data that’s easily extracted from blockchains, everyone can see everyone else moving their money around. 

That means traders can keep an eye on exchange wallets to gauge whether investors and crypto miners are getting their bitcoin into position for a possible sale — or taking balances down from the exchanges in anticipation of holding for the longer term.

The latter might be what’s happening now, CoinDesk’s Muyao Shen reported Monday. Total balances of bitcoin on major exchanges has hit its lowest levels since November 2018. It could be an indication of bullishness among bitcoin traders.

Related: The Inevitable Marriage of Yield Farming and NFTs, Explained

“There’s no reason to sell now,” Mike Alfred, CEO of Digital Assets Data, told Shen in a phone interview. “Why would you be selling when you’re at the beginning of a wave of potential corporate treasuries and institutional investors coming in?”

Another interpretation, according to Arcane Research, is that traders are taking their bitcoin off exchanges to deploy them in the decentralized finance sector, known as DeFi. Juicy returns can be obtained from tokenizing crypto assets and depositing them as collateral in semi-automated, blockchain-based trading and lending platforms.

As CoinDesk reported earlier this week, tokenized bitcoin has become one of the largest assets on DeFi. Currently, there are more than 108,000 BTC worth some $1.1 billion minted from seven issuers, according to Dune Analytics.

That might be another bullish sign. 

Related: Bitcoin Has Been Less Volatile Than Tesla Stock for Months

“Bitcoin maximalists would decry the use of bitcoin on Ethereum, arguing that it isn’t ‘real’ bitcoin,” David Derhy, an analyst for the cryptocurrency trading platform eToro, wrote Monday in an email. “I view this development as positive for the sector, as it highlights an evolution within the industry.”

Whatever the case, it’s all there to see.

Read More: Bitcoin Balances on Exchanges at 2-Year Low and That May Be a Bullish Sign

Bitcoin Watch

Bitcoin’s upward momentum is again running out of steam near the psychological resistance of $11,000.

The cryptocurrency clocked highs near $10,950 early Monday and is currently trading near $10,850.

The cryptocurrency’s weekly chart MACD histogram, an indicator used to identify trend changes and trend strength, has dipped below zero for the first time since March, indicating a bearish shift in the broader trend.

Similarly, the 5- and 10-week averages have produced a bearish crossover. As such, bitcoin could face chart-driven selling pressure. 

On the higher side, $11,000 is the level to beat for the bulls.

– Omkar Godbole

Token Watch

Bitcoin (BTC): Market cap could swell to $1-5T in next 5-10 years, from about $200B now, as largest cryptocurrency becomes settlement system for banks and businesses while taking 10% share of physical gold market, Coin Metrics says in report with ARK Invest. 

Bitcoin: (BTC): Largest cryptocurrency breaks record for longest streak of days above $10K, now at 63 days.

Ether (ETH): On-chain data suggests Ether investors bought September dip. 

Uniswap (UNI): Uniswap is now bigger than the entire decentralized finance space just two months ago, as trading protocol becomes first to pass $2B milestone.

Uniswap (UNI), Balancer (BAL), Curve (CRV): Gemini lists DeFi tokens following Binance, Huobi and OKEx in succumbing to FOMO. 

Tether (USDT): Bitfinex, the cryptocurrency exchange affiliated with the dollar-linked USDT stablecoins, has launched perpetual contracts tracking European equity market indexes, settled in USDT.   

What’s Hot

More than $150M drained in hack on Singaporean cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin (CoinDesk) 

Bahamas sets Oct. 20 as date for “sand dollar” token, perhaps the world’s first retail central-bank digital currency (CoinDesk)

Trading volumes for Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) and other crypto exchange-trading products shrink as prices fall (CoinDesk)

Bitcoin mining-rig-maker MicroBT expands into offshore manufacturing, reportedly to help U.S. buyers dodge tariffs on Chinese imports; inks deal with Foundry Digital, a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which also owns CoinDesk (CoinDesk)

OKEx CEO Jay Hao says “fair launch” distributions are “fundamentally flawed” because tokens end up “in the hands of retail investors,” leading to “superlatively high fluctuations,” or else it all becomes “a playground for whales” (OKEx via LinkedIn)

Coinbase CEO Armstrong says cryptocurrency exchange won’t engage in “social activism” or “debate causes or political candidates internally” because it’s a “distraction” and creates “internal division” (Brian Armstrong/Medium)

Bitwise bitcoin fund doubles to $9M as investor fears grow over runaway inflation

Analogs The latest on the economy and traditional finance

Just as Federal Reserve-fueled stocks rally fades, giant public pension systems decide maybe they’re missing out and should allocate more money into equities (WSJ) 

New York Fed says moral hazard from official coronavirus aid to be less than in 2008 because business losses weren’t necessarily due to poor risk management, just “bad luck” (NY Fed)

Accenture, Darden Restaurants, Foot Locker among companies reinstating dividends or stock buybacks after cutting jobs (CNBC)

Deutsche Bank revising remote-working policies in effort to permanently reduce office space (Bloomberg)

Coronavirus fears and US presidential elections caused mixed results for Asian stocks during the weekly open (SCMP)

Bank of England governor won’t say no to negative interest rates; it’s “in the tool bag” (FT)

Tweet of the Day Related Stories

• Bitwise Bitcoin Fund Doubles to $9M as Investor Fears Grow Over Runaway Inflation
• EY Releases Enterprise Procurement Solution on Ethereum Blockchain

Bitcoin (BTC) is often criticized for being over volatile, but it’s been a sea of calm compared with Tesla stock in recent months.

• Tesla (TSLA) has been seeing bigger daily percentage moves since the end of June, according to 30-day realized volatility data.
• Further, the volatility gulf between the two assets has been widening in recent weeks.
• Bitcoin witnessed a below-1.25% daily move in 14 out of the last 27 days, according to data from TradingView – almost 52% of the time.
• However, Tesla only achieved sub-1.25% moves 6% of the time over the same period, data source Skew tweeted early Monday.

• “People always assume bitcoin is incredibly volatile, but it’s not more volatile than many popular tech stocks,” Skew co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Goh told CoinDesk.
• Looking at the price charts, both bitcoin and Tesla have witnessed two-way business this month and formed contracting triangles (narrowing price ranges), as shown below.
• However, Tesla has seen a month-to-date price decline of 18% – far worse than bitcoin’s 6% drop.

• Bitcoin’s 30-day historical volatility, which measures the price action realized in the past 30 days, has been flatlined near 55% (annualized) since Sept. 3.
• Further, its 30-day implied volatility – that is, investors’ expectations of how volatile price will be over the next four weeks – has declined to 44%, the lowest level in nearly two years.
• In the past, big moves have been preceded by an implied volatility reading of less than 50%.
• At press time, the cryptocurrency is currently trading at $10,911, representing an over 2% gain on the day.
• The weekly chart MACD histogram, an indicator used to identify trend changes and trend strength, has crossed bearish below zero.
• As such, the cryptocurrency may face some chart-driven selling pressure in the short term.

Also read: The Real Story Behind Tesla’s Crazy Rally

Related Stories

• First Mover: Bitcoin Low Exchange Balance Looks Bullish but Chart Looks Bearish as $11K Nears
• Bitwise Bitcoin Fund Doubles to $9M as Investor Fears Grow Over Runaway Inflation
• Bitcoin Balances on Exchanges at 2-Year Low and That May Be a Bullish Sign
• Market Wrap: Bitcoin Sticks to $10.7K; DeFi Site dForce Doubles TVL in 24 Hours

Accredited investors worried about out-of-control inflation have poured millions into Bitwise’s bitcoin fund as a means to preserve the value of their portfolios.

An amended filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week showed the asset manager had raised, in total, just under $8.9 million for its Bitcoin Fund, which provides accredited U.S. investors with exposure to bitcoin through a traditional product.

This marks the single-largest increase in assets raised in the fund’s two-year history. A filing from 2019 shows the Bitcoin Fund had attracted $4.1 million in investment, meaning the fund has more than doubled in size in the past year.

Related: Bitcoin Has Been Less Volatile Than Tesla Stock for Months

While bitcoin has come on in leaps and bounds in its acceptance among the traditional investment community, Bitwise’s head of research, Matthew Hougan, told CoinDesk the more immediate cause for the surge in the fund’s size came from concerns over runaway inflation.

“With the unprecedented expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet, the radical amounts of fiscal stimulus, and the Fed’s new and significantly more dovish inflation policy, [Bitwise clients] are looking for a hedge,” he said in an email.

“Bitcoin is the most efficient hedge for inflation that exists in today’s market,” he added.

See also: First Mover: As Central Banks Print $1.4B an Hour, Bitcoiners Bet on Federal Reserve ‘Capture’

Related: Bitcoin Balances on Exchanges at 2-Year Low and That May Be a Bullish Sign

Fiscal stimulus has become a favored tool for governments and central banks as they battle to keep economic activity alive in the wake of the pandemic. The Federal Reserve initially pumped more than $2.8 trillion into the economy and dropped interest to rock-bottom rates.

As Congress debates another $2.4 trillion stimulus package in the run-up to the November elections, Fed chair Jay Powell said this month that the central bank was unlikely to tighten monetary policy for at least three years and will even tolerate inflation above the 2% target in order to make up for the drop in consumer prices during the peak of the pandemic.

Hougan said that many of Bitwise’s clients were financial advisors who serve wealthy investors, themselves wary about the debilitating effects inflation can have on their portfolios. Many investors see Bitcoin’s fixed supply of 21 million as a means to preserve value in the event loose monetary policy leads to runaway inflation.

Indeed, other fund managers have experienced similar surges in demand from the same stratum of well-heeled investors. In the summer, $250 million found its way into three funds run by the New York Digital Investments Group (NYDIG); Pantera Capital told the SEC in August it had received nearly $165 million in placements from qualified investors – those worth at least $5 million.

Also read: Pantera Capital Crypto Funds Report 100% Returns Amid DeFi Craze

Related Stories

• Market Wrap: Bitcoin Sticks to $10.7K; DeFi Site dForce Doubles TVL in 24 Hours
• Voyager CEO Says Revenue Growth Accelerates 8-Fold as DeFi Trading Surges

One of the world’s largest consultancy firms has released a new Ethereum-based solution aimed to streamline enterprise resource planning (ERP).

• In a press statement issued Sunday, EY (or Ernst & Young) said its OpsChain Network Procurement platform is designed to enable companies to run private end-to-end procurement activities.
• The platform utilizes open-source software including the Microsoft-backed Baseline Protocol and operates on the public Ethereum blockchain.
• The product is designed to support enterprise networks, allowing buyers and sellers to operate as networks, while automatically tracking volumes and spend, and utilizing agreed terms and pricing.
• It’s also aimed to move business processes outside of any one ERP system to a shared blockchain-based smart contract, according to the consultancy firm.
• EY global blockchain lead Paul Brody said putting the process on a blockchain means not having to persuade a company to join a “costly, closed proprietary network.”
• The company also said that, based on its experience with other procurement systems, switching to a blockchain-based solution has cut down ERP cycle times by more than 90% and reduced costs by up to 40%.
• Companies can now plug into EY’s beta platform and enable direct integration with their own ERP systems via APIs, EY said.

See also: Wirecard Fallout: Auditor EY Accused of Not Flagging $2.1B Black Hole Sooner

Related Stories

• $2B Locked: Uniswap Now Bigger Than Entire DeFi Industry Just Two Months Ago
• Bitfinex Launches Tether-Settled Perpetual Contracts Based on European Equities
• The Bahamas Reveal Details, October Date of Landmark Central Bank Digital Currency Debut
• Degens for Hire: Based.Money Is Launching Moonbase, a Place for DeFi Projects to Find Community

Uniswap is now bigger than the entire decentralized finance space just two months ago, as the trading protocol becomes the first to pass the $2 billion milestone.

• Uniswap clocked the record figure just after midnight (UTC) Monday and currently has $2.06 billion worth of crypto assets locked in, according to crypto rankings website DeFi Pulse.
• Testament to its neck-breaking growth, there’s now more value just in Uniswap than there was in the entire DeFi space on July 9.
• As of press time, there’s now more than $11 billion in total value locked (TVL) in DeFi, with Uniswap making up approximately 18% of that.
• Based on Ethereum, Uniswap utilizes an automated market-making system leveraging liquidity pools so users can exchange or “swap” between ether (ETH) and any ERC-20 token.
• Holders are incentivized to deposit tokens in these liquidity pools with interest and a cut of the swap fee – the total balance in these pools together make up Uniswap’s $2 billion TVL.
• Monday’s news shows just how much Uniswap’s fortunes have changed in the past few weeks.
• Back in early September, $830 million worth of vital liquidity moved to rival protocol SushiSwap, leading to Uniswap’s TVL to plunge to just $400 million by September 10.
• A week later, in order to coax users back, Uniswap launched its own native UNI token and airdropped over $500 million to wallet addresses who had been using the protocol since before September.
• UNI token has led users to quickly snap back to Uniswap and its TVL was approximately $1.8 billion just days after the token launched.
• The platform plans to issue and distribute 4 billion UNI tokens to the community over the next four years.
• The next biggest DeFi project, peer-to-peer lending platform Maker, trails slightly behind Uniswap at $1.96 billion TVL, according to DeFi Pulse.

See also: Stablecoins Hit $20B Milestone, a Nearly 300% Year-to-Date Surge

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Cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex has launched tether (USDT)-settled perpetual contracts that track two European equity market indices.

• Perpetual contracts on Europe 50 (EUROPE50IXF0: USTF0) and Germany 30 (GERMANY30IXF0: USTF0) will go live at 09:00 UTC on Monday, the firm said in a press release.
• Each contract offers up to 100x leverage and will be settled in stablecoin tether (USDT).
• A perpetual contract is similar to a traditional futures contract, but has no expiry and mimics a margin-based spot market.
• The STOXX Europe 50 includes 50 stocks from 18 European countries and provides a blue-chip representation of supersector leaders in the region.
• Meanwhile, the German 30 or DAX 30 is a stock index that represents 30 of the largest and most liquid German companies that trade on the Frankfurt Exchange.
• “This is the first time that an exchange from the digital asset space has launched a product that bridges the gap with traditional stock markets, representing a significant milestone in the evolution of crypto as an established asset class,” said Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex Derivatives.
• Using tether – a so-called stablecoin designed to maintain a value of per token – will facilitate settlement in cross-asset class trading strategies, hedging and risk management, Ardoino added.
• The perpetual contracts will be open for trading 24/7, unlike equity exchanges which are open for business for a limited number of hours, five days a week.
• As such, traditional market investors may turn to Bitfinex’s perpetual swaps on data- or event-heavy weekends for price discovery ahead of Monday’s opening bell.
• “Over the weekend, we may reasonably expect lower volumes than on weekdays in the normal course of a business unless there are significant economic developments over the weekend, such as a central bank policy shift, etc,” Bitfinex told CoinDesk in an email.
• The exchange will aim to ensure price stability by putting a +/-5% cap on the final mark price from 4:30 PM UTC until 8:00 AM UTC on the following day.

Also read: Bitfinex Invests in Derivatives Exchange Built With Bitcoin’s Lightning Network

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The balance of bitcoin on major exchanges has hit its lowest levels since November 2018. Yet unlike that time, when bitcoin was in the depths of the crypto winter, some see this current spate of low bitcoin balances on exchanges as a sign that a new generation of investors is putting its money in it for the long term.

The last time bitcoin balances on exchanges were at this low a point was in November 2018, according to data from Glassnode. A hard fork on Bitcoin Cash that month may have also caused the declining bitcoin balances on exchanges since some owners were moving their bitcoins to private wallets in order to claim the new tokens from the fork. Bitcoin then continued its bearish trend into the beginning of 2019, before it recovered in April of that year.

Long-term holders as a possible reason

Low bitcoin balances on centralized exchanges do not necessarily imply a bearish market trend. In fact, it could reflect a bullish view from bitcoin holders, as they move to longer-term holding strategies, such as cold wallets, Glassnode tweeted back on April 14.

Related: Over $150M Drained in KuCoin Crypto Exchange Hack

That may be the case with this most recent drop in balances, according to Mike Alfred, CEO of Digital Assets Data.

“There’s no reason to sell now when you have large corporate treasuries like MicroStrategy buying the asset now,” Alfred told CoinDesk in a phone interview. “Why would you be selling when you’re at the beginning of a wave of potential corporate treasuries and institutional investors coming in?”

Read more: Bitcoin CEO: MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor Explains His $425M Bet on BTC

South Korea-based data provider CryptoQuant also captured the declining bitcoin balances on exchanges. According to the company’s CEO, Ki Young Ju, this means there are fewer bitcoin holders who could sell their bitcoins on exchanges, avoiding a possible major market correction.

Related: Degens for Hire: Based.Money Is Launching Moonbase, a Place for DeFi Projects to Find Community

However, this decline hasn’t been a straight line down, according to another crypto data source, Chainalysis. Their data show daily net inflow of bitcoin to exchanges logging its biggest single-day increase on Sept 21 since the market crash on March 12. Philip Gradwell, an economist at the company, told CoinDesk that the number indicated “a weakening market.”

“While the overall amount of bitcoin held on exchanges is low, it has increased over the last few days, still small relative to the longer term decline in bitcoin held on exchanges,” Gradwell wrote in an email response to CoinDesk. 

The rise of bitcoin on DeFi 

The latest bitcoin balance drop on exchanges started in mid-March when prices took a steep tumble to a 10-month low, according to Norwegian crypto analysis firm Arcane Research’s weekly report on Sept. 22.

Arcane Research attributed the decreased bitcoin balance on exchanges partly to the white-hot decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, where bitcoin is being tokenized on Ethereum by those lending the cryptocurrency in exchange for yields. 

“In the same period [since March 15, 2020], more than 100,000 BTC have found their way into Ethereum protocols, which could explain some of the outflow,” the research team wrote.

As CoinDesk reported earlier this week, tokenized bitcoin has become one of the largest assets on DeFi. Currently, more than 108,000 BTC worth some $1.1 billion minted from seven issuers, according to Dune Analytics.

An influx of less-experienced investors 

Others, at the same time, say that a new flux of crypto investors since the coronavirus pandemic started could be the reason for the low bitcoin balance on exchanges. These investors, coming mostly from traditional financial markets, may prefer “white glove” services such as a crypto investment fund to manage their crypto portfolios for them, instead of going to crypto exchanges themselves. 

As a result, the bitcoin balance on exchanges has been dropping this year both consistently and significantly.

Digital Assets Data’s Alfred said that crypto fund companies such as Grayscale (a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which also owns CoinDesk) are buying a large amount of bitcoin, as both high-net-worth individuals and institutions are putting new capitals into the crypto market. For example, at the start of Q3, Grayscale had $4.1 billion in assets under management (AUM). As of Sept. 23, its AUM was $5.5 billion. 

Traditional investors may be concerned with easy monetary policies of the Federal Reserve, other central banks and governments around the world. But unlike the old generation of crypto investors, who were often technologically sophisticated  early adopters, new crypto investors are less familiar with how crypto assets work and therefore less comfortable with holding and managing bitcoins themselves, according to Alfred. They thus turn over their investment capital to more experienced firms. 

“These are people that don’t know much about bitcoin,” Alfred said. “They just know that they want to own something (in crypto) and they don’t want to do it themselves.”

This sentiment is echoed by Babel Finance, a Hong Kong-based crypto lender. In a WeChat conversation with CoinDesk, Simons Chen, executive director of investment and trading of the company, said that bitcoin balances on crypto exchanges have been taken away by both decentralized exchanges and crypto investment funds.

“Institutional investors are withdrawing their bitcoin from exchanges and transferring them elsewhere,” the chat wrote. “So the low bitcoin balance on exchanges is happening not because of any market correction, and as a result, there has not been much pricing pressure.”

Notably, bitcoin’s price – which is known for its volatility – has been becoming less volatile this year. Alfred said it is partly due to more capital flows into the leading cryptocurrency, as well.

“I think volatility has come down pretty dramatically in part because there’s so much traditional capital coming in, which really dampens the volatility,” he said. “You have this very supportive bid coming from all this new money coming in that believes in the long-term fundamental story and is not buying just to sell right away.”

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Bitcoin closed Sunday at $10,793 setting a record of 63 consecutive daily closes above $10,000, according to market data aggregated by Messari.

• The bellwether cryptocurrency’s previous record 62-day streak above $10,000 lasted from Dec. 1, 2017, through Jan. 31, 2018, when bitcoin reached its all-time high of just above $19,900 on Coinbase after soaring nearly 100% in 2 weeks.
• Bitcoin’s latest prolonged period above the major five-digit mark, however, has been relatively quiet, mostly staying in a fairly small range between $10,000 and $12,500.
• According to Coin Metrics, 180-day returns volatility for the leading cryptocurrency has plummeted 41% so far in September.

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Over $150 million of an Asian cryptocurrency exchange’s funds have been compromised in a security breach.

The Singapore-headquartered digital asset exchange Kucoin said in a statement that it detected large withdrawals of bitcoin and ethereum tokens to an unknown wallet beginning at 19:05 UTC time on Friday. 

In a live stream on 4:30 UTC time Saturday, Kucoin CEO Johnny Lyu said that one or more hackers obtained the private keys to the exchange’s hot wallets. Kucoin transferred what was left in them to new hot wallets, abandoned the old ones and froze customer deposits and withdrawals, Lyu said.

Related: Russian Web Censor Tells Binance It’s Been Blacklisted – Three Months Late

Kucoin’s cold wallets were unaffected, Lyu claimed. Cold cryptocurrency wallets are not connected to the Internet and are considered more secure than hot cryptocurrency wallets. 

In an updated statement on its website, KuCoin released a list of BTC, bitcoin SV (BSV), ETH, LTC, XRP, Stellar lumens (XLM), Tron (TRX) and Tether (USDT) wallet addresses where the stolen funds were transferred.

Two Ethereum wallets belonging to KuCoin have sent more than 11,480 ETH, which currently trades at a price of about $350, to the Ethereum wallet address associated with the hack, according to data from blockchain explorer Etherscan.

The Ethereum wallet address has also received over 150 Ethereum-based tokens worth more than $150 million from the two KuCoin Ethereum wallets, Etherscan’s data shows.

Related: Gemini Exchange Launches in UK After Being Awarded EMI License

The other identified wallets have received exactly 14,713 BSV, 26,733 LTC, 18,495,798 XRP and 999,160 USDT, along with over 1,008 BTC, 9,588,383 XLM, and 199,038,936 TRX, according to blockchain explorers Blockchair and Tronscan.

The cryptocurrencies are trading around roughly $10,700 per BTC, $165 per BSV, $45 per LTC, $0.25 per XRP, $0.07 per XLM, $0.02 per TRX and $1 per USDT, as of writing.

Tether and several cryptocurrency exchanges such as Bitfinex have blacklisted the wallet addresses, according to the updated statement.

Over 200 cryptocurrency assets trade on Kucoin with a combined daily average volume of around $100 million, ranking it as one of the busiest trading exchanges, according to the cryptocurrency data site CoinGecko.

The price of Kucoin’s exchange token KCS fell by 14% to $0.86 within an hour on Saturday as news of the security breach spread on social media. 

Stolen user funds will be “covered completely” by Kucoin and its insurance fund, Lyu said.

UPDATE (Sept. 27, 2020, 1:00 UTC): Addresses and balances for cryptocurrency wallets associated with KuCoin’s hack have been added.

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An Asian cryptocurrency exchange’s funds have been compromised in a security breach.

The Singapore-headquartered digital asset exchange KuCoin said in a statement that it detected large withdrawals of bitcoin and ethereum tokens to an unknown wallet beginning at 19:05 UTC time on Friday. 

In a live stream on 4:30 UTC time Saturday, KuCoin CEO Johnny Lyu said that one or more hackers obtained the private keys to the exchange’s hot wallets. Kucoin transferred what was left in them to new hot wallets, abandoned the old ones and froze customer deposits and withdrawals, Lyu said.

Related: Uber’s Former Security Chief Charged With Trying to Conceal Hack Using Bitcoin

KuCoin’s cold wallets were unaffected, Lyu claimed. Cold cryptocurrency wallets are not connected to the Internet and are considered more secure than hot cryptocurrency wallets. 

Lyu did not disclose the amount of cryptocurrency assets that were stolen, but said that KuCoin would release the hacker’s wallet address and a list of stolen funds.

Two ethereum wallets belonging to KuCoin have sent more than 11,000 ETH, which currently trades at a price of about $350, to an unknown wallet address, according to data from blockchain explorer Etherscan.

The unknown wallet address has also received over 150 Ethereum-based tokens worth more than $150 million, the Etherscan address information shows.

Related: Crypto Firm Hacked for $1.4M Admits It Will Struggle to Reimburse Users

Over 200 cryptocurrency assets trade on KuCoin with a combined daily average volume of around $100 million, according to the crypto data site CoinGecko.

The price of KuCoin’s exchange token KCS fell by 14% to $0.86 within an hour on Saturday as news of the security breach spread on social media. 

Kucoin is investigating the hack with international law enforcement and stolen customer money will be “covered completely” by an insurance fund, Lyu said.

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An Asian cryptocurrency exchange’s funds have been compromised in a security breach.

The Singapore-headquartered digital asset exchange KuCoin said in a statement that it detected large withdrawals of bitcoin and ethereum tokens to an unknown wallet beginning at 19:05 UTC time on Friday. 

In a live stream on 4:30 UTC time Saturday, KuCoin CEO Johnny Lyu said that one or more hackers obtained the private keys to the exchange’s hot wallets. Kucoin transferred what was left in them to new hot wallets, abandoned the old ones and froze customer deposits and withdrawals, Lyu said.

Related: Uber’s Former Security Chief Charged With Trying to Conceal Hack Using Bitcoin

KuCoin’s cold wallets were unaffected, Lyu claimed. Cold cryptocurrency wallets are not connected to the Internet and are considered more secure than hot cryptocurrency wallets. 

Lyu did not disclose the amount of cryptocurrency assets that were stolen, but said that KuCoin would release the hacker’s wallet address and a list of stolen funds.

Two ethereum wallets belonging to KuCoin have sent more than 11,000 ETH, which currently trades at a price of about $350, to an unknown wallet address, according to data from blockchain explorer Etherscan.

The unknown wallet address has also received over 150 Ethereum-based tokens worth more than $150 million, the Etherscan address information shows.

Related: Crypto Firm Hacked for $1.4M Admits It Will Struggle to Reimburse Users

Over 200 cryptocurrency assets trade on KuCoin with a combined daily average volume of around $100 million, according to the crypto data site CoinGecko.

The price of KuCoin’s exchange token KCS fell by 14% to $0.86 within an hour on Saturday as news of the security breach spread on social media. 

Kucoin is investigating the hack with international law enforcement and stolen customer money will be “covered completely” by an insurance fund, Lyu said.

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The Bahamas confirmed it will cross the central bank digital currency (CBDC) finish line next month.

• In a late Friday tweet, the Central Bank of the Bahamas announced that on Oct. 20 it will begin the “gradual national release” of its consumer-facing “Sand Dollar” digital currency, perhaps the world’s first retail CBDC.
• Though it was already known that the Bahamas was eyeing a mid-October release, the Friday announcement sets a hard date for the historic event and sheds new light on the rollout.
• In the first phase, private-sector players such as banks and credit unions will ready their systems with know-your-customer (KYC) and other compliance checks across low-value, personal and enterprise wallets.
• Sand Dollar’s second phase, slated for early- through mid-2021, will focus on preparing essential infrastructure services in the government and private sectors, such as utility companies, for the CBDC.
• A growing cadre of financial and payment institutions slated to intersect with Sand Dollar have already invested in building out mobile wallets for their users and have been on-boarded for the rollout accordingly, the central bank said.
• Those wallets will be secured with “multi-factor authentication” safeguards, according to the announcement.
• Users cannot and should not expect to have cash-like anonymity when using the CBDC, the central bank said. Even so, it said Friday that wallets will be encrypted “to ensure confidentiality.”
• Additionally, the central bank said it has prepped the CBDC by subjecting it to a “rigorous cybersecurity assessment” to overcome public fears of paying with a digitally native currency.
• Regulations surrounding the Sand Dollar CBDC are still in the works. The central bank said those “will be crystalized in the public space over the month of October.”

“The intended outcome of Project Sand Dollar is that all residents in The Bahamas would have use of a central bank digital currency, on a modernized technology platform, with an experience and convenience – legally and otherwise – that resembles cash,” the central bank said.

Read more: The Bahamas Edges Closer to Hurricane-Proof Digital Currency

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BASED has a new method for aligning decentralized finance (DeFi) projects with each other. At its core is a smart contract called Moonbase, CoinDesk has learned. 

Based.Money is a project of the Ghouls, a loose consortium of crypto developers, artists, designers and meme makers. Friday night, the outfit will release its newest project since BASED, the rebasing game dropped this summer during the boom of Weird DeFi. 

Based.Money is a game that riffs on Ampleforth’s rebasing mechanic, where it makes a daily readjustment in the supply of BASED tokens, adjusting the amount in everyone’s wallet. It’s a game of optimizing for the right time to get in and get out. 

Related: Voyager CEO Says Revenue Growth Accelerates 8-Fold as DeFi Trading Surges

But Moonbase is a bit more serious. As the project’s pseudonymous proximal leader, Based Money God, told CoinDesk over Jitsi:

“What we’re all about is creating a fair launch movement. An ecosystem of projects that are self-sustaining and don’t require traditional venture capital or institutional investment in order to succeed. We want to create a collaborative space of builders in which we all benefit.

Read more: How DeFi ‘Degens’ Are Gaming Ethereum’s Money Legos

Fair launches are a way to get lots of people involved in a new DeFi project without relying on traditional seed capital. Yearn.Finance is often credited for popularizing the term after announcing a governance token and a way for liquidity providers (LPs) to earn them without setting tokens aside for anyone else, even the creator. 

Related: On-Chain Data Suggests Ether Investors Bought September Dip

“Most of these DeFi projects aren’t inherently decentralized. They are inherently skewed or biased because VCs back them,” Based Money God said. “When these projects raise, the VC allocations have a disproportionate amount of tokens.” 

A new alliance

Moonbase creates a way that new projects can offer tribute to the BASED community such that they have an incentive to back, promote and support the new project for at least a year. It could almost be called community mining. 

“You can see the power of our community because our memes are dope and our messaging is cool,” Based Money God said. “Moonbase, the intent, socially, is trying to help these projects and bootstrap community and aligning themselves to Based.” 

It might also be thought of hiring the Based community, in a way. Some crypto projects hire PR firms; some will hire the memesters of the Moonbase. 

Read more: Yearn, YAM and the Rise of Crypto’s ‘Weird DeFi’ Moment

So how does it work? 

DeFi projects that want to get degenerate will mint a new smart contract called a Rover. Each Rover will be distinct for each project. The core idea of a Rover is that any assets that go in it will go through a yearlong unlocking period (so if 365 DAI went in, the last DAI would unlock at the end of a year).

As the underlying assets get unlocked, they will get swapped for BASED and be sent to the Moonbase, rewarding everyone participating there proportionally.

Basically, Moonbase is another smart contract where anyone can put in BASED and get back mbBASED, which represents a proportional share of BASED in the contract (like Compound’s cTokens).

That means mbBASED holders will want any assets in Rovers to grow in value. However, the alignment is meant to go further. 

A project can put anything they want in a Rover with any logic they want. They could throw 1,000 ETH into a Rover and send the Moonbase a message that just said “Please help,” but that’s not actually how the Ghouls foresee it working. 

Instead, they expect projects will create special liquidity vaults for mbBASED that will have their own formulas for earning liquidity mining rewards, and earnings for that pool wouldn’t go to the depositor but to the Rover. 

Read more: Uniswap’s Distribution Is Built on Something That Can’t Be Forked: Actual Users

So, imagine a decentralized exchange called RDEX that launched this way. It could set up an mbBASED-DAI pool where half the mining rewards (RBT, say?) go to the depositor (for the DAI) and half the rewards go to REDEX Rover. 

“It’s like a tribute to Based God,” Based Money God said. 

By setting it up this way, the project has an incentive to try to really grab the attention of Moonbase depositors, because no rewards go to the Rover if no one deposits. This is why they are called Rovers. 

“The Rover is bringing things back to the moonbase,” Based Money God said.

The Moonbase has an incentive to drive value to RBT, because eventually that RBT will turn into more BASED for the Moonbase.

Finally, anyone can set up a Rover. It’s permissionless. But obviously, there’s a need to get the attention of the Moonbase. 

So, there will be a page on Snapshot where projects can submit what they are doing and the community will vote on one question or another: “Is it BASED?”

The vote has no impact on the smart contract. On a technical level, it does nothing, but it might be the most important step. 

Said Based Money God:

“If you want that social validation, if you want to really take advantage of the social advantages of our community, you need to present to our community. There needs to be a ceremony.”

Watch the Twitter account because Moonbase opens tonight. Actual DeFi projects will launch Rovers over the weekend and the smart contract that makes it easy for others to do the same will follow. 

“We are writing out a manifesto,” Based Money God said. “BASED is whatever the community decides is based.”

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A Nevada woman is facing federal charges for allegedly paying a darkweb hitman $5,000 worth of bitcoin to murder her ex-husband in a case that shares striking parallels with another recent murder-for-hire plot.

• The hit, ordered in spring 2016, did not go through. But 36-year-old Kristy Lynn Felkins was indicted in California federal court Thursday for allegedly paying a phony hitman 12 BTC (at the time worth $5,000) to see that it did.
• Homeland Security agents traced the murder-for-hire bitcoin to a LocalBitcoins account associated with Felkins, who, through a pseudonym, had allegedly discussed mixing her bitcoin with the scammer prior to allegedly paying him, authorities said.
• Chat logs cited in a criminal complaint detail a month-long back-and-forth in which the scammer tries and fails to up-sell the Felkins-linked pseudonym on a more expensive method of killing before ultimately ghosting her, the murder uncommitted.
• Federal agents said their tip came from an unnamed foreign hacker who “scraped” the murder-for-hire site for information, chat logs and bitcoin addresses and then handed it to the Feds “in or about January 2019.”
• The Felkins hacker-tipster generally matches the description and circumstances of another hacker-tipster federal agents cited in a separate but similar darkweb murder-for-hire investigation CoinDesk covered last month.
• In that case, agents said their source was providing information in multiple ongoing investigations but declined to provide his name or the site he had scraped.
• The hacker-tipster is additionally described in this case’s filings as a foreigner convicted outside the U.S. of possessing child pornography. His information has proven “to be reliable,” agents wrote.
• He is working with the U.S. government without any expectation of monetary gain or get-out-of-jail-free cards, according to the Felkins complaint.
• A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not immediately respond to CoinDesk’s request for confirmation that the two hacker-tipster sources are the same.

The charges demonstrate how individuals who view bitcoin as a gateway to criminal dealings – thinking, perhaps, that the crypto provides unparalleled economic anonymity in a digital-first world – can readily wind up in the Fed’s crosshairs when bitcoin’s immutable and highly traceable ledger gives their transactions away.

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Buying volume is pushing bitcoin higher. Meanwhile, DeFi investors continue to seek places to park crypto for steady yield.

• Bitcoin (BTC) is trading around $10,730 as of 20:30 UTC (4:30 p.m. EDT). Gaining 0.50% over the previous 24 hours.
• Bitcoin’s 24-hour range: $10,550-$10,795
• BTC above its 10-day and 50-day moving averages, a bullish signal for market technicians.

Bitcoin’s price was able to cling to $10,700 territory, rebounding from a bit of a dip after the cryptocurrency rallied on Thursday. It was changing hands around $10,730 as of press time Friday 

Read more: Up 5%: Bitcoin Sees Biggest Single-Day Price Gain for 2 Months

Related: Voyager CEO Says Revenue Growth Accelerates 8-Fold as DeFi Trading Surges

Guy Hirsch, managing director and U.S. head for multi-asset broker eToro, points to fundamentals for a bullish bitcoin case.

He cites bitcoin’s mining hashrate and difficulty hitting all-time highs, along with heightened economic uncertainty in the face of rising COVID-19. “$11,000 is the only barrier to a parabolic run towards $12,000 or higher,” Hirsch told CoinDesk.

Neil Van Huis, head of institutional trading at liquidity provider Blockfills, said he is just happy bitcoin has been able to stay over $10,000, which he contends feels is a key price point.

“I think we’ve seen that test of $10,000 hold which keeps me a level-headed bull,” he said. 

Related: New Blockchain Program Aims to Counter Fake Viewer Data, Scam Ads

The last time bitcoin dipped below $10,000 was Sept. 9.

“Below $10,000 makes me worried about a pullback to $9,000,” Van Huis added.

The weekend should be relatively calm for crypto, according to Jason Lau, chief operating officer for cryptocurrency exchange OKCoin.

He pointed to open interest in the futures market as the source of that assessment. “BTC aggregate open interest is still flat despite bitcoin’s overnight price gain – nobody is opening new positions at this price level,” Lau noted.

Another indicator of expected calm is bitcoin swaps funding, which remains in negative or near zero territory – a signal derivatives traders are still hesitant to place bullish bets.

Lau said there would need to be positive funding rates in the derivatives market before another big price pop. 

“Until funding goes positive again, it’s hard to see us going much higher – for me that’s the best indicator of where we are at the moment,” said Lau. “Longs are being paid to open positions, so it confirms that there’s still a lot of hesitation at current price levels.”

Investors hunting for yield plow into dForce

The second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, ether (ETH), was up Thursday, trading around $355 and climbing 2.7% in 24 hours as of 20:30 UTC (4:30 p.m. EDT). 

Read more: Fintech Giant Plaid Has a Hidden Passion for DeFi

DeFi project dForce, a decentralized exchange, has seen its total value locked (TVL) almost double over the past 24 hours, from $58 million Thursday to over $108 million as of press time.

Jean-Marc Bonnefous, managing partner of Tellurian Capital, which invests in the DeFi ecosystem, says some investors should be wary of trendy projects cropping up in the ecosystem. 

“There’s a great pace of innovation, but in some cases, project releases are not even a minimum viable product,” he said. “So the chances for breaking are pretty high which implies a huge risk premium and high volatility for the tokens as we have seen over the last few weeks.” 

It’s possible, then, that crypto traders like dForce for parking assets while waiting for more exciting opportunities. According to the project’s website, dForce users are currently getting a 7% annual yield on the dai (DAI) stablecoin.

Other markets

Digital assets on the CoinDesk 20 are mostly green Friday. Notable winners as of 20:30 UTC (4:30 p.m. EDT):

• chainlink (LINK) + 10.6%
• stellar (XLM) + 7.1%
• 0x (ZRX) + 6%

Notable losers as of 20:00 UTC (4:30 p.m. EDT):

• ethereum classic (ETC) – 1.2%
• bitcoin sv (BSV) – 0.61%

Read more: OneCoin Investors Allege BNY Mellon Aided $4B Fraud

Equities:

• Asia’s Nikkei 225 ended the day up 0.51% on hopes fresh coronavirus-related stimulus from the U.S. will provide a boost to the global economy.
• Europe’s FTSE 100 closed in the green 0.34% as investors weighed the impact of rising COVID cases on the continent.
• In the U.S., the S&P 500 gained 1.8% as tech stocks led the index higher, including Apple up 3.7% and Microsoft in the green 2.8%.

Commodities:

• Oil was down 0.22%. Price per barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude: $40.05.
• Gold was in the red 0.24% and at $1,862 as of press time.

Treasurys:

• U.S. Treasury bond yields all fell Friday. Yields, which move in the opposite direction as price, were down most on the 2-year, dipping to 0.129 and in the red 8.3%.

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