10th December 2023 > > Lugano & North Korea.

tl;dr

Lugano reinforces Switzerland’s reputation for being crypto-friendly. Crypto sanctions on malicious actors are good for all of us.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Perpetual futures funding rates remain elevated, which might be sustainable for the next month with the 10th of January being a much-touted date for the SEC to declare approval for a spot BTC ETF.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Lugano

Lugano has joined Zug City, Zug Canton, and the municipality of Zermatt in accepting cryptos as payments for tax and other municipal expenses. Specifically, residents and businesses can pay using BTC or USDT from any wallet of their choice.

Presumably Senator Elizabeth Warren and Jamie “you cannot fire me” Dimon believe that the Swiss technocrats that have implemented this move are doing it simply to facilitate “criminals, drug traffickers, money laundering, tax avoidance” for they both maintain there is no other use case for cryptos.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – North Korea

Both Russia and North Korea have active scamming units sponsored by the state, perhaps even reporting directly to their respective megalomaniacal murdering leaders, Putin and Kim Jong-Un, who also share another trait in common – a lack of height, undoubtedly a contributory factor to their sense of insecurity and inadequacy when faced by decent, honest people.

The feral fraudsters attack both the TradFi world and the crypto world though it is the latter which garners outsized press attention, and which gets Warren’s and Dimon’s knickers in a twist.

But every dollar that goes towards North Korea’s WMD programme is a dollar too much. It is important that illicit activities do not become embedded in cryptos to the same extent as in the TradFi world. The U.S. government is leading the charge on this one.

The U.S. OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets) has been busily sanctioning individuals, specific wallets, and two mixers – Tornado Cash and Sinbad.

We saw yesterday that Tether has frozen some USDT at the request of the U.S. government, and centralised cryptocurrency exchanges often receive and act on similar demands. There are rumours which I believe to be unsubstantiated (but I could be wrong about that) that miners are following suit, by refusing to incorporate some crypto transfers into new blocks.

There are those who would portray this as a betrayal of the crypto ethos, and in a very strict sense they are correct. But compromising at the margins by allowing a vanishingly small number of transactions to be censored is a price well worth paying for the wholesale adoption of cryptos on a global scale.