10th May 2025 > > GENIUS, & a shock.

tl;dr

The GENIUS act is delayed, not killed, as some would have you believe. A very surprising development leaves us all in some shock.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

That pump yesterday blazing through the $100k barrier was accompanied by a reset of the perpetual futures funding rates from an oversold -0.03bps to a neutral 1.02bps. A total of 190,000 leveraged traders, almost entirely shorts, got taken out with a notional value of $1bn. Ouch!

But even that pain hasn’t stopped the leveraged children piling back into the short side, taking the perp rate back down to nearly zero, raising the delightful risk of yet another short squeeze higher, putting BTC’s ATH firmly in our sights if so.

My thanks go out to all the shorts helping to get this party started (as Keith Vaz once memorably told us), but really, they shouldn’t be doing it. Remember kids, never use leverage when trading cryptos.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – GENIUS

You might have read in some of the more ill-informed press that the Senate yesterday voted down The GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins) by 48-49 votes, suggesting that this ground-breaking piece of crypto legislation has failed its first test.

Well, that just isn’t true. Following a change of heart from some Senators who sit on the banking committee, the bill’s passage has become choppier than initially expected. My sources inform me that agreement on amendments to the bill are very close, but those amendments are not yet published. Yesterday’s vote became a procedural vote that prevented a final vote from immediately taking place i.e. it has bought more time to allow for an agreement to emerge on the regulation of stablecoins, one of the crypto industry's most pressing issues.

It isn’t the most inspiring start to the crypto plans of the new administration. It is also clear now that despite my hopes otherwise, the bipartisan approach to cryptos remains as firmly embedded as ever, which is a real shame. We all want the politics taken out of cryptos.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – You are not going to believe this

The CCC and Senator Elizabeth Warren, the figurehead for an anti-freedom and anti-liberty army dedicated to the cause of creating a monetary panopticon, have never seen eye-to-eye.

Until now that is.

I will give you some time to pick yourself back up off the floor, dust yourself down, and gather your thoughts before we continue.

…

Right, feeling better now? Let me explain.

Warren has been raising concerns about the conflicts of interest between the new administration’s sponsoring of crypto legislation allied with the 180-degree about turn in the approach of the SEC to the crypto industry, and the Trump family’s burgeoning crypto business.

Putting aside the obvious fact that Warren doesn’t care one jot about ethics (she is a career politician after all) and she is merely trying to score political points (she is a career politician after all) she does happen to be right for once. Probably for the first time ever, but credit where credit is due – the CCC remains forever totally unbiased and totally fair to all parties.

The launch of meme coin TRUMP (and MELANIA for goodness’ sake) just prior to the election was, at best, distasteful. The recent offer of dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago for the top 220 holders of TRUMP is a most worrying development. The UAE announcing it will use USD1 (a Trump family stablecoin) to invest $2bn in Binance stinks.

Trump will point to the fact that all sitting Presidents must put all their business interests into a blind trust, with decisions made by third parties, which is true. He has compared his family’s crypto interests with prior President’s family businesses which themselves were impacted by government policy, and to a certain degree that is a valid comparison.

But optics do matter. The politics do matter. If Warren’s intervention gains traction amongst some, that will increase the obstruction to wholesale adoption of cryptos, delaying (not preventing) the crypto revolution. Personally, I wish that this opportunity for her to pretend she has some moral high ground had not been presented to her.