20th December 2025 > > Project K, Grayscale, & Coinbase.
- Mark Timmis
- 6 minutes ago
- 3 min read
tl;dr
Get your Xmas orders in now for Project K. Grayscale gives us a crypto-friendly view of 2026. Coinbase gives us a crypto-friendly gift for 2026.
Market Wrap
A mid-week Christmas day guarantees low liquidity, likely little price action, but if there is any, it can be explosive.
Occasional Series – The ideal Xmas present
A gentle reminder that Project K is available in either physical or digital form, centralised or decentralised:
Occasional Series – How to explain cryptos part 1
Ben Thompson (me neither) has beautifully captured the power of public, crypto enabled, blockchain technology:
“Blockchains are the idea that disparate groups can come to a consensus without any kind of centralized authority.”
You need only to dwell on that statement for a very, very short time before the endless possibilities and limitless opportunities proffered by blockchain technology become blindingly obvious.
Curious Crypto’s Commentary – Grayscale
Grayscale – hardly an unbiased observer of crypto markets, I admit – has released a report with predictions for cryptos for 2026:
The main themes are these:
- Growing institutional adoption driven by the twin forces of dollar debasement and ever-increasing regulatory clarity.
- Tokenisation of real-world assets.
- Explosive growth in stablecoins as they begin to replace fiat dollars for institutional international settlements and retail domestic settlements.
- Increasing adoption of privacy coins such as Zcash.
- The entwining of cryptos with agentic A.I.
- Growth and development of DeFi.
These themes are all familiar to regular readers of the CCC, with perhaps the exception of privacy coins, a topic we have deliberately avoided, in the main.
Owning privacy coins on chain, outside of a centralised cryptocurrency exchange, will likely attract detailed, unwarranted, and unwanted attention from the tax authorities. In the UK, with our world-beating tax code that runs to 21,000 pages and over ten million words (twelve times longer than the entire collection of Shakespeare’s writing, no less), it is far too easy to make genuine errors that HMRC will furiously and joyously punish as the state pours yet more money into hiring tax officials to harry and harass law-abiding individuals. Make no mistake – this has been a deliberate if unspoken policy of all governments in the UK since the turn of the millennium. So, best to steer clear of privacy coins, in my humble opinion. Which is why we (generally) do not discuss them here.
Grayscale makes another, rather more important, point, which is one that the CCC has been banging on about for a while now.
The four-year cycle is dead. It is no more. It has ceased to be.
If I am right about this (yes, the jury is still out, but the parrot bashing suggests I have correctly called this one), then the looming spectacle of vastly looser monetary conditions in the US from May onwards will benefit cryptos as much as, or more than, other risk assets.
…
As an aside, the sheer length and complexity of the UK’s tax code is a desperate drag on productivity, for both individuals, and for business. It raises the cost of capital, making us all poorer.
Every single Chancellor of the Exchequer since, and including, Gordon Brown appears to have been competing with their predecessor to accelerate our ever more convoluted tax rules with no objective other than to add to our communal detriment, and our shared sorrow. Jeremy “not my real surname but this is a family publication” Hunt was undoubtedly the very worst transgressor in this regard.
In entirely related news, it has been reported that UK MPs routinely claim the costs of tax advice required to navigate the HMRC shark-infested waters from the public purse. One prominent member has been paid £7,000 to do just that. Tax-free, natch.
Nice work if you can get it.
Curious Crypto’s Commentary – Coinbase - Wow!
This is a story that combines two of our favourite topics – tokenisation, and the placement of Coinbase at the heart of this crypto revolution.
In essence, Coinbase is creating a regulatory-compliant platform for the tokenisation of real-world assets, using Base (an Ethereum Layer 2 with virtually zero fees) with decentralised ownership of those tokenised assets allied with battle-tested centralised custody of the actual assets.
This opens the possibility of 24/7/365 trading of any asset one can possibly imagine, in any size, with no friction. The improvement in the efficiency of pricing will be a huge boon to industry and banks, lowering the cost of capital, making us all wealthier.
The tokenisation revolution is happening right here, right now.
I would like to add that owners of Coinbase stock – particularly in tax-free wrappers – will benefit more than most, but I suspect my compliance team will remove this sentence from today’s missive.
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