28th July 2023 > > Divisiveness, but it's not my fault.

tl;dr

A day of divisiveness, but not of my making.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Wow.

I have never seen the perpetual futures funding rate at this elevated level. This demonstrates a very unbalanced market between leveraged longs and leveraged shorts. There is an elevated risk of a long squeeze, potentially of dramatic proportions.

Which immediately prompts me to polish and shine my biggest and baddest buying boots, just in case.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Farage and the state of UK banking

I was trying to avoid going here, but I now have no choice but to do so.

I understand that a significant number of people are happy to see Nigel Farage suffering the ignominy of being de-banked. Serves him right, they may well be thinking.

I disagree with them.

My disagreement has nothing to do with his politics or him as a person, though some do get the two of those mixed up at times. Regardless of whether you support his political platform or not, he has a democratic right to express his legally held views and to prosecute those views in public fora.

The same principle is true of any divisive figure from any side of the political divide.

I fundamentally disagreed with Jeremy Corbyn’s suggestion that following the Salisbury poisoning we ask Russia to confirm or otherwise that the Novichok used came from their stocks of chemical weapons (that’s the sceptic in me coming out), but he has every right to try to convince others that this was a sensible suggestion that would lead to the truth.

For those who supported Coutts’ decision to close Farage’s bank account because of his political views, the news below may cause you to think again.

…

NatWest – the owner of Coutts and of whom we as taxpayers still own 38% more than a decade after the ill-advised nationalisation of NatWest – have closed an account because of “cryptocurrency trading”:

You may believe that cryptos should be “banned” by making them illegal. I would strongly disagree with you, but I wholeheartedly support your right to take that stance. Write to your MP, go out and campaign for that outcome. That is your right to do so.

But it is not right that a bank shuts an account that has engaged in lawful activity.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Elon Musk and X

Continuing the topic of divisive figures – in my experience people tend to have a Marmite-like approach to Elon – the pivot away from Twitter to an “everything” app is underway.

The Financial Times – itself a divisive news outlet – has reported that the company will be applying for licences to bring payments to the platform. This is probably not a minor task, and of course there is the software side to things, though Elon does have form when it comes to online payments. The FT states that the focus “first and foremost” will be on fiat.

I would be mightily surprised if Elon stopped there.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Gary Gensler, Chair of the SEC

For crypto enthusiasts they don’t come much more divisive than Gensler.

Gensler was asked in an interview yesterday about the raft of recent spot-BTC ETF applications:

“There’s a lot of noncompliance in this field. The platforms themselves, where trading is occurring of various crypto tokens, though some of it comes under the securities laws, currently they’re not necessarily compliant with those time-tested protections against fraud and manipulation.”

That doesn’t sound to me that he is convinced by the surveillance sharing agreements that now populate all eight of the current ETF proposals.

But again I come back to the inconsistency on display here. There is a 99% correlation between spot BTC and futures BTC markets. Several futures-based BTC ETFs have been approved. Rather ridiculously a 2* leveraged futures ETF has also been recently approved.

How is it possible that the futures market is free from the risk of market manipulation, but the spot market is not?