5th April 2023 - Open Exchange.

tl;dr

Open Exchange should not even exist.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Despite rumours of an Interpol Red Notice being issued for founder and CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, and further rumours of his actual arrest (both of which have been denied) BTC price action remains strong. I think there is a strong likelihood that Binance US shuts itself down, leaving the field open for Coinbase to clear up.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Ethereum upgrade Shanghai

The Shanghai upgrade to the Ethereum network is scheduled for a week’s time on 12th April 2023.

The key element is the implementation of EIP-4895 which will allow validators and stakers to withdraw staked ETH to the tune of 16 million ETH, nearly 32 billion dollars’ worth. This has caused concern amongst some commentators who have built up a popular narrative that Shanghai will be negative for ETH price action,

In the lead up to the last significant upgrade – The Merge – the popular narrative was to buy ETH in advance and to sell afterwards. In true contrarian fashion, the CCC disagreed with those arguments in favour of selling beforehand to reinvest later. Indeed, analysis shows that DCA (dollar cost average) selling in advance of The Merge to buy back afterwards was the smart trade, mostly on account of ETH losing 25% of value in one week after The Merge.

On 3rd March 2023 I expressed my opinion – contrary to most other commentators – that Shanghai will be positive for ETH price action for a whole bunch of reasons. I remain firmly convinced of that view.

Well, we shall have the opportunity to test my theory in just seven days’ time, which will be exciting.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – This is cheeky

Three Arrows Capital went bust last year during that turbulent period when several prominent crypto firms took a tumble, not least of which was the fraudulent fiasco at FTX.

The founders Kyle Davis and Su Zhu have been subpoenaed on a variety of counts, though with their whereabouts unknown, not much progress can be made in terms of bringing them to trial.

Notwithstanding these problems, Davis, and Zhu, have launched a new operation known as Open Exchange, or OPNX. Remarkably investors have put in $25mm of start-up capital despite the reputational risks involved.

But that isn’t the cheeky part.

The cheeky part is that users of OPNX will be able to trade bankruptcy claims for failed crypto firms, presumably including Three Arrows Capital. Mark Loehr, CEO of OPNX, explained:

“We are here building OPNX because we want to help the industry. Right now, there are over 20 million claimants worldwide for FTX, Celsius, and other platforms that are stuck waiting years just to access their funds and we think they deserve better.”

Much as I love the crypto revolution, people like this are just shameless scumbags, but that’s just a personal view.