5th January 2026 > > Crenshaw news (hurrah!) & The Times (boo!)

tl;dr

Crenshaw has gone at long last. The Times gets it badly wrong again.

Market Wrap

This positive start to the year, suggesting that we will probably see daily inflows to the spot BTC ETFs all this week, has a surprising accelerant – the return of memecoins.

The entire memecoin market capitalisation has risen 26% from $38bn to $48bn. The CCC’s favourite, DOGE, is up 29% giving the CC Treasury’s bags an early 2026 boost, which is nice. Memecoins (with the notable exception of DOGE) are all entirely speculative, so this is a sign of renewed risk appetite from retail investors. Whether that translates into renewed risk appetite for institutional investors is a question that is yet to be answered.

If memecoins are back in favour, Solana – the favoured platform for memecoins – and its native token SOL, will likely benefit the most.

Curious Crypto’s Commentary – Rejoice, ye all!

SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw had her last day of work in the offices of the SEC on 31^st December 2025, sparking scenes of wild jubilation, and some excessive fireworks, across the world. Crenshaw was a reliable obstacle to all things crypto, to the extent of voting against the launch of spot BTC ETFs after Gensler’s hand was forced by the courts who described the SEC’s refusal to countenance these products as “arbitrary and capricious”.

This news was expected by regular readers of the CCC (https://www.curiouscryptos.com/post/19th-december-2024-crenshaw-is-a-goner) though it has taken a year to be realised. The usual platitudes were served up in an SEC press release:

"Commissioner Crenshaw has devoted more than a decade of distinguished service to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Over those years, she has been a steadfast advocate for the agency's mission—demonstrating clarity of purpose and generosity of spirit. Though on the downside, her anti-crypto stance marks her out as illiberal and as authoritarian as genocidal Putin, mass-murderer Xi, and the portly megalomaniac Jong-Un.”

I must admit that only part of that quote was in the actual press release, but we know it should have been.

Whatever. The forces for freedom, democracy, and privacy are strengthened on this news. After me everyone:

“Crenshaw is a goner, Crenshaw is a goner, la-la-la, la-la-la.”

…

There are now only three SEC Commissioners, all of whom are Republicans. Trump can nominate two more, who will certainly be drawn from the ranks of the Democrats, of whom there are now several prominent crypto supporters. That is a sentence that one could not write several years ago, demonstrating the now increasingly bi-partisan support for cryptos, a development which should cheer us all.

Curious Crypto’s Commentary – Cryptos in the news

A useful metric for gauging popular interest in cryptos is the prevalence, or otherwise, of crypto news in the leading newspapers.

The Times has already run at least one article on this topic in 2026 (https://www.thetimes.com/money/saving-investing/article/how-to-buy-crypto-by-an-investment-specialist-mpkrhcchx) but as usual it is largely factually inaccurate, and biased against the crypto revolution.

The journalist (whose name I won’t repeat here to save her blushes) gives the game away by putting in bold letters at the top of the article “Having written about cryptocurrencies for 14 years, she remains a sceptic”.

If we take her at her word, then BTC was trading at around $6 when she first started reporting on cryptos. I would have expected a serious financial journalist to at least go through the motions of investing in BTC a nominal amount – say $100 – before reporting on it, just to gain a greater understanding of the topic under consideration, which I continue to believe is a helpful approach for journalists in general. Clearly that didn’t happen given the lack of knowledge she demonstrates later in the article about all things crypto. Having missed out on returns of 1,500,000% since then (a $100 investment would now be worth $1.5mm) this explains why “… she remains a sceptic”, for she missed the single greatest financial opportunity of her life and does not want to own up to that mistake. I have come across many others like here. Every new psychologically important price point that is reached is met with ever firmer denials and ever more extreme claims that BTC has no value.

In answering her own question “What actually is crypto?” she makes the rookie error of confusing distributed ledger technology with database technology. The two are so very different in nature that anyone with even the slightest passing interest in cryptos understands that trying to conflate the two illuminates a total lack of understanding at a fundamental level of “What actually is crypto”.

I am at a loss to understand in the section “How to buy it” that the conclusion is, in reference to centralised cryptocurrency exchanges, that “This is where you can keep tabs on how your investment is faring.” I think this section of the article was written by a random word generator.

“How to spend it” references “… a lightning wallet”. There is a layer-2 for BTC called the Lightning Network for which “… payments are fast, secure and have low transaction fees” but there is no indication in the article that this applies only to BTC, or any acknowledgement that layer-2 transactions are not the same as layer-1.

Finally, when discussing cold wallets (e.g. Ledger Nano) the journalist describes them as “… a hard drive with specific software and a very secure password” and then goes on to discuss James Howells who famously lost a real hard drive on which was stored his private key in the Newport rubbish dump. Anyone who has seen a Ledger, or a Trezor, or any of the other multitude of cold wallet options, would never describe it in such terms, nor confuse it with James’ experience.

…

I hope you don’t think I am being too harsh, and I hope none of my comments will be taken personally by anyone, not least of all the author of this dramatically inept piece of journalism. It’s just that I get very frustrated and annoyed at the lack of understanding and knowledge of even basic details about cryptos shown by most financial journalists.

At the very least, they should all sign up to the free CC course before putting pen to paper:

https://www.curiouscryptos.com/cccourses