Crypto Begins October With a Bang, Shrugging Off Government Shutdown

The historically strong fourth quarter is finally upon us. But will crypto prices live up to the hype?

If the first trading day of the month seems to be any indication, that answer appears to be yes — as the market shrugs off the government shutdown in Washington to re-claim a $4 trillion market cap.

Perhaps that shouldn't be surprising. On average, October has brought a nearly 22% return to Bitcoin over the last decade or so. That only trails November’s 46% average for the best month. All signs seem to be pointing to history repeating itself. Let’s dig into why…

What the Market Is Telling Us

I just got back from moderating a crypto conference in Korea with the one and only Tom Lee. Not only is Tom now leading Ethereum’s largest digital asset treasury in BitMine — he’s also still one of the smartest market minds I know and leading things at Fundstrat.

Fundstrat always puts out great research and there is one glaring signal they were pointing at last week. That signal only continues to glow hotter, with gold hitting a new record high north of $3,800 an ounce on Monday.

As their research points out, a surge in gold prices has generally foreshadowed moves higher by crypto in the weeks to come. With gold continuing to enjoy a nice rally, Fundstrat’s Sean Farrell writes that his confidence is growing that crypto should enjoy that hallmark strength in Q4.

But even if it weren’t for gold, there are plenty of other indicators seemingly showing there is still plenty of runway for the boom times to continue.

Not only is stablecoin giant Tether reportedly shoring up its latest round at $500 billion — which would make it one of the world’s highest valued companies — the stablecoin market as a whole continues to notch new money coming in.

Data shows Tether and USDC continue to lead the pack, but new stables are expected to begin hitting the market — and the launches that have already happened thus far have looked strong. Case in point, Plasma (which Tether and Peter Thiel also backed) is already humming along after its launch last week. The project raised more than $373 million in a new offering to keep pace with everyone else looking to swoop in on the stablecoin space.

Plasma founder Paul Faecks told The Rollup that it’s about to get crazy.

“You do have a massively expanding pie and so I truly believe the vast majority of stablecoin is in the future,” he said. “It’s going to be an absolute war to really win this at scale.”

Linea Bagging SWIFT?

Speaking of scale, there’s probably no crown jewel quite like SWIFT — or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.

It’s how money gets sent around the Western world, and it’s been falling behind as fin tech companies moves money faster. On Monday, SWIFT announced it’s working on a prototype ledger for cross-border transfers with Consensys, the company led by Ethereum founder Joe Lubin. (Consensys also incubated Linea.)

If this does land on the Ethereum Layer-2, it would be a pretty big win for Linea right out of the gate after launching this month. Per the release:

Financial institutions from 16 countries are providing Swift feedback on the design of the ledger, and, following successful development and proof of concept, Swift will work with its global community on implementation. The group of banks working on the design includes:

Alts Still Cranking

Not to be outdone, Solana and Avalanche are also continuing to attract attention of their own with some newer DATs stepping in to add some buy pressure.

Avalanche is up 28% in September, riding a new leg higher after Anthony Scaramucci was revealed to be leading a new AVAX DAT, AVAX One. Solana is up about 5% over the same time frame, but seems poised to continue giving Ethereum a strong run for its money to lead in the final months of the year.

We recently caught up with Pantera’s Cosmo Jiang who just led the way into another Solana DAT at Helius. In his words, Solana is still poised to inherit much of what’s to be built onchain.

Coinage Getting into the DAT Game?

Watching everyone else create these virtuous flywheels of momentum via publicly traded companies has triggered a wave of FOMO around Coinage.

First it was Michael Saylor. Then Tom Lee. Now Pantera and the Mooch. But flywheels don’t always need to look the same, and so far, no one has really recreated that for the attention economy. It got us wondering, what would the attention economy need to look like with “bonds” and “equity” equivalents anyways?

As you know, Coinage has always been an experiment that rises to the occasion. We aren’t just a Web3 media outlet, we’re also a Web3 media experiment — and we’re excited to be entering the final chapter.

You see, not only have we pioneered creating the first NFTs that enabled us to pay a distribution back to NFT holders — but now, we’re launching the first tokenized ads as NFTs. Anyone can bid on Coinage’s first ad-space auction, which we’re excited to launch as part of a tool from Trustless Media and GBM.

In a way, these NFTs kind of look like “attention bonds,” by unlocking the right for a holder to advertise over a certain time period. Importantly, as always, all the revenue from these ad-sales will go to the Coinage DAO. So, if you want to get your brand in this newsletter, there’s a new way to do so. Or, if you want to own the ad-space you can sell to someone else, feel free. Things are about to get exciting. May the flywheel continue to churn.

Coinage is a community-owned DAO letting our NFT holders become actual co-owners in one of the fastest-growing Web3 media outlets. Mint an NFT and become a member today to open a path to patronage dividends, or stake with us to support our project.