👀 The coast is clear

If you need any more reassurance that working with crypto is tipped to get easier, look no further than Coinbase listings.

In fact, the rate of Coinbase listings has rapidly accelerated.

Over the past two years, until the election in November, the exchange had made 88 listing announcements specific to the US — an average of 3.8 listings per month.

Since Trump’s win around this time last month, Coinbase has made 16 such announcements — either for its flagship US exchange or specifically for the state of New York.

Of those new coins, seven are related to memecoins: WIF, PEPE and FLOKI were all listed on Coinbase in mid-November, while the former was opened to New York residents this week.

Those aren’t micro-cap memes from pump.fun. They are hugely popular established memecoins with vocal followings, which were often seen pestering Coinbase to list the tokens on X over the years.

Coinbase then added MOODENG on Monday — an actual pump.fun coin — capping off a pent-up meme rollout that felt like years in the making.

Prior to Trump’s win, Coinbase had only listed one memecoin in the past two years, BONK, in December 2023. The exchange then made BONK available in New York earlier this year, in May.

Coinbase and other exchanges have been historically slow to offer their full suite of coins to New York residents, on account of the Attorney General’s Office’s penchant for securities lawsuits.

Other, more substantive coins have been given the Coinbase nod since the election. Helium’s MOBILE is now available in New York alongside DEGEN, ARB, SEI, AIOZ, 1INCH, EGLD, and SD. 

Still, Coinbase opting into memecoins to such a degree makes absolute sense for its bottom line. Memecoins bring volume which directly converts to trading fee revenue for Coinbase. 

The move, while potentially hindered by the continued potential of a disagreeable SEC, was probably overdue. But its actual impact on Coinbase’s own valuation may not convert so easily heading into a second Trump term.

Coinbase’s share price has tracked bitcoin’s price performance almost exactly over the past year and has been slightly underperforming against it in the past two weeks. 

If the market is indeed pricing in potential revenues from a memecoin supercycle powered by Coinbase, it’s not yet showing up. MOODENG, though, has more than doubled, so there’s that.

— David Canellis

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• Old coins are pumping: IOTA and VET are up 62% and 42% apiece in the past 24 hours.

• XRP stopped 17% short of its $3.40 all-time high from 2018 and currently trades for $2.69. (Ripple CTO David Schwartz has previously suggested XRP’s actual peak was only $2.80.)

• Ethereum’s economic security (ETH staked times price) almost set a new record on Monday: $128.52 billion compared to $128.93 billion in March.

• DeFi TVL is on its way to pre-Terra levels, rising by more than 50% in the past month to $139.3 billion (pre-Terra: ~$160 billion).

• Daily Solana DEX volumes spiked nearly 60% yesterday, jumping from $4.7 billion to over $7.4 billion, per Blockworks Research data.

 🔥 LFG

XRP’s up 120% in the past week. It’s also seen a “stark uptick” in volatility, according to Kaiko analysts. 

Realized volume is up over 100%, marking its newest high since July 2023 (in case you need a refresher, that’s when the court ruling about institutional sales was filed). 

And here’s something interesting: XRP’s move over the weekend actually eclipsed bitcoin volumes.

“Seeing stronger volumes accompany a move higher in prices implies that the move has a broad base and is less likely to be just a fleeting change,” analysts wrote.

For Kaiko, these data sets suggest that tokens that had previously been in the SEC’s line of fire could see some reprieve — and a potential jump — as the SEC enters into a new era. One in which the market feels pretty comfortable betting that the agency won’t take as much offense to crypto’s existence, though we don’t know who will be handpicked by President-elect Donald Trump to lead the new regime. 

My colleague, Fox’s Eleanor Terrett, thinks there’s a possibility that we could have a name as soon as today.

Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi, on the Empire podcast this morning, had an interesting read-through about the interest in XRP and how that translates into this broader cycle — because, surprise, I always like to find an excuse to zoom out. Basically, he thinks this is a sign that folks aren’t just here for the memes.

“Most people don't want to do this nihilistic thing of ‘I'm just betting that this thing is going to go up and down’ because they don't actually think they're gambling. They think that they are investing in the future,” Qureshi said.

Don’t get me wrong, David and I know there’s an appetite for the memes, but I think Qureshi’s point is a salient one: Those who are new in crypto or who have been in crypto have heard talking heads, analysts, even Trump, say that there’s valuable technology in this space and that’s why they’re here. Memes just happen to make it fun…for those who want to partake. 

I’m with Qureshi here, and WisdomTree’s Jason Guthrie (which, funny enough, filed for an XRP ETF just yesterday). 

Let the memes pump but don’t let them overshadow the fact that more concrete interest is on the rise — and change is on the horizon.

— Katherine Ross

• Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said he has no interest in working with ex-SEC staffers who went after the crypto industry during their tenure at the regulatory agency.

• Marathon Digital is buying up a wind farm in Texas, which will only operate about 30% of the time, in an effort to “eliminate the dependence on the grid,” per Bloomberg.

• Nike’s RTFKT, the NFT wearables company, will shutter in January. 

• Coinbase added Apple Pay support to its onramp, allowing users to fund crypto purchases with their Apple-linked wallet. 

• Pantera Capital raised $20 million to back TON, the Telegram-linked blockchain.

Q: Is Operation Chokepoint 2.0 actually real?

I’m actually split. I lean toward agreeing with our colleague, Byron, but I also think that it’s a fair assessment that banks may look at crypto customers with a perfect convenient excuse baked into the KYC of it all. 

It’s tough to push back on, and it makes folks looking for evidence of systematic discrimination into conspiracy theorists. 

This is a topic that, for me, requires a much higher word count than I can use here so let me sum this up by saying: 

I think there’s genuine merit in Operation Chokepoint 2.0. That can be found in Silvergate’s filings. But I think there is also a strong argument to be made that banks were simply saving their own hides, rather than a concentrated effort by the government itself. 

Clearly, I’m a lousy conspiracy theorist. 

— Katherine Ross

It’s hard to listen to Marc Andreessen discussing debanking and not come away with suspicion.

The line between bureaucracy and conspiracy is, however, incredibly blurry. But considering Operation Chokepoint 1.0 was indeed a thing, I’d probably put money on the second iteration being real and impactful in untold ways.

Developments like Coinbase Onramp’s integration with Apple Pay feel like a step in the right direction. 

Something tells me that KYC will persist as a major pain in crypto’s ass — until more of legacy finance moves onto crypto rails.

— David Canellis