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Gempire!

We’re packing the spice in today’s edition, as we look at how XRP’s doing and what the new offering from Morpho and Coinbase really mean for users.

And it’s the final workday of the previous US administration, with President-elect Donald Trump set to be sworn in on Monday.

Are you ready for the new era? We are. We’ll see you all bright and early Monday.

👊 Punching up

True believers of an impending altcoin season now have their most compelling evidence to date:

XRP is at all-time highs (sort of), and the XRP Army is finally looking like the smart ones in the room.

It’s for sure a big deal. Price records for XRP have turned out to be crypto’s answer to Haley’s comet: They only come around once every half-decade or so. Which is eons around here.

There’ve been mixed reports over whether XRP has really broken its 2018 peak. A Fortune piece yesterday pointed out that XRP’s all-time high is $3.84 on Binance while CoinGecko says $3.40.

XRP reached as high as $3.3991 on Binance on Thursday afternoon, per TradingView data. So eh, close enough. 

Not to mention, Ripple Labs CTO David “JoelKatz” Schwartz has historically been adamant that XRP had never actually reached $3.84 in 2018 for most of the crypto trading world.

That price was supposedly met only briefly on South Korean exchanges, which at the time placed a hefty premium on many top coins, including BTC and XRP.

Keep in mind that the goal for most crypto traders and investors is to avoid “round-tripping” their bags — holding coins from bull market top to bear market trough and back again.

Real roundtripping in XRP’s case would mean holding through a 90% collapse between January 2018 and December 2019, and another 80% drop between April 2021 and the following June.

Here’s the rub: because XRP’s last all-time high was so long ago, its equivalent today would be much higher due to US dollar inflation.

What was $3.40 in 2018’s money would now be $4.25. XRP would need to rally by another 25% or so to break its inflation-adjusted all-time high, as shown by the beige area at the top of the chart above.

But that’s only against the dollar. XRP’s bitcoin and ether ratios continue to be firmly underwater, even despite its near-500% rally since this time last year.

The purple line on the chart below plots XRP’s performance against ETH, while the pink line is its BTC ratio. 

XRP has lost 64% of its value against ETH since Ethereum launched in 2015 and 42% against BTC over its record trading history, starting in 2013.

No matter. XRP’s rally is still very much a symbol of a crypto groundswell in the US ahead of Trump’s second term. A sign of the times that screams the US is open for crypto business.

Take Ripple’s branding and communication in its early years: “crypto” and “blockchain” were curiously absent right up until mid-2017, instead opting to present its distributed ledger as a payments protocol similar to email.

Now, they’re “pioneers in crypto.”

If there was such a thing as reverse chain abstraction, Ripple has nailed it. And it’s paying off.

— David

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Unichain is launching soon!

Designed to be the home for DeFi and liquidity across chains, Unichain is an L2 that will launch with up to 95% lower transaction fees than Ethereum L1. Shortly after mainnet launch, the chain will introduce 250 millisecond block times for near instant transactions. Plus, as part of the Superchain, Unichain is optimized for seamless cross-chain transactions.

Stay in the loop — visit Unichain.org and follow @Unichain on X for updates!

Coinbase is shaking things up. 

If you somehow didn’t hear, Morpho and Coinbase have teamed up to offer loans where Coinbase users (though New York users can’t, much to the disappointment of some of my colleagues) can borrow USDC against bitcoin held on Coinbase. Pretty cool, right? Definitely yet another sign of the changing times. 

Blockworks data whiz Dan Smith joined Empire’s round-up this week, telling host Jason Yanowitz that he thinks the announcement is a win for bitcoin… with some caveats.

“ Bitcoin's money, they [Coinbase] want it to be everywhere,” Smith said. But the asterisk, as he called it, is that the loanee now has to trust that Morpho can hold that bitcoin as collateral on Base. This can, understandably, cause anxiety about that going wrong.

As Smith pointed out, the upside is that Coinbase is the largest centralized exchange in the US.

For some folks, that’ll be enough to entrust Morpho and Coinbase with holding their loaned bitcoin. 

And now you know.

There’s been a lot of demand for the product, according to Coinbase’s VP of Product Max Branzburg.

Smith, in the episode, also noted that the pairing of onchain lending startup Morpho and Coinbase here is a huge win for the former.

For Branzburg and Coinbase, Morpho was the go-to because it has “built some really great products in this area, and has built protocols that are very well audited that are safe, secure, [and] provide that kind of value.”

But he’s not ruling out the potential for other integrations with other projects. 

“As more people are building on base, we'll find ways to bring Coinbase users to those builders,” Branzburg said. 

Honestly, one of my burning questions personally was two-fold, why bitcoin, and is this only going to be a bitcoin offering? 

A few weeks ago, when I spoke with Haynes Boone partner Matthew Frankle, we discussed the rising appetite for bitcoin margin loans (which unfortunately didn’t make its way into this newsletter… yet). And now we have this big partnership announcement from Coinbase.

Branzburg’s simple answer to the first part is that bitcoin’s the “OG.” It’s really following the same formula Coinbase used when it announced its wrapped bitcoin product last year, which allowed folks to utilize their bitcoin exposure on Base.

“That was a pretty cool breakthrough a few months ago, but you still had to go, take your bitcoin, get it into your wallet, navigate the protocols, figure out how to use it. What's happening here is, under the hood, we're doing all of that for you, abstracting all that complexity away,” he explained. 

Essentially, it gives customers a potential value add for their bitcoin (and keeps it from getting dusty, of course). 

Anyway, the last tidbit of information I gleaned was that bitcoin’s just the start for onchain lending via Coinbase.

“This roadmap will expand to other assets over time as well,” Branzburg told me.

So there you have it folks, Coinbase is going further onchain and, perhaps, just in time for crypto to have its moment in the spotlight.

— Katherine

This March, hear from Michael Saylor, Brad Garlinghouse and other top leaders driving the evolution of global finance. From navigating macroeconomic dynamics to exploring the rise of onchain economies, DAS NYC brings together institutional investors, allocators, and fund managers for meaningful insights and actionable ideas.

📅 March 18-20, 2025
📍 NYC | Javits Center North

The transformation of finance is happening now. Be part of it.

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