As the northern hemisphere moves toward winter, 🥶 the frigid Bitcoin economy appears to have thawed. 🌱 But how bullish are things getting?
[Bulls, aye! 🎯]
The price of Bitcoin hit its highest point since April 2022, ascending above $45,000. That’s roughly 3X its price at this point last year. The continued upward movement for BTC and other coins suggests a shift from a bear market to a bull one.
What Journalists Said 🧑💻:
Crypto execs have seen enough to announce an end to Crypto Winter, reported Arjun Kharpal (CNBC). In addition to the forthcoming Bitcoin halving, in which new BTC supply is reduced, the market may soon have a Bitcoin spot exchange-traded fund, which could bring more retail investors into crypto. And interest rate cuts by the Fed could further help the macroeconomic environment. ✂️ Standard Chartered, meanwhile, is predicting BTC at $100K by the end of 2024. 🔮
I’m even hearing $500,000, said Vildana Hajric (Bloomberg). Bitcoin’s unexpected resurgence is “bringing out hyped-up predictions about further gains — most of them based on little else than intuition or obscure technical analyses.”
Meanwhile, stock in crypto companies such as Coinbase and Riot is rising, and Microstrategy’s Bitcoin investment strategy is way up, said Reuters. 📈
“This bitcoin rally feels different,” wrote Nick Baker (CoinDesk). “I have no idea” where prices will go, “but it's been two years since the mood in crypto markets felt this ebullient – before the collapses of Celsius, Voyager, Three Arrows Capital, FTX, Genesis …” FOMO and YOLO are in the air. 😁
PR Perspective 🔎 :
PR in a bull(ish) market is different to PR in a bear market. While the perception may be that media covers crypto more positively when sentiment turns, this is not necessarily the case. Gone are the days of slow news weeks, where journalists are searching for stories—in a bull market, launch and fundraise announcements become a dime a dozen, with big numbers and names chiefly receiving attention. While we welcome the crypto spring, we also hope our journalist friends don’t forget us when they make it big.
[Bitcoin’s Ordinal Sin? 🙏]
Ocean Mining, a Bitcoin mining firm backed by Jack Dorsey and co-founded by Bitcoin core developer Luke Dashjr, said it would censor Ordinal inscriptions. 🤬 These NFT-like assets are attached to individual satoshis, the smallest denomination of BTC. Dashjr sees Ordinals as a denial-of-service attack on the Bitcoin blockchain and is pushing a bug fix that would eliminate them.
What Journalists Said🧑💻:
Ordinals have been controversial since they were introduced in January, but they’re being discussed again because of congestion, said Martin Young (Cointelegraph). 🤧 Bitcoin’s price is rising alongside token minting, so “average medium-priority transaction costs have increased to around $14 from roughly $1.50” in the past several days.
The Bitcoin network needs more going on, not less, argued Jack Inabinet (Bankless). Ordinals are “useful primitives…that sparked utilization of the chain.” Since miners will increasingly rely on transaction fees for revenue as block rewards reduce with each halving, “the Bitcoin network must increase transaction fee revenue.”
Prominent Bitcoiners are pushing back against Ocean, wrote Pedro Solimano (The Defiant). Former Kraken exec Dan Held and crypto investors Nic Carter and Trevor Owens questioned the ethos and economic efficacy of miners blocking transactions on an ostensibly censorship-resistant network. 🐙
The market seems to be siding with Ordinals. ORDI, a Bitcoin Ordinal memecoin, passed a market cap of $1 billion this week, wrote Brandy Betz (Unchained), thanks in part to its listing on Binance.
Why It Matters ⁉️:
Bitcoin and Ethereum are very different birds. 🐣 While the latter community mostly embraces decentralized applications and innovation, the former is more conservative regarding development. There’s a BTC battle over how to add value: through being digital gold or by adding utility. Regardless of the chosen path, miners won’t stick around if it’s not profitable to do so.
[Was that ‘Sew wy’ or ‘Sue-y’? ⚽]
Football (that’s soccer for you Americans) star Cristiano Ronaldo is the subject of a Florida class action lawsuit for promoting his NFT collection on Binance, which recently settled a $4.3 billion lawsuit over ineffective anti-money laundering controls and other issues.
What Journalists Said 🧑💻:
Binance already has enough to worry about, said Jamie Crawley (CoinDesk). The SEC has sued it for allegedly violating securities laws—and that’s on top of the $4.3 billion settlement.
“Ronaldo appears unbothered,” wrote Jack Kubinec (Blockworks), even hinting at working with the exchange again soon. And why shouldn’t he? CEO Changpeng Zhao may be out, but as long as the exchange remains solvent, Binance’s sports partnerships should stay in place—”unlike FTX, which had to renege on its deals.”
Maybe drop the smirk, Cristiano. 😏 Ryan Ozawa and AI (Decrypt) wrote: “The liability faced by celebrities who dabbled in crypto promotions was starkly expressed by the Securities and Exchange Commission when it filed charges against NBA Hall of Famer Paul Pierce earlier this year.”
Why It Matters ⁉️:
To paraphrase a famous song: You’re nobody till somebody sues you. We’ve seen Kim Kardashian get pilloried for evangelizing EthereumMax and Larry David get lambasted for doing an FTX commercial. But last year’s crypto collapses (e.g., Terra, FTX, and BlockFi) may mean celebrities take a more wait-and-see approach during this bull market before agreeing to a Web3 marketing campaign.
[Tweet Of The Week]
Credit: @BitcoinMagazine
[Samantha Yap’s Reflections 📕]
This is the 100th edition of The Context. When we launched the newsletter at the start of 2022, the only constant in crypto was the difficulty of breaking through the noise to keep up with all the top stories.
We realised we spend every day absorbing news about the industry from crypto trade outlets, mainstream publications, and Twitter (X). So, we wanted to put our understanding of crypto narratives to good use. The Context is designed to help our audience digest the top crypto stories of the week so they can keep up with the space without getting too lost in the noise.
The YAP Global editorial team, driven by editors Jeff Benson and Jeremy Wagstaff, has done a terrific job of capturing the crypto industry's dynamism and complexities. We went from the Terra/Luna and FTX collapse to BlackRock’s impending ETF. We’ve captured the market swings and the technological progress, and we will continue to do so.
Riding the Web3 wave has always been wild, and we’ve endeavored to make it enjoyable for our audience with punny headlines and unique perspectives in our PR takes. As we continue navigating the growth of this crypto industry, we remain committed to delivering the key stories to care about amidst the industry's dramatic fluctuations.
The usual disclaimer: This newsletter collates the main themes and headlines of the week in DeFi/crypto/metaverse/Web3/NFT land and tries to provide unbiased context. It's aimed at anyone who wants to keep an eye on the space. It's put together by a team at YAP and doesn't contain any promotion of our clients (if one is mentioned, we'll flag that).
The team: Founder Samantha Yap and consulting editor Jeff Benson, Sam O'Donohoe, Ewan Brewster, Damian Alvarez, Andrew Wickerson, Tiffany Mac Sherry, Becky Corbel and Delon Chan. Your feedback is, as always, welcome. Ping us at thecontext@yapglobal.com. Old newsletters can be found here.
This newsletter is prepared by YAP Global, an international P.R. Consultancy focusing on helping cryptocurrency, Decentralised Finance (DeFi) and brands through impactful storytelling. Find out more about us here.