Keith Asmussen, Joshua Ebedes, Preston Sledge
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Market Summary
Dotted lines represent non-trading days (weekends, holidays, etc.)
Top Stories
The IRS offers a $625,000 bounty to anyone who can break Monero and Lightning
The Internal Revenue Service announced that they are currently “seeking a solution with one or more contractors to provide innovative solutions for tracing and attribution of privacy coins.” In their proposal, the new initiative will assist IRS Criminal Investigation agents trace transactions in order to anticipate future transactions of suspect addresses. Monero, a privacy coin know for its emphasis on privacy concerns, is identified by the IRS as being the preferred crypto asset of criminal organizations due to its difficulty to delineate. If the prototype is accepted, the developer will be rewarded an initial $500,000 and allow the developer to work on the prototype another eight months into a working concept.
Big European states call for cryptocurrency curbs to protect consumers
The finance ministers of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands made a joint statement that stablecoins should not be permitted to operate in the European Union until legal, regulatory and oversight challenges have been addressed. The finance ministers called on the European Commission to present regulatory proposals that protect consumers and preserve state sovereignty in monetary policy. They are also demanding all stablecoins to be pledged at a ratio of 1:1 with fiat currency, with reserve assets denominated in the Euro. Olaf Scholz, Finance Minister of Germany, believes that the authorities should take a rigid attitude and ban any private sector activities if any future regulatory requirements are not met.
Chart of the Week
This graph retrieved from alternative.me indexes the fear and greed that drives investors in the Crypto market. Fear and Greed indexes are an interesting and useful way to look at markets from a less technical perspective. Ratings closer to fear indicate that people are wary to buy and thus that the market is underpriced while ratings closer to greed indicate that people are overbuying without fully considering the real value or risks. In this chart the 0-50 indicate levels of fear while 50-100 indicate level of greed. Notable in this chart is the spike and then maintained high level of greed starting in late July and then it's plummet to fear in early September.
Top Tweets
@Hardwood_. this thread does a good job explaining the uproar around SushiSwap ( a fork of UniSwap) and their “community governance”
@DegenSpartan gives a meme showcasing the current crazy state of defi
@SBF_Alameda provides a solid thread on Token Valuation
@CryptoCharles__ pokes fun at crypto twitters investment gurus.
Video of the Week
Introduction to Bitcoin: aantonop
This week's video follows last week’s as an introductory video for newcomers to the club and space as we start the fall semester. Andreas Antonopoulos is an author, entrepreneur, and Bitcoin advocate. His ideas and explanations of the value and purpose of Bitcoin are clear cut and convincing. Specifically he is great at explaining the philosophical and moral arguments for Bitcoin. In this video he discusses the evolution and future of money, decentralization, money as a language, and many of the other important foundations of the philosophy around Bitcoin.
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Texas Blockchain’s ‘State of the Market’ is a student-led editorial. None of the views expressed by the authors should be taken as the view of the University of Texas at Austin or the Texas Blockchain organization. Furthermore, none of the views expressed should be taken as financial advice in any circumstance.