A court battle between a novel bank that wants to do business in crypto and the Federal Reserve Board is coming to a head. Zoom in: The central question in this case is whether a politically motivated Fed intervened in a process conducted by one of the reserve banks it oversees, wrongfully denying Custodia Bank a Fed master account.

Crypto's animating purpose was to develop incorruptible institutions. However, various attempts to embed these structures in a broader social fabric, from DAOs to crypto-network states, have largely failed. We draw from Lawrence Lessig's legal theories to explain why. Protocol designers work with markets and code but frequently ignore the vital institutional functions served by social norms and the law itself. The absence of these regulatory functions considerably limits the forms of pro-social behavior that can be fostered or enforced.

The Crypto Fear and Greed Index has dropped to a "neutral" reading for the first time in three months, following the approval of a spot Bitcoin ETF by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The index has a rating of 52 over the past 24 hours, its lowest since October 19, 2023, when Bitcoin traded at a daily average of $31,000. Despite the ETF announcement, Bitcoin has been down 2.9% over the past week and is currently trading at the $42,500 level. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index tracks investor sentiment toward crypto markets and may signal buy opportunities just as excess greed levels could foreshadow impending price corrections. However, there is uncertainty around the impact of Bitcoin ETFs, and the long-term effects of increased institutional crypto access remain unclear.

Binance Research Institute released its 2023 annual review report, which comprehensively analyzed the performance of the cryptocurrency market in the past year. The report shows that driven by the significant increase in the first and fourth quarters, the market value of cryptocurrencies in 2023 increased by 109%; Web3 projects attracted 1,173 investments, totaling $9 billion; decentralized finance (DeFi) TVL increased by 38.9% year-on-year; and the global stablecoin market value decreased by 5.2% overall in 2023.

On January 13th, it was reported that Venezuela's national oil currency, Petro, plans to cease operations on January 15th. According to information displayed on Patria Platform, the only website currently able to trade Petro, all cryptocurrency wallets held on the platform will be closed on January 15th.

GoPlus posted on social media stating that the GoPlus team has discovered a serious deviation in the price conversion of the current UniSat platform. All users who trade inscriptions should pay attention to the BTC price and manually calculate the value of the legal currency to avoid financial losses and situations of incorrect purchases caused by the calculation bug of the legal currency price.

On January 13th, AI Arena announced the establishment of the CortX Foundation to support the growth and development of the AI Arena ecosystem. They also revealed the NRN token economy and announced that 80 million tokens (8% of the total supply of 1 billion) will be distributed to the AI Arena community through airdrops during Season 1. Of these, 40 million tokens will be used for the upcoming P2A competition, and 40 million tokens will be used for NRN reward boxes.

This is a list of high level statements, predictions and beliefs that relate to the concept of Onchain and to some extent crypto at large. A lot of them—if not all of them—are consensus, obvious and nothing new. I'll likely add to this over time.

I had a friend tell me earlier this year that she thought my “cosmic timing might be off.” What she meant, I gathered, is that I have a tendency to push my will on the world rather than to pause patiently for its signals to act. A normal thing for those of us in tech, I guess: a belief that the world is our canvas to write rather than read, to inscribe our utopias rather than assess our direr realities.

I left crypto at the tail end of 2020. I felt the gap was too wide between the future a core group of smart, earnest, and technically impressive true believers were gesturing at, and what was really happening. 2020 was the year where Yield Farming exploded, and it seemed to confirm that crypto had accepted its main purpose as a vehicle for self-referential, mindless, speculative bullshit. It’d lost all its seriousness, and all of its promise with it.