Prizmabet

‘DeFi on Bitcoin’ Gets a Boost as BOB L2 Integrates $6B BTC Staking Protocol Babylon

The integration allows BOB, a “hybrid L2,” to use Bitcoin as its anchor chain where transactions with assets from other chains can be irreversibly recorded.

BOB, the “hybrid layer-2” network seeking to make Bitcoin the center of the decentralized finance (DeFi) universe, has taken a step toward that goal by integrating with BTC restaking protocol Babylon.

An abbreviation of “Build on Bitcoin,” BOB’s aim is to establish Bitcoin as the foundational network for DeFi by creating bridges between itself and other blockchains, using Bitcoin as the anchor chain to finalize transactions.

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Integrating with Babylon forms part of BOB’s roadmap by giving it “Bitcoin finality,” the point at which a transaction is permanent and irreversible on the oldest blockchain. Assets deposited from other chains on BOB would be confirmed and verified on Bitcoin via Babylon’s protocol.

Babylon, which is billed as a way of using BTC to secure other protocols and decentralized applications, is the foremost Bitcoin staking project in the sector, with total value locked (TVL) of around $6 billion.

Staking refers to offering up crypto tokens to support the running of a blockchain network in return for rewards, similar to accruing interest in a bank account.

Such a process is fundamental to networks like Ethereum and Solana which run on a “proof-of-stake” mechanism, but is absent from Bitcoin, which use “proof of work.”

However, given that the total market cap of bitcoin is greater than every other crypto asset combined, projects like Babylon are exploring ways of tapping into BTC’s deep reserves to benefit the broader industry.

This week, Babylon completed its third staking round in which it took its total BTC staked to 57,290 ($5.93 billion), placing it in the top 10 protocols by TVL, according to data tracked by DeFiLlama.

BOB’s next step is to launch bridges connecting Bitcoin to other networks, using BitVM, a computing paradigm designed to allow Ethereum-style smart contracts on the world’s original blockchain. BitVM is set for testnet release in Q1 of 2025.

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The Fed Pivot is Finally Here

Last week, the Fed cut its federal funds target rate by 50 bps to 5.00% p.a. (upper limit) which could have strong implications for the crypto community, says Andre Dragosh, head of research Europe, CoinShares.

“The time has come,” stated Fed chairman Jerome Powell back in August at the Jackson Hole central bank symposium. Last week, the Fed cut its federal funds target rate by 50 bps to 5.00% p.a. (upper limit) which was slightly more than markets had priced in before the FOMC meeting. In other words, the Fed positively surprised markets with this rate cut.

It is quite likely that the Fed is just getting started with rate cuts. At the time of writing, the market already expects 3 additional cuts (75 bps) by year-end and another 5 cuts (125 bps) next year through December 2025. The Fed has also telegraphed additional cuts via its latest Summary of Economic Projections (SEP) (aka “dot plot”).

Nonetheless, despite this more-than-expected interest rate reduction of 50 bps, it is quite likely that the Fed still remains “behind the curve.”

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For instance, a standard Taylor rule based on the unemployment rate and core PCE inflation implies that a fed funds target rate of around 3.6% p.a. is already warranted based on the underlying economic and inflationary momentum.

In addition, the latest fund manager survey by Bank of America indicates that monetary policy was still “too restrictive” in September 2024 – in fact, the most restrictive since October 2008 according to this survey.

There still remains an increased risk of a recession as several reliable indicators such as the prominent “Sahm rule” remain triggered.

That being said, our quantitative analyses imply that global growth has become less relevant for the performance of bitcoin while other factors like monetary policy or the US dollar have become more important.

In other words, a US recession might not be as negative as widely anticipated for bitcoin and other cryptoassets. To the contrary, it may lead to even more Fed rate cut expectations and US Dollar weakness which could provide even more tailwind.

With the latest move by the Fed and other major central banks, the global liquidity tide is clearly turning; global money supply has already reached new all-time highs and is accelerating. Expansionary money supply growth periods are usually associated with bitcoin bull runs.

The re-steepening of the US yield curve which tends to be a recessionary indicator is also an indicator for increasing liquidity and therefore bullish for scarce assets like bitcoin.

What is more is that the increase in global liquidity is coinciding with the increasing supply scarcity of bitcoin which has been intensifying since the latest halving in April 2024.

Our analyses have shown that there tends to be a significant lag between the halving event itself and the moment the supply shock starts to become significant, as the supply deficit only tends to accumulate gradually over time.

So, it appears as if there is a perfect confluence between an increase in potential demand via global money supply and a simultaneous reduction in available supply via the halving.

The market has been mired in “chopsolidation” – a choppy consolidating range-bound market – since the latest all-time high in March 2024. This was due to several factors such as government sales of bitcoin, Mt. Gox trustee’s distribution of bitcoins, or the macro capitulation in early August 2024.

In this context, the summer months have generally been one of the worst performing months for bitcoin historically with September being the worst month of the year.

However, Q4 tends to be the best month for bitcoin from a pure performance seasonality perspective and we also expect bitcoin to break out of this chopsolidation in Q4.

It seems as if the wait for a new break-out to the upside is finally over. The Fed pivot may have just delivered the perfect catalyst for that.

Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.

Welcome, Crypto, to the Fiery Cauldron of U.S. Presidential Politics

Before the push for the White House really gets rolling, digital assets – including bitcoins and CBDCs – are being hefted as ideological effigies, but will it matter?

Whether the crypto industry wants the spotlight or not, digital assets are among the earliest talking points in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, with the most prominent of the new candidates even invoking bitcoins in his campaign opener as evidence of President Joe Biden’s missteps.

In an election in which the heaviest fireworks will likely be seen on the side of the Republican challengers, former President Donald Trump – occupying the role as Biden’s leading nemesis – is himself facing an early-days threat from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who immediately staked out crypto as a kind of political shorthand.

“The current regime, clearly, has it out for Bitcoin,” DeSantis said from his campaign’s Twitter Spaces launch pad, using crypto to represent innovation and personal freedom. “Bitcoin represents a threat to them, they’re trying to regulate it out of existence.”

If digital assets keep figuring into presidential politics, they’ll likely feature as a stand-in to illustrate the perceived abuses of the federal government, according to industry insiders and political experts. But the attention may not contribute to the policy progress crypto businesses crave, because the sector is waiting for comprehensive rules, not political sentiments.

So far, Biden’s administration is being accused of squeezing emerging crypto businesses and trying to set up a central bank digital currency (CBDC) to spy on citizens, according to DeSantis and one of Biden’s challengers from his own party, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

For DeSantis, his pro-crypto position also separates him from chief rival Trump. The digital assets views of the Republican frontrunner for the 2024 nomination have historically been rooted in distrust, with Trump having declared in 2019 that he was “not a fan” of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, “whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air.” However, more recently Trump profited from his own series of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), so his position remains murky.

Two weeks before DeSantis opened his campaign beside tech mogul Elon Musk, he sought to make a political moment out of his state’s “ban” of a U.S. CBDC. Experts in the commercial law Florida used to act against a potential digital dollar have said Florida’s effort isn’t a ban at all, but that might not matter for political supporters impressed by DeSantis’ zeal.

“He seems to understand that private solutions being developed in the crypto markets are likely to be superior, in part because they pose fewer risks to the individual liberty of the public,” said Dave Weisberger, CEO of CoinRoutes, a trading tech startup in DeSantis’ home state.

But DeSantis is generally vague about his defense of cryptocurrencies, and his remarks don’t seem to acknowledge they are online instruments that can operate outside the whims of sovereign states. When he says that Democrats – given another four years – will “probably end up killing it,” it seems to suggest the U.S. lawmakers would have more reach than they do, and that crypto won’t find homes in other global jurisdictions, such as in Europe.

“It’s more about how he’s trying to paint himself as a fresh face,” said Ron Hammond, director of government relations for the Blockchain Association in Washington. “He’s trying to say ‘I’m the younger gun here who’s trying to get something done.’”

In the know

A rival Republican candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, has argued the Florida governor doesn’t know the topic well. The biotech entrepreneur told CoinDesk he’s pro-Bitcoin because he sees it as a “decentralized alternative” to the U.S dollar, improving the country’s financial infrastructure by presenting “a source of competition to the existing system.” And he says he understands it much more than DeSantis.

Other notable Republican candidates, such as Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and his state’s former governor, Nikki Haley, have reserved comment on the financial movement. Despite his position on the Senate Banking Committee that could help decide U.S. crypto’s fate, Scott has taken the most neutral possible stance, saying lawmakers should take a “thoughtful, bipartisan and balanced approach” to overseeing the industry in the U.S.

Among the Democratic challengers to standard-bearer Biden, Kennedy – who also holds other views that overlap with Republican positions – is fervently pro-crypto.

“Cryptocurrencies, led by bitcoin, along with other crypto technologies are a major innovation engine,” Kennedy wrote in a tweet earlier this month. “It is a mistake for the U.S. government to hobble the industry and drive innovation elsewhere.”

The most popular of the pro-crypto candidates among voters, DeSantis, still trails well behind Trump in primary polling, but the fact that there are multiple candidates saying nice things about digital assets is a positive for some in the sector.

“We now have three presidential candidates, spanning both political parties, who explicitly support the digital asset industry,” CoinRoutes’ Weisberger said. “While Republicans are trying to make crypto a partisan issue, the industry itself doesn’t believe it should be, which is why the support from RFK Jr. is also potentially important.”

Biden is the only candidate with a federal record on digital assets. So far, his administration hasn’t set down any significant crypto policy, and the financial regulators he picked have taken a staunchly critical view of the industry. His Securities and Exchange Commission chief, Gary Gensler, may be the most antagonistic of the bunch, combating digital assets businesses in courtrooms and with his agency’s rule proposals. And the direct messages from Biden’s Department of the Treasury and his own White House have been increasingly suspicious of the industry.

Though it wasn’t a campaign remark, Biden, who last month formally announced

The Risks and Rewards of High-Frequency Crypto Trading #prizmabet

High-frequency trading can be lucrative in newer markets like crypto, but HFT is not without its unique risks.

I had a nice conversation this week about high-frequency trading (HFT) in crypto markets. Born out of an idea I had to explore the space generally, a bout of fortuitous timing let me speak with someone who has engaged in it first hand.

I’ve always viewed HFT as a quantitative trading style that combines individual quantitative acumen with technical tools to take advantage of price discrepancies. Market makers in stocks and derivatives markets famously deploy the technique, leveraging coding ability and technical skill to capture trading opportunities first.

Often this involves arbitrage, where one asset has two different prices on separate exchanges. If, for instance, you can buy an asset for $10 on one exchange and nearly instantly sell it for $10.25 on another, you will have essentially secured a riskless profit. Doing so over and over can be highly profitable. Some of the more well-known names in HFT are Jump Trading, Citadel Securities, Virtu and Hudson River Trading.

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In popular culture, HFT has been displayed in Michael Lewis’ 2014 book “Flash Boys,” along with the 2018 film “The Hummingbird Project.” Both describe real and fictional, respectively, efforts to help HFT firms speed up their trading reaction times by fractions of a second by running a new, straighter fiber-optic line across the U.S. Today, the fastest firms use microwave or shortwave radio networks.

HFT certainly has its critics. Some write it off as outright cheating, arguing that access to faster throughput enables them to “front run” orders. Others say that it provides an unfair advantage to institutions over individuals. And others attribute rapid crashes in prices to HFT.

Use of HFT within crypto markets could amplify those critiques to symphonic levels. Still, the part of me that enjoys the marriage between markets and technology can’t help but look further.

My curiosity brought me to a conversation with Keone Hon, CEO of Monad Labs. His current firm’s mission centers around delivering a proof of chain (PoS) blockchain, which increases transaction throughput, and maintains compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). His prior role included a role as quantitative trading team lead at a separate HFT firm.

And while I spent the first half of this column discussing what I knew (or thought I knew), I’d like to spend the second half discussing what I learned. Here are some takeaways:

What HFT provides to crypto

Part of the edge is borne out of the nascency of crypto itself. Since there are fewer participants than there are over in traditional markets, price dislocations are more common – meaning larger profits. As more participants come in, those opportunities will become more scarce.

Buyers and sellers are not necessarily prepared to trade at the same time, so HFT firms bridge that time gap, buying from sellers and vice versa.They also compete with other traders to quote prices as tightly as possible.

“At the end of the day, professional automated trading is providing a service, although it may not sound that way,” Hon said.

The different HFT strategies in use

Candidly, this was my most selfish question. I enjoy all conversations around strategy and how individuals synthesize their own interpretation of data into a plan of action.

It was apparent that a class of strategies exists in HFT. One (mentioned previously) is arbitrage, whereby the trader is looking to take advantage of mispricings across different exchanges. Other strategies are alpha-driven, kicked off by “quantitative signals that come from measuring things happening on the order book,” Hon said.

What stood out to me during our strategy discussion was the need to not only be thoughtful in execution, but in position management and exchange evaluation. Part of the requirement of trading across exchanges involves maintaining inventory there, which brings with it additional elements of counterparty risk, particularly with centralized exchanges.

To that end, I got the sense that Hon feels that decentralized exchanges need to catch up to their centralized counterparts in terms of the user experience and quality of execution. My impression is that part of his current firm’s goal is to bridge the current gap between centralized and decentralized exchanges.

Regulation

How can you have a conversation on crypto and trading and not bring up regulation at least once? On that end, I suspect his response will surprise some. My impression is that Hon views sensible regulation as good, if for no other reason than it lets participants operate within a prescribed framework.

“It’s actually beneficial to make sure that exchanges are playing by the rules. It’s good to make sure that they have proof of reserves and assets that they claim,” Hon said.

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This is actually similar to what other crypto participants have told me. A clear set of rules, implemented without malice, would enable crypto participants to operate effectively, efficiently and… quickly.

Edited by Nick Baker.