Weekly Roundup 12/13/24 (French Hill, Circle x Binance, more OCP2.0) (EP582)

On The Brink with Castle Island

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode:

• French Hill wins the nomination to chair the House Financial Services Committee
• Riot Platforms, a bitcoin mining company, announced the intention to raise $500 million via a convertible note offering. The proceeds will be used to acquire additional bitcoins, and for general corporate purposes.
• MicroStrategy acquired another 21,550 bitcoin for roughly $2.1 billion.
• Circle and Binance announced a partnership with the goal of expanding the reach of Circle's USDC stablecoin across Binance's trading, saving, and payments platforms. Additionally, Binance plans to adopt USDC as part of the company's corporate treasury.

• Coincheck, the second largest crypto exchange in Japan, went public via SPAC, joining Coinbase as the only other crypto exchange listed on Nasdaq.
• The total stablecoin market cap eclipsed $200 billion this week, a record high following a 13% increase in supply in the past month.
• Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin gained approval from New York's Department of Financial Services, a key step in the company's plan to launch the tokenized dollar by year-end.
• Google announced a new quantum computing chip, though the specs are still many orders of magnitude away from threatening the encryption levels of Bitcoin and other crypto protocols.

Sponsor notes:

• Coin Metrics State of the Network: Where in the World is Crypto Trading?
• Exploring the Kimchi premium, regional exchange activity, and crypto seasonality