Messari Daily Brief Jan. 7, 2021 - "Insurrection"

I saw some people comparing yesterday's “insurrection” on the U.S. Capitol to a military coup or even 9/11. Just…no. There is no comparison to be made between the images of a viking LARPer standing behind the Speaker’s podium due to shoddy Capitol security, and the smoldering ruins of a symbol of American capitalism containing the remains of nearly 3,000 souls. Still, yesterday was (as W so aptly put four years ago) “some weird shit.” The chaos presidency (h/t Jeb!) may be mercifully coming to an end, but we could still have more economic and monetary chaos as the political pendulum swings left and Democrats take full control of the government in two weeks. The staggering bitcoin rally seems to reflect that “fear” of unchecked spending.

The long-term consequences of massive monetary expansion are known (end of the USD reserve), even if they are still underappreciated. At first glance, that seems very bad. Naval said something on Clubhouse like "I feel sad when Bitcoin goes up because it means the world is going down.” But I think that misses the mark. Our political systems weren’t built to survive the internet age, and their underperformance (and ultimate failures) have seemed like a foregone conclusion even before the dawn of bitcoin. If anything, we should be relieved, not saddened by crypto’s emergence because it’s a lifeboat that has arrived just in time.

We should hope Biden proves to be a historically temperate one-term President, one that presides over an orderly (if painful) fiscal restructuring that embraces crypto rather than strangling it. We might hope he takes cues from the original President Bush, who oversaw the orderly unwinding of the Soviet Union, and was the right man for the moment, even though he served just one term.

Headlines that matter:

• INTEL: MKR raises debt ceilings for ETH, USDC; Solana, Cosmos release network upgrades.
• Crypto market cap hits $1 trillion for the first time (CoinDesk)
• DeFi “laggard” MKR surges nearly 50% (CoinDesk)
• Dfinity announces mainnet launch (Decrypt)
• ShapeShift shares plans to drop KYC and return to full DeFi
• CME becomes the biggest bitcoin futures exchange with 20% of open interest (CoinDesk)
• Korean game maker Nexon looks to make $460 million purchase of Bithumb (The Block)
• The year of the “wrapped tokens” continues as BTSE mints Wrapped XMR (Decrypt)
• Vitalik explains ETH scaling savior “rollups"
• Daily Shade: Sara Mauskopf on working at Coinbase during a political riot.