News of News For Bears and Bulls – Trustnodes

While Iranians gear up to remember the fifth of November, most are watching whether there will be some cultural revolution of sorts at the Fed too.

JP Morgan projects that if the central bank raises interest rates by just 50 basis points and Fed Chair Jerome Powell expresses his willingness to tolerate inflation and tight labor market conditions, the S&P 500 could climb more than 10% in a day.

Much hopium in the air with that being a lot of ifs, but the already largely leaked script of Fed will probably say a 0.75% hike and then the public will be ‘prepared’ for slower raises in December.

That would confirm the ‘pivot’ as we would be out of crisis hikes, and we would enter a new stage where interest rates either go up slowly, don’t move at all, or even go down a bit.

The new normal, depending obviously on just what the economy does and on just how much higher than neutral they have targeted their tightning.

Regardless, if we’re not quite yet out of the woods fully, we’re probably at that stage where we get to look at the fields beyond the woods.

Welcome to News of News, the bit where we clean our desk, highlighting some of the developments in the process.

Starting with miserable Britain, where a $200 a month extra on energy or $100 a month more due to rising interest rates – a complete calamity that sent people starving according to corporate media – now gets added a tax of $3,500 for 9 to 5 workers because somehow an elected billionaire gets to rule UK.

You didn’t like $100 worse off, not that anyone asked you, that’s just what the media said you don’t like. So enjoy thousands of pounds off and this one you will like, the media says.

And off quickly to nicer things with Reuters reporting the Blockchain company Valereum has received regulatory approval to buy the Gibraltar Stock Exchange (GSX).

Few have heard of Valereum. They’re apparently creating a “a seamless NFT bridge between Fiat and Crypto Securities.” Right.

Crypto banning China tried to project at FinTech Week in Singapore that they’re still a modern country, they’re not going back to peasantism with their Sinonization of Marxism, or indeed their hostile attitudes towards cryptos, by presenting an mBridge that can allow other central banks to create their central bank digital currencies (CBDC) on this Chinese platform.

If anyone is dumb enough to use it presumably, but Singapore has been dumb enough to try and restrict cryptos to accredited investors only, the very rich.

They too are trying to present a not-peasants front by announcing “DBS Bank, JP Morgan and SBI Digital Asset Holdings conducted foreign exchange and government bond transactions against liquidity pools comprising of tokenised Singapore Government Securities Bonds, Japanese Government Bonds, Japanese Yen (JPY) and Singapore Dollar (SGD).”

For this they forked Aave, added gatekeeping, and put it on Polygon, according to the whitepaper. The bonds traded in addition were a simulation, with the point here presumably being that they know how to copy paste.

Hong Kong on the other hand is trying to liberalize their restrictions on crypto imposed after China tightened its grip.

That grip has not worked out for the once great city, and so China is now trying to go back to affirming the ‘one country, two systems’ policy, and that seemingly comes with a more accommodative approach towards cryptos. OKX’s Director of Financial Markets, Lennix Lai, said:

“This signal from the Hong Kong Government is very important and gives us a better sense of the regulatory direction that it has in mind for the industry.

With the Government reconsidering its stance and potentially opening up the market for some retail participation, this increasingly open attitude has given us enough confidence to make the Hong Kong market a priority.

For the crypto ecosystem there to flourish, those players with Asia-Pacific headquarters in Hong Kong will need to attract a lot of talent. This will require both the presence of crypto-minded professionals and net migration into Hong Kong.”

You’d expect Lai to say all that. Upbeat because you’re not getting slapped, but the real winner in this mess in Singapore and Hong Kong will probably be Tokyo.

The crypto industry can at least have some say in Tokyo, a democracy, as can the citizens of Tokyo, and so for longer term stability, crypto businesses probably should now stop playing around and just head to Tokyo for their Asia HQ.

Boris Johnson, the Churchill-light get Brexit done and out former Prime Minister of UK, is to speak at the International Symposium on Blockchain Advancements conference on December the 2nd in Singapore.

He reportedly received £130,000 for a speech at an insurance summit last month. It is unclear how much he’ll receive for the speech at this blockchain conference, but it is not quite expected that he will have any insight on blockchain as such, with Johnson being more into latin than Solidity.

From a policy perspective however he was in charge when his Chancellor, now Prime Minister, announced crypto related ambitions, so if he wanted he could provide insights on how the government can approach this industry.

“We’re going to put ducts overtop over the bit coin miners feeding the warm air into the hot water tanks which heats the water almost for free.”

So says Ray Blanchard, a developer in Windsor, Canada, presenting his Bitcoin Building where he has put a lot of solar panels for tax reasons, and so bitcoin miners will be used to consume the excess energy.

Loopholes and loopholes, and then there’s gimmicks, like an NFT vending machine in central London where passers-by can get the code to a donated NFT for just $10.

Neat, almost as much as BBVA Mexico launching an investment fund for web3, blockchain, metaverse, tokens, and NFT assets.

That’s still nothing compared to uranium-backed non-fungible tokens. Madison Metals says that Lux will initially tokenize 7.65 million pounds of U3O8 that Madison has contributed to the Lux partnership.

That being Lux Market, through which “almost anyone in the world will be able to mint Lux Uranium NFTs.” Except Iran presumably?

These are tokenized though, with $5.12 million worth of uranium backed NFTs already sold, exceeding all expectations.

We don’t even want to ask if actual delivery is an option, but it is primarily just a way to invest and gain price exposure to Uranium.

If this was a proper legit token on a public blockchain, able to freely move etc, then you can defi it where you can hedge, option, etc. Making it sort of a listing of a new commodity on the new decentralized financial system.

This instead is on the Lux Network, which they describe as “the first decentralized blockchain integrated with and operated by a network of regulated bank and money transmitter partners.” So not quite a defi commodity listing.

In the same vain, a Norwegian oil and gas company claims to have implemented smart contracts, but on GumboNet, which “enables the company to automate payments under their existing natural language contract using Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) data from Equinor and third-party logistics systems.”

So a lot is moving, but crypto prices aren’t moving much. Making it builders time with still quite a lot to go towards automating finance through public and permissionless blockchain systems.