Coinbase bets big on new SEC 🤑

Fewer checks and balances. More memecoins.

January 31, 2025

Hi! Liam here.

filedIndustry optimism runneth over. 

The new Securities and Exchange Commission chair has barely stepped into his new office, and crypto tycoons are already betting that Paul Atkins will look favourably on the industry. 

Crypto exchange Coinbase announced it's planning a massive overhaul of its token listing process this month. 

There’s historically been a high barrier to clear to get listed on the exchange. That’s all changing, said Brian Armstrong, the Coinbase CEO. 

Instead of the tedious work of examining each application, he said the company may start blocking listings after letting users decide on which token is actually a scam and which one has bag-pumping promise. 

Think community notes, but for cryptocurrencies. 

“Evaluating each one by one is no longer feasible,” Armstrong said on X, referring to the hundreds of thousands of tokens popping up weekly. “Regulators need to understand that applying for approval for each one is totally infeasible at this point as well (they can't do 1m a week).”

Fund issuers are also reading the room. 

The number of spot exchange-traded crypto funds has soared in the new year. They’re also getting a lot more exotic. 

There are applications in play for Cardano, Hedera, Litecoin, and a slew of others for Solana and XRP.

Some issuers like Tuttle Capital even filed leveraged ETF applications for memecoins like TRUMP, MELANIA, and BONK. 

No way would these fly under former SEC Chair Gary Gensler.

But perhaps industry optimism is edging toward hallucination.

“A leadership change is definitely beneficial for crypto, but the SEC is still a regulator,” Bryan Armour, the director of passive strategies research, North America at Morningstar, told the Financial Times.

Court documents show how a North Korean “IT worker” infiltrated a trading bot. The rest, well, is history. Ben Weiss reports.

AI hype is spilling over to the crypto industry in a big way. But one project and its audacious founder may be more hot air than matter. Tim Craig reports.

If you pivoted to AI, it’s time to pivot back to crypto. At least, that’s what many of the world’s largest venture firms are doing. Eric Johansson reports.

Post of the week

With Gensler headed back to teaching, at least one crypto founder has found a unique way to exact revenge on the former regulator.

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