[Daily] Litecoin has company

Good morning! Welcome to The Daily Moon.  A dormant Bitcoin whale has awakened after 12 years. The whale moved tokens worth $11 million to multiple wallets. Thankfully, nothing has moved to exchanges yet. They still HODL 600 BTC worth ~$16 million. 😥

As of Tuesday, 7PM IST

The markets were jittery over fears of regulatory action. Bitcoin was flat on concerns of a sell-off. Ethereum continued to see exits from whales. S&P 500 and Nasdaq saw selling in technology stocks during early trade. Back home, Sensex and Nifty ended higher on gains in power stocks. 

LTC Bulls Target Halving 

Litecoin is just 100 days away from halving and the bulls are excited. There’s an expectation that the PoW token will rally in the months leading up to the event. It’s a stark contrast to Bitcoin, though. 

FYI Halving is a phenomenon where LTC slashes the rewards for new tokens mined. Currently, Litecoin issues 12.5 tokens as a reward for every block added. This will be halved to 6.25 tokens. 

How’s the mood?PoW tokens such as Bitcoin and Litecoin undergo halving every four years. It is considered bullish because the token supply (as rewards) drops. However, each token behaves differently. Let’s take a look:

1. Bitcoin typically rallies for a full year after the halving. 

2. Litecoin rallies in the three-to-six-month period leading to a halving. 

3. LTC had ~320% gains in the 45 days following each halving. 

4. BTC rallied ~780% for almost a year after the 2020 halving. 

Bitcoin’s next halving will happen in April 2024, so there’s still a lot of time to go. FYI, we took BTC and LTC because they are referred to as the gold and silver equivalents in crypto.  

Is volatility out?Not completely. In Litecoin’s case, the token is up ~2.5% because the whales are back in action. Meanwhile, Bitcoin treads on a slippery slope. Its Ordinals Inscriptions (Bitcoin NFTs basically) have revived after a sluggish phase. But that hasn’t been enough to stop the downward trend. 

Can Stablecoins Be Tweaked?

Stablecoins are considered relatively less volatile than other crypto tokens. But regulators across the world insist that CBDCs are the way forward. Probably what’s missing in stablecoins is programmability. 

Go deeperSo, we know how stablecoins work. 1 USDT=$1 because Tether has reserves to maintain its value against the fiat currency. But what makes it more valuable is the ability to keep adding use cases. Here are some examples: 

• Banking: Stablecoins can be an alternative to physical currency. But beyond that, programmable tokens that can be exchanged against other stablecoins (like Tether GBP for instance) will be beneficial to users. 

• Investment: Rather than funds sitting idle, stablecoins can have a mechanism to pool funds to a community investment vehicle. 

• Inflation hedge: When prices of products increase, the value of fiat currencies decreases. To counter this, experts suggest stablecoins can track the inflation rate to ensure minimal volatility in prices. These inflation-linked tokens can be used for real estate and other high-value purchases. 

Stablecoins can make finance accessible to the unbanked. Developers just need to think out of the box. 

Google Got (More) AI

ChatGPT has unleashed a wave. Of everyone adding generative AI to everything. But no one seems to be more in a rush than Google. As if the uncreatively named Bard and adding generative AI to some products weren’t enough. Now they’re bringing generative AI to cybersecurity. Drumroll. Not. 🙄

Sec-PaLMThat’s the name of the specialised security-focussed language model it has built. Google has a Pathways Language Model (PaLM) which it launched last year. Basically, the underlying machinery that makes an AI system work and appear intelligent. On Monday, Google announced the Security Artificial Intelligence Workbench based on Sec-PaLM (Security PaLM. Keep up folks). If there’s one thing tech firms love more than AI right now, it is their eternal love for abbreviations.

What does it do?It’s a long list. Very technical. 

The TL;DR: it will go through your organisation’s security stuff and tell you in human-readable language what you’re supposed to do. Google will test it out with partners, slowly, before making it available for everyone. There are other claims, but no one’s really sure if this will work.  

California Likes DAOs

You win some; you lose some. Nobody knows what the US wants to do with crypto regulation. But there are green shoots like this proposed bill in California that gets DAOs. 

What’s this about?A San Francisco legislator introduced a bill that proposes to change the state’s corporate code, which will allow DAOs, blockchain networks, and smart contract protocols to be set up in California. They’ll also pay taxes, so it’s a win-win for all. 

The tech connectionThe bill has made people happy because this makes building an ecosystem around tokens legal. Let’s hope others in the US are watching and changing gears to speed up too.

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Who are we? This newsletter’s ambition is to educate (and to entertain). The world of money is changing everyday and we want to help you decode what’s happening in the world of crypto, public markets in the US and India.