OVERVIEW

Stuck In The Suck ☁️ 

Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto market heatmap:

And here’s a look at crypto’s total and altcoin market cap YTD:

New In Three Sentences
Crypto News 📰

💸 Robinhood’s $8 BTC Giveaway: Not Exactly “Free”

Robinhood dangled eight dollars in Bitcoin to Gold subscribers, but they’ll yank it back unless you pony up another $55 to keep Gold for a whole year. That means anyone who paid five bucks to grab the “free” $8 now needs to cough up the rest, or lose it. Reddit.

📝 IRS Crypto Reporting Relief: A Taxpayer ‘Phew!’

The IRS just slammed the brakes on forcing FIFO-only reporting for crypto, giving battered investors a breather until the end of 2025. It’s their tacit admission that digital asset taxation is basically rocket science, and rushing it might blow up everyone’s wallet. CryptoSlate.

🤝 Vitalik Buterin’s ETH Donation: Tornado, Meet Lifeline

Ethereum’s co-founder just wired a cool 100 ETH (about $340k) to fund Tornado Cash dev Alexey Pertsev’s legal defense. Tornado Cash was banned in 2022, only to have a U.S. appeals court say smart contracts aren’t exactly “property” after all. Now, with Buterin’s big check, this pivotal lawsuit doubles as a crypto-themed soap opera: censorship vs. code. DailyHODL.

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
Stuck In The Suck 🤦‍♂️ 

The altcoin market recaptured the $1 trillion level overnight before retreating back into the $980 value area. Why? Some of you are familiar with it, but for those who are not, let me introduce you to the Cloud:

The image above shows the Ichimoku Kinko Hyo system on the altcoin market’s daily chart. Ichimoku is a form of Japanese analysis and trading. If you’re unfamiliar with it, that’s fine.

The most important thing you need to know about the Ichimoku system is this: the Cloud is bad. ⛔️ 

There’s a ton of trading systems that tell you when to take a trade but not many that tell you when to stay the f*ck away. The Ichimoku system is one of those.

And the component of the Ichimoku system that is the DANGER DANGER DANGER zone is the Cloud. The Cloud is the big blob of green or red on a chart that looks like a paint spill.

Everything that is bad in the world and in your life exists inside the Cloud. Don’t believe me? Depending on how long you’ve been a reader of the Litepaper, then Bitcoin’s weekly chart from the December 29, 2022, Litepaper is a perfect example of how much suck the Cloud is:

And when I say everything bad in the world and your life exists, I mean everything.

We’ll have to zoom into the chart above to see what I’m talking about. If you look really closely, maybe squint a little, you can see all the bad things that exist in the Cloud:

The Cloud represents indecision, volatility, whipsaws, broken hearts, broken dreams, fakeouts, and all-around misery. And a good chunk of the crypto market is currently inside the Cloud.

Cardano

Stellar

Bitcoin

Dogecoin

Expect horrible trading conditions to continue until there’s a clear breakout from the Cloud. 🥹 

NEWS
The Guy Who Is 1,000x Worse Than SBF Or Madoff Is Coming To The US ✊ 

The collapse of FTX and the drama with SBF was a big deal, but the actual damage done was little. Don’t get me wrong, people got screwed over hardcore by the judicial system, but close to 90% of the assets have been recovered. 💵 

Hell, just this Monday (December 30, 2024), the 10th distribution of $131 million from the DoJ to Bernie Madoff’s victims brings the total to a whopping 93.71% of the fraud losses recovered!

But who is worse than SBF or Madoff? Who am I talking about? One of the most punchable faces in crypto: Do Kwon. 👊 

If Do ‘Con’ Kwon’s crime was in stonks, he’d be more infamous than Madoff or SBF. But this is crypto, so he mostly floats under the financial news radar despite the carnage Terra’s LUNA and TerraUSD collapse had.

To put things into perspective, SBF’s FTX fiasco was a mosquito bite, itchy and irritating. Do Kwon’s $40+ billion collapse of Terra was a swarm of murder hornets at an outdoor wedding. 🐝 

While any recompense probably won’t be happening, at least, hopefully, there will be some justice. Kwon was handed over to the FBI on Tuesday. And pleaded not guilty at his first US court appearance in Manhattan today. 🧑‍⚖️  

News In Three Sentences
Metaverse, NFT, & Gaming News 🎮️

⚔️ Axie Origins Final Era: AXS on the Line

Axie Infinity’s Season 11 is capped off 2024 with a 24,000 AXS prize pool, fresh tournament hype, and collectible chest rewards for Mystic Axie hodlers. The top 15k players grab those sweet AXS gains, while ranks up to 30k snag fancy avatars and borders. AxieInfinity blog.

🚀 eCash 2024: A Year of Constant Upgrades and Zero Chill

From Chronik integration to real-time difficulty smoothing and brand-new apps galore, eCash basically sprinted through 2024 with a string of upgrades that shrunk block times and killed off slowdowns. Devs also rolled out privacy features, P2P exchanges, staking dApps, and hammered inflation under 1%. eCash blog.

🔎 The Graph 2024: Dawn of Decentralized Data

This year, The Graph blitzed to L2 scaling on Arbitrum, rolled out GRC-20 (the new “common language” for data), and locked in a reality where 10,000 subgraphs rely solely on the decentralized network. They also sealed alliances with Soneium, expanded to 80+ blockchains, and introduced a shinier payment system called TAP that shaves off on-chain overhead. The Graph.

News In Three Sentences
DeFi, DEX, and Lending Protocol News 🏦

🔄 1inch 2024: The Year DeFi Got a Facelift

Between cross-chain swaps, a shiny Mastercard-backed crypto debit card, and top-tier security upgrades, 1inch basically decided to be everyone’s DeFi superhero. The new Fusion+ upgrade showed off cross-chain wizardry, while the 1inch Wallet brought better scam protection and a friendlier flow. 1inch blog.

🍣 Sushi 2024: The Year of “Swap Anything”

Sushi hammered out aggregator volume topping $1.5B since July, dished out $2M in sushi bar rewards, and integrated new chains from Tron to Sonic Labs. The revamped aggregator gave 40%+ MoM volume growth, the Sushi Bar got reboots for xSUSHI stakers, and expansions such as limit orders, DCA, cross-chain bridging, and a polished referral program made DeFi a breeze. SushiSwap blog.

💥 Storj 2024: 7x Growth, AI on Demand, and Channel-First Power Moves

Storj capped off a colossal year of 20% month-over-month growth and scored two major acquisitions: Valdi (on-demand AI/GPU compute) and Petagene (cunoFS for HPC-level file access). This new trifecta of distributed cloud storage + GPU compute + HPC is set to crush the big cloud guys on performance, cost, and carbon footprint. Storj blog.

LINKS
Links That Don’t Suck 🔗

🌡️ Celsius Network appeals $2B disparagement claim rejection against FTX

📺️ Tokens and scams alike surge amid Netflix’s Squid Game season 2 launch

📈 Bitcoin DeFi trends predicated to soar in 2025

🚗 Tesla faces first delivery decline as 2024 numbers fall below 2023

🤯 Man asks clerk to pick out a lottery ticket, wins $2 million

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