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Overhauling Crypto Policy at the SEC

Gary Gensler officially stepped down as chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the agency’s approach to crypto is getting an overhaul.

Author

Ryan Allis
January 22, 2025

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Issue Summary: Welcome back to Coinstack, the weekly newsletter for institutional crypto investors and industry insiders. We review the top news, stats, and reports in the digital asset ecosystem for our 300k weekly subscribers. This week the SEC formed a new crypto task force, Trump named crypto-friendly SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda, Hyperliquid reported record-high $22B in 24-hour volume and big venture news came in for Phantom Wallet ($150M) and 1Money ($20M).

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💵 Weekly Crypto Fundraises & Deals

Here are all the crypto fundraises we heard about this week, ranked by size…

  1. Phantom Wallet, the crypto wallet app, has raised $150M and secured a $3B valuation, led by Venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Paradigm

  2. Startup 1Money, a next-generation payment network engineered to be the fastest, cheapest, and most compliant Layer 1 protocol dedicated solely to stablecoin payments, has raised $20M, led by over a dozen participants

  3. Reown, Web3 infrastructure development firm,has raised $13M in a Series B funding round, led by Union Square Ventures and 1kx

  4. Merit Systems, a startup focused on changing the economics of open-source software development, has raised $10M in a seed funding round, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto fund and Blockchain Capital

  5. Tapestry, a Solana-based social graph protocol, has raised $5.75M in a Series A funding round, co-led by Union Square Ventures and Fabric Ventures

🗞️ Crypto News Recap: The Top 5 Stories

Welcome back to This Week in Crypto… everything you need to know in one scannable format. Here are the top 5 stories of the week…

  1. ⚖️ SEC Forms New Crypto Task Force Spearheaded by Hester Peirce: Gary Gensler only officially stepped down as chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) yesterday, but the federal agency’s approach to crypto is already getting an overhaul.

  1. 👨‍⚖️ Trump names crypto-friendly SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda as acting chair as Gensler departs: President Donald Trump has picked Mark Uyeda, one of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's top officials, to lead the agency until a permanent chair is confirmed.

  1. 🚀 Hyperliquid reports record-high $22 billion in 24-hour volume: Hyperliquid :said on social media platform X that its trade volume was over $22 billion in the 24 hours leading up to 11:41 p.m. ET on Monday. The platform’s $22 billion trade volume overwrote the previous record high of $21 billion reported a day prior. It also reported $4.7 billion in open interest and $9.5 million in protocol revenue.

  1. 📊 Solana hits new all-time high, DEX tokens surge: Solana’s underlying token hit a new all-time high on Saturday amid the massive runup of Official Trump (TRUMP), the memecoin launched by President-elect Donald Trump.

  1. ⚖️ Digital Currency Group agrees to pay $38 million to settle with SEC over negligence: Global investment firm Digital Currency Group agreed to settle and pay $38 million to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday over allegations that it misled investors via crypto lender Genesis Global Capital, LLC.

💬 Tweet of the Week

Source: @martypartymusic

📊 Key Stats of the Week

Here are the most important and interesting stats in crypto this week...

1. Demand for Solana has gone parabolic. 4 of the top 5 fee generators are now Solana-based as users continue to pile in, pushing the network to 88M daily transactions and over $31B in daily DEX volumes.

Meteora leads the entire space with a staggering $60M in daily fees, followed Raydium ($31M), and Jito ($26M), while the network itself stands at $35M. Perhaps just as interestingly, these are all more fees generated than Tether ($18M), the historic market leader, and Circle ($5M) combined.

On an annualized basis, each of these protocols would collect upwards of $788M in fees.

Source: @DavidShuttleworth

2. Inauguration Day is here, and last week we had the largest volume of institutional inflows so far this year. Overall, $2.2B poured in led by BTC ($1.9B), ETH ($246M), XRP ($31M). Interestingly, this brings XRP's total inflows since November to $484M. Overall, however, this volume pales in comparison to some of the levels seen in November and December ($3B-$4B).

Meanwhile, SOL remained relatively muted with just $2.5M of inflows and only $17M YTD. This could change, quite abruptly, especially with the prospective of several ETF products looming along with a pro-crypto administration.

Source: @DavidShuttleworth

3. Absolutely wild activity on Solana right now as over $17.5B of DEX volume has been settled on the network within the last 24 hours.

To put this into perspective, this is not only the most daily DEX volume ever in the history of DeFi, but is more than double the daily volume of Ethereum ($3.6B), Base ($2B), Arbitrum ($1B), and Optimism ($152M) combined.

Raydium leads the way with a staggering $13B in daily volume (74% of all DEX volume on Solana) and has generated $26M in daily fees, the most of any application in the entire space.

This is incredible progress and a win for everyone onchain.

Source: @DavidShuttleworth

4. Morpho Crosses $5.9B deposits, $3.7B TVL & 100K users

Source: @OurNetwork

5. Spark Pulls back 25% After Hitting $8.63B ATH Supply in a Month

Source: @OurNetwork

📝 Highlights from the Top Crypto Reports

Here are the top highlights from the best crypto research reports this week…

About the Author: OurNetwork aims to help you understand crypto like never before by harnessing the power of onchain data & analytics. This is made possible by a community of contributors who actively participate at the forefront of this emerging data landscape. This is an excerpt from the full article, which you can find here.

Introduction

President-elect Donald Trump is scheduled to be inaugurated on Monday, January 20, 2025. I discussed the impact of the election in a blog on Coindesk, where I predicted that “Positive tailwinds in crypto caused by the election itself may not be as sticky in a month. However, the ramifications of a unified Republican House and Senate majority may mean a more productive government, and one that passes more legislation surrounding crypto.”

In this blog, I focus more on the legislative environment with tailwinds pre-inauguration followed by policy opportunities post-inauguration.

Pre-Inauguration:

Before the election, the Blockchain Association’s polling found that “Two-fifths of Crypto-Positive voters [in swing states] say crypto is a major issue for them in the election; half pay attention to candidates’ crypto stances.” . In this election, the crypto voting bloc has proven itself to be a credible group to court.

Large crypto-focused PACs also emerged to fund candidates, like Protect Progress ($37M), Fairshake ($227M), and Defend American Jobs ($59M).

Cabinet and Staff Picks

Trump has been announcing staff picks and Cabinet picks (who still need to be confirmed), many of which are pro-crypto. Here are some of the most notable.

Paul Atkins (SEC commissioner from 2002 to 2008) was selected to be the new SEC chair. He is an advisor to the Chamber of Digital Commerce, an institution focused on promoting the acceptance of crypto.

Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is to be led by Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Trump announced that they would “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies”. Given Musk’s advocacy for crypto, like Dogecoin, he may well use his platform to publicly support crypto. For example, he recently posted on X that “If dollar inflation is solved, the price in dollars to buy cryptocurrency will actually drop, other things being equal.”

The Commerce Secretary pick, Howard Lutnick, is pro-crypto. At the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, he said “Bitcoin is like gold and should be free trade everywhere in the world.”

Labor Secretary pick Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon voted for the SAB 121 House Joint Resolution and FIT 21. She stated that she’s “talked to several leaders in this space that welcome safe regulations & oversight to help legitimize the industry mainstream.”

Many of Trump’s supporters in government are pro-crypto, like RFK Junior, JD Vance, and Michael Walz. They have supported bills like FIT21 and SAB 121, for example.

For the first time, the US president appointed an “AI & crypto czar”. Czars are typically industry veterans that directly work with the executive branch to oversee a specific mandate and do not require Senate approval. Trump named David Sacks, a tech investor and former CEO of Yammer and COO of PayPal, to serve as the “AI & crypto czar.”. In Trump’s announcement, he said that “[David Sacks] will work on a legal framework so the Crypto industry has the clarity it has been asking for.”

🎧 Top Crypto Podcasts of The Week

Here are the crypto podcasts that are worth listening to this week...

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Tracking the most important blockchain stories of the 2020s, including a decentralized internet and the creation of a new open global monetary system that works for everyone. As always, published for informational purposes only. Please do your own research. Just our opinions. Not intended as financial advice as we are not financial advisors. We may own some of the digital assets we write about as we believe strongly in the sector. Please do your own research. Published and written weekly by Ryan Allis and Mike Gavela.

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