This latest move comes as the U.S. central bank battles stubbornly high inflation while dealing with a string of high-profile bank failures.

The U.S. Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) continued its year-plus string of rate hikes on Wednesday, lifting the fed funds rate by 25 basis points to a targeted range of 5%-5.25%.

The price of bitcoin (BTC) held steady in the immediate aftermath of the news, trading at about $28,600.

The Fed's move was widely expected, but investors and traders were looking to the accompanying policy statement and Chairman Jerome Powell's post-meeting press conference (beginning at 2:30 p.m. ET) for clues about whether the central bank was mulling a pause after an historic run of rate hikes that's taken the fed funds rate from 0% in early 2022 to today's 5%-5.25%.

The policy statement was notable for leaving out prior language that suggested continuing rate hikes were a certainty. The statement did take note of "tighter credit conditions" as weighing on the economy going forward, and said the FOMC will "take into account the cumulative tightening of monetary policy, the lags with which monetary policy affects economic activity and inflation, and economic and financial developments."

www.federalreserve.gov

While inflation has fallen from nearly a double-digit pace one year ago to the current level of about 5%, it remains well above the Fed's 2% target, suggesting further tightening of monetary policy is necessary.

The Fed, however, is fighting a two-front war, with its rate hikes possibly having helped expose balance sheet issues at a number of U.S. banks. This past weekend saw the latest in a series of lender failures, with the nation's 12th-largest bank by assets, First Republic (FRC), requiring a joint rescue by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and JPMorgan (JPM).

source: coindesk

#fomc #fomcmeeting #Fed #news #newsbrief

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading crypto assets comes with a risk of financial loss.

With all of the back and forth regarding the efficacy of cryptocurrencies, I find myself more and more looking for use cases outside traditional “currency” definitions, i.e. that which is used primarily for transactions, where a unit of account is traded for a product or service.

Doing so often brings me to arenas that while well known to many in the crypto community, are still relatively green space for me. As a markets-based professional, I attempt to be transparent in my crypto journey. While there are many topics that I have a significant degree of comfort with, Web3 is an area where I see opportunities to increase my base of knowledge.

Conceptually, the value proposition for Web3 makes perfect sense to me. Web 1.0 covered the earliest days of the text-based internet, an era of read-only websites that users “surfed” to consume content written by others.

Roughly two decades ago, Web 2.0 emerged, representing an expansion of the “read” era, characterized by users’ ability to contribute their own content, interact with others in real time via social media and garner attention for themselves (both good and bad) via their actions. This is commonly referred to as the “read-write” era, and incorporates a lot of what we do in our day to day lives.

Web3 is meant to add the concept of “ownership” to the first two, where users have control over their data, payments within the network are done on a peer-to-peer basis and data itself is decentralized, rather than being warehoused by a few centralized entities.

But why is this important? Well, speaking for myself, I’ll say this. We’re all the sum of our own experiences, to one extent or the next. And those experiences can often be distilled down into individual data points that can tell what we’ve done in the past, and heavily infer what we may likely do in the future.

Simply by interacting with this very content, you’ve likely revealed something about yourself – to an entity that you’re unaware of and that you may or may not be comfortable with.

Those pieces of information about yourself are extremely valuable to third-party businesses, some of which have built billion-dollar operations with all of our personal data at its foundation. And like an undisciplined fan revealing the ending of a movie, we’re all essentially just giving it away.

In many ways, we’ve exchanged our data as the price of admission to centralized protocols with robust networks. One mental model would be the idea that everything that you use in the physical space is rented, from your house, down to your shoes.

As far as content creation is concerned, that which you create is within your control only to the extent that the centralized entity allows. In these instances you are surrendering personal data and what amounts to intellectual property.

Web3 would conceivably turn that concept on its head, resulting in users having complete ownership and control over their data and content, with digital assets or tokens – see, there’s an angle here for a crypto publication – providing each user with property rights.

Instead of businesses being given unfettered access to your personal habits and preferences, they would conceivably have to compensate you for it.

As an individual, you would personally warehouse your own inventory of data and tokens, which you would bring with you from protocol to protocol, supplying and removing them as you see fit.

In an ideal world, the attractiveness of robust networks that we find in centralized networks would be married with greater ownership of personal data, with the blockchain acting as a trustless and permissionless vehicle to govern peer-to-peer interaction.

And if we can own something that truthfully belongs to us, and decide how and to what extent we want it distributed, I expect that people will find value in that.

So why doesn’t this already have widespread adoption? For starters, I expect that scalability is a real issue. Widespread adoption is needed for Web3 to work effectively.

Moreover, users need to not only believe in the concept of Web3 itself, but also must see value in the tokens that are used as incentive mechanisms.

It stands to reason that inertia will be a huge factor in users transitioning from the current way that they interact on the internet to a Web3 framework. People are comfortable with Web 2.0, even if that comfort level is displayed by seemingly grinning and bearing the loss of privacy and transfer of personal information.

Moral issues, for lack of a better term, will likely present a hurdle as well. It goes without saying that not all content creation is good content creation. The reduction of one’s digital footprint will likely incentivize some to produce content that is illegal and/or deemed harmful. This is not to cast aspersions or make judgements, as much as it is to highlight what I believe would be a reality.

For all of the ills regarding scalability and legality, I believe that time and innovation will be the antidote.

In my opinion, the ability to maintain ownership of one’s personal information, while maintaining the right to monetize it themselves, is something that will grow in favor.

The professional investing community appears to agree as well, with companies like JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Disney and Apple exploring the benefits of Web3 or investing capital into the space.

From a market perspective, assets like Chainlink (LINK), Filecoin(FIL) and Audius (AUDIO) represent ways to gain exposure to Web3 development. The same holds true for protocols such as Ledgermail, Presearch (PRE) and DTube (DTUBE), whose Web 2.0 analogs would be email, Google and YouTube.

All told, I believe that Web3 has a long way to go, but remains well on its way to getting there. I have yet to reach the individual who speaks favorably about the extent to which they lack control over the dispersion of their data.

It only makes sense to me that the alternative would be viewed in good terms. But it will take time, patience and innovation before many see it.

source: coindesk

image source: ai

#Web3 #web3isthefuture #web3community #newsbrief #web2

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading crypto assets comes with a risk of financial loss.

Veteran investor and Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary warns that more regional banks could go under as they face immense losses from their exposure to one sector of the economy.

In a new interview on the Meet Kevin YouTube channel, O’Leary says that the commercial real estate sector will likely put a lot of pressure on equity holders, including regional banks.

O’Leary says that investors in commercial real estate will likely get wiped out in the next two years.

“The majority of risk right now in the infrastructure of both regional and money center banks is commercial real estate... We have 11 sectors in the economy. The 11th, the newest is real estate…

The majority of debt that was done in very liquid times with very low rates starts to come due in Q3 and Q4 of 2024. So the defaults will start then and then the peak of it, the refinancing in 2025, is going to be very high.

That’s when all of a sudden the economics of a lot of commercial real estate don’t make sense, it’ll be upside down.

And the equity holders in those real estate buildings, they will go to zero.”

According to O’Leary, the commercial real estate sector will likely trigger a period of weakness in the economy for the next year and a half. The Shark Tank star goes on to say that commercial real estate could eradicate hundreds of billions of dollars worth of investments and trigger the downfall of more regional banks.

“I think we’re going to have a period of softness for maybe 18 months…

It could be that long, and it probably will be triggered by this colored pig in the python of commercial real estate. It’s got to go through the belly.

It’s a really big $0.5 trillion loss, has to be absorbed. It will wipe out 15% of the regional banks.”

source: dailyhodl

#bank #bankcollapse #newsbrief #newsupadet #dyor

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading crypto assets comes with a risk of financial loss.

#ftx #ftxupdate #newsbrief #Celsius

Some people lending money to the Celsius network are worried that there may be something wrong with the Celsius tokens on a certain exchange. He formed a group and ask a judge to help find out who did what.

People lending money to FTX are asking for a special order to get information about people using FTX.

A group of people who owe the money of the Celsius networks want to ask another company called FTX for information about some digital wallets. They feel that these wallets were used for some works that are not allowed between April and August.

The committee wants to see information from FTX to see whether people were doing proper trade or cheating. He asked the court to help in getting this information on 26 April.

Can you explain it in simple words for a child?

A company named Elements is investigating whether some money roaming in a particular computer system called “Blockchain” may be bad or wrong.

The group asked someone who knows a lot about a special way to keep a track of money called “Blockchain” to help them find any speed of money.

One company found that 947 things happened where people put a special type of money in their secret wallet, and then withdraw it and put it in another wallet run by a website called FTX. This happened in three days.

Can you explain it in easy words that a child can understand?

FTX agrees to buy something from the company related to Miami International Holdings.

A company named FTX sold a part of its business that allows people to buy and sell things called Crypto in $50 million. But they must first wait for the special court to say that it is fine.

Investigations about people who have secretly worked can help find out that Celsius.

Former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan lost his bet that bitcoin would surge to $1 million. 

Balaji Srinivasan, the former Coinbase chief technology officer turned investor, lost his bet that the price of bitcoin would soar to $1 million as the U.S. economy experienced hyperinflation. 

Conceding defeat yesterday, Srinivasan paid $500,000 to James Medlock, a pseudonymous Twitter user who proposed the bet in March. He split a further $1 million between the charity Give Directly and Chaincode Labs, a Bitcoin research center. 

Balaji@balajis

"I settled the bet early with Balajis," Medlock tweeted on Tuesday. "Took some time to work out the details but he proceeded in good faith and you can see the receipt of funds on chain in the next tweet. $500k to me (so I get 30% post tax as planned) and 500k to GiveDirectly."

James Medlock@jdcmedlock

Balaji's bitcoin bet

The bizarre chain of events was set in motion when Medlock posted a tweet on March 16 saying, "I’ll bet anyone $1 million dollars that the US does not enter hyperinflation."

Srinivasan, who has more than 900,000 followers on Twitter, responded with, “I will take that bet.” He asked Medlock to buy one bitcoin and promised to send him $1 million after 90 days if the cryptocurrency's price hadn't climbed to $1 million.

“This is one of those tweets that just popped into my head and I sent it in 10 seconds without thinking about it. Wild to think how different my life would be if I had never clicked ‘tweet,’” Medlock tweeted on Tuesday.

Srinivasan's failed bet drew mockery from some, with Bloomberg journalist Joe Weisenthal tweeting that it had helped "raise awareness about the soundness of fiat currency."

Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart

As of the time of writing, bitcoin is trading at $28,517, according to CoinGecko data. 

source: theblock

image source: Balaji@balajis twitter

#BTC #newsbrief #news #crypto2023 #balaji

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading crypto assets comes with a risk of financial loss.