Every failure you experience in your life is designed and architected by yourself. - xh3b4sd

A regulatory sea change will be unfolding over the next 4 years for the crypto industry, and we cannot understate how big its effects are going to be. For at least the next 4 years we are going to win so hard that you will get tired of winning. One day you will say that you are so tired of winning and that you can't keep winning, and then we will win some more. Winning here means simply being treated in a fair and competitive way by the powers that be. There is zero reason for rogue regulators to prosecute one faithful key player of an innovative industry after another, only to lose those battles in court time and time again. There is zero reason to waste taxpayer money in baseless law suits targeted against an entire industry. There is zero reason to alienate 50 million US Americans who hold digital assets and declare those individuals as political enemies. This attitude is like being against people who own dogs. That makes zero sense. There is further zero reason for a political party to create millions of enemies without any tangible upside whatsoever. There is zero reason to indoctrinate faithful everyday people with the idea that "democracy" itself is at stake in what is in fact a democratic election to begin with. None of those and many more of the same stupid mistakes make any sense. And yet, the Democratic party took every single opportunity in the playbook to mess up the presidential race, and with it the election itself as a result. The people may be stupid, but they are not that stupid. And I am so glad that the people came together in order to make a statement that is unmistakable. Red wave. Landslide. Donald Trump won the popular vote, the electoral vote, the Republicans win the senate and most likely even the house. In sports there is often a difference between "we won" and "they lost". We can win based on our own merits, or because the other team was simply even more incompetent than we have been. I think the latter happened here during the 2024 US Presidential Election. Most people, I think, did not vote for Trump, but rather, voted against Hillary back in 2016, and now again against Kamala, because this oligarch republic is not the democracy that the Democrats claim to represent. We wrote about the very likely Trump victory here in the Powerlaw memo back in May of this year. We predicted half a year in advance that crypto will move the needle during this presidential race. 50 million Americans own digital assets in one form or another. In some swing states you only need a couple 10 thousand votes on top to win. I cannot show you hard evidence at this moment in time, because the data is just not available, but those numbers at those scales tell me that it is most probable, that alienating a large portion of the voter base for no tangible upside whatsoever does indeed make a difference where it matters most. So, leaning hard into crypto and technology for that matter was key for Donald Trump to win. You do not need the masses to win in America. You only need to tip the scales in some specific areas of the country, which evidently happened here multiple times, with key swing states captured like Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Moving forward, crypto as an industry will become decriminalized. The US will become open for business for entrepreneurs of our beloved industry. And innovation can once more take place again in the United States of America. Higher!

The key takeaway for the traders amongst us is the overall market reaction as the Presidential Election results became ever more certain. The dynamics at play here showed surprisingly a great deal of information asymmetry amongst market participants. Some may have anticipated increased volatility, but the direction and magnitude at which markets moved eventually was rather unexpected for most people I would say. The total crypto market cap is up roughly 300 billion USD post election. The US stock market is up about 1 trillion USD in the same time frame. By most estimates the US election outcome was tied in a coinflip, and so the market as a whole was positioned rather defensively, exactly because of those uncertain odds. Days before the election took place, most markets repriced lower for what was not known to happen next. And if you take anything away from this Powerlaw memo, then let it be this one thing. Markets hate uncertainty. In that light, it is then no wonder that markets went lower pre, and much higher post election, especially if you were convinced which side to lean on. The timing of market movements is also interesting to look at. While traditional media outlets were comparatively slower to report results of key swing states, prediction markets and pure online sources aggregated by Google were so much more precice and efficient to acknowledge election outcomes. And so during the early European morning hours of Wednesday the 6th of November, markets ripped. What we can learn here too is that once again mechanism design and a general understanding of the system dynamics at play are hugely advantageous. If you know what is at stake, and if you know the more likely outcome, and if you know the expected ripple effects, and if you know what swing states are, and if you know which sources to trust and if you know when to expect the most relevant key information, well then you have an edge like no other. Study mechanism design. Lesson in there.

Our financial system is so old, opaque and convoluted that it is hard to reason what is actually happening on the ground. Which is also why I cannot find more accurate and up-to-date data about the first State level pension fund to put ETH on their balance sheet. And not only is the State of Michigan incredibly based by being the first known State pension fund to ever do that, but also does the State of Michigan hold more ETH than it holds BTC, with 11 million USD to 7 million USD exposure respectively. This is an incredible development, and I hope it will not have been the last of its kind. As we open up and decentralize our ever more digital economies, they become more transparent and permissionless, as long as economic activity unfolds on public blockchains like Ethereum. This is the future that we are fighting for here all day every day. And if you still think our cute little blockchain thing is niche and nobody cares after all. Well, for one, we just won the US election. You are welcome. And two, Bitwise research is showing in their Q3 market report that 13 out of 22 global financial institutions are actively working on tokenization on top of public blockchains, read Ethereum. You can ignore us all day long. We are going Higher.

One word. Hardness. This past week we could read how Citi Group integrated with Ethereum to achieve near realtime cross border transactions, enabled for 19,000 institutional clients across 180 countries. Reading the respective reports it dawned on me why the rollup centric roadmap is so critical for Ethereum to become most relevant to the future financial system. It is because of Ethereum's deliberately designed hardness properties. The rollup centric roadmap says that anything can be build on top of a solid foundation, the L1. Its hardness makes Ethereum the most reliable focal point for any form of value transfer. And only because of this hardness, this reliability, the world's institutions are enabled to build on top of Ethereum in the first place. Not on Bitcoin, not on Solana, and not on Ripple, but on Ethereum!

At last some stone cold market commentary. As I am writing this ETH broke through 3k. SOL broke through 200. BTC dominance is back below 60% and my money is on this new trend dynamic to continue in light of a new regulatory regime on the horizon, which, frankly, favours utility tokens. My predictions for the year of 2024 as published back in January remain intact. BTC not over 100k. ETH not over 6k. SOL not flipping ETH and Eigenlayer accelerating the usage of crypto economic security on top of Ethereum. Next target for ETH/BTC is to get back above 0.04 because that kind of level makes no sense at all. One word. Higher!