 November 11, 2020  By Daniel Kuhn If you were forwarded this newsletter and would like to receive it, sign up here.
Top shelf Ethereum's Infura went down, causing a chain split. The world's second-largest bank will issue $3 billion in blockchain bonds. President-elect Joe Biden's transition team features some noted crypto commenters.
Chain split Blockchain bonds Tokenization chill Brain trust  Goodbye, dai and bitcoin sv. Hello, kyber and cosmos. A swelling in volume in the crypto markets over the third quarter has changed the list of noteworthy digital assets beyond bitcoin and ether that matter most to traders and investors. That change is reflected in the CoinDesk 20.
In the latest revision, five assets were replaced by crypto assets that saw volume surges outpacing even the double-digit gains posted in market volume as a whole.
The new assets are algorand (ALGO), cosmos (ATOM), cardano (ADA), kyber (KNC) and omg network (OMG). On average, incumbent CoinDesk 20 asset volume increased by 22% from Q2 to Q3. However, these crypto assets' trusted market volume increased by much more.
These five new crypto assets replaced incumbent assets that are well-known to crypto investors. Read more about how they displaced incumbents bitcoin sv, dai, zcash, monero and dash on CoinDesk 20's latest update.
Quick bites
 CoinDesk Research's latest Monthly Review covers asset performance in October, Bitcoin's congestion problem and Ethereum's shifting metrics as the launch of Ethereum 2.0 looms. Download the free report. Market intel Coin consolidation Market analysts are largely bullish on bitcoin's prospects to test all-time highs of $20,000, though many foresee a period of consolidation in the coming weeks and months. CoinDesk market reporter Omkar Godbole writes, "further notable gains look unlikely in the short term, as the cryptocurrency's 60% rally from $9,800 to $15,900 seen over the past two months looks overstretched, per the technical charts." A position also taken by Patrick Heusser, senior cryptocurrency trader at Zurich-based Crypto Broker AG, who sees consolidation between $14,000 to $16,000 in the next few weeks. Diminished sell-side liquidy, driven by increased institutional action, could be a factor here, Godbole notes.  Webinar: How to Value Ethereum In this 30-minute webinar, the first of the four-part series How to Value Ethereum, CoinDesk Research looks at accounts - a concept that sounds familiar to blockchain addresses, but involves novelties and complexities that are critical to understanding how Ethereum works.
Register to join How to Value Ethereum on Nov. 11. At stake Privacy coins
Citing regulatory concerns, Veronica McGregor, ShapeShift's chief legal officer, told CoinDesk's Brady Dale that the action was taken to "derisk" the company. At the moment, it seems like ShapeShift is alone in disabling certain privacy coins. There was no immediate change to regulatory policy that might have incentivized the move – though the general thrust of overriding guidance would suggest that privacy coins are in financial watchdogs' crosshairs.
Dale spoke with Peter Van Valkenburgh, Coin Center director of research and a zcash Foundation board member, who compared privacy coins to bags of cash – currently the denomination of choice for criminal activity. The U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, "basically says, you have to make sure you are taking reasonable steps from a cost-benefit analysis to stop the proceeds from crime from flowing through your institution," Van Valkenburgh said.
What defines a reasonable step is still open to interpretation, given the broad mandate of laws like the Bank Secrecy Act. Van Valkenburgh noted that these vague regulations do offer ways for crypto companies to offer privacy coin services, "just as banks deal with cash."
Notably, monero, the 14th largest cryptocurrency by market cap and the only one of the coins in question that offers privacy by design, is something of a pariah for centralized exchanges. Of the major exchanges, only Kraken offers XMR trading, Decrypt reported. Blockchain forensic firm CypherTrace was tapped by the Department of Homeland Security to crack monero's privacy protections, while the IRS has offered a similar contract to Chainalysis and Integra to crack monero, zcash, dash, grin, komodo, verge and horizon.
Offering a peak behind the hood of regulatory conversations, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong essentially said this summer that regulators speak softly but carry a big stick.
"A lot of it is behind-the-scenes conversations where [regulators] are kind of saying: 'We very much don't think you should do this. And then we have the conversation: 'Well, are you telling us that you don't like it, or are you telling us that you are going to sue us if we do it?,'" Armstrong reportedly said. To be sure, when it comes to financial surveillance U.S. financial regulators have both soft power and money behind them.
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Market Watch
| Bitcoin | $15,382 | 7 day: +11.6% |
| Ethereum | $452 | 7 day: +17.4% |
| All crypto | $445b | 7 day: +12.6% |
| Bitcoin dominance | 64.1% | 7 day: -0.1% |
Prices as of 5 p.m. EST
