Good Morning,

Here's a quick preview of today’s content: Deutsche Bank gets involved in crypto by investing in a blockchain firm, XRP flies to the moon, NYSE wants to list a crypto index fund, Hong Kong to possibly waive crypto tax gains, and more

If you haven’t followed us on X/Twitter yet, make sure to because we post breaking crypto news as soon as it happens.

Lastly, we hope everyone had a great holiday break!

Happy Monday, let’s dive in.

Market Snapshot

• XRP flipped a $100B market capitalization late Saturday and is up an astounding 77.5% over the weekend - currently a $138B market cap

  • Ripple will soon be allowed to legally offer RLUSD to the public if approved, with a possible launch date of Dec. 4 (CD)

  • XRP flipped the famous stablecoin Tether USDT and now has the third largest market cap in the world

• Spot-based Ethereum ETFs recorded their strongest daily inflows on Friday, outpacing their bitcoin counterparts through the day and this week

Headline Roundup
^{_{The major headlines driving crypto markets}}

• NYSE Arca wants to list Bitwise's $1.4B crypto index fund (DC)

• Michael Saylor released his 3 minute pitch to the Microsoft board about Bitcoin that you can watch here. 

• XRP flips Tether becoming world’s third largest crypto as prices soar (DC)

• Justin Sun still plans to buy 100,000 Bananas after art auction backlash (DC)

• MARA purchases $615M worth of bitcoin, boosting total holdings to 34,794 BTC (TB)

• CryptoPunk #8348 was loaned for $2.75M (DC)

• Former Binance Exec sued the company, claiming that she was fired after blowing the whistle on bribery concerns (DC)

• Ethena and Securitize pitch upcoming BlackRock-fueled stablecoin in Spark's $1B tokenization play (TB)

• Trump’s company will receive at least $15M after Justin Sun’s investment into World Liberty tokens (CS)

• Missing “Cryptoqueen” Ruja Ignatova may be hiding in Russia to avoid criminal charges (DC)

• Hong Kong gaming firm Boyaa dumps Ethereum to add $50M to Bitcoin stash (DC)

• Solana memecoin launchpad Pumpfun saw its weekly revenue drop after disabling its livestream feature (CT)

• Former Facebook exec says Diem/Libra stablecoin fell victim to a 'political kill' (TB)

• Data shows 12% of UK adults now own crypto (DC)

• Ripple Labs has donated $25M to pro-crypto PAC Fairshake (DC)

• Solana defi exchange Jupiter will revise airdrop plan after voters reject $1.6B in rewards (DC)

• MIAX joins Nasdaq and NYSE in listing options on Bitcoin ETFs(CT)

• NFTs surged 57.8% in November and recorded $562M in sales for the month, a substantial increase in volume from October (CT)

• Sky Mavis, the developer of NFT game Axie Infinity and Ronin, laid off 21% of its workforce (DC)

• Tether is set to discontinue support for its Euro stablecoin EURT (TB)

Launches

• Hyperliquid airdrops over $1.2B worth of tokens to users as HYPE crosses $4B FDV (TB)

Venture Capital

• Deutsche Bank joined the second Series B funding round held by blockchain firm Partior, bringing its total funding raised across the series to $80M (CT)

• Bleap has raised $2.3M in a pre-seed funding round led by Ethereal Ventures to launch a self-custodial stablecoin payments app (TB)

• Avant, a crypto yield protocol developer similar to Ethena Labs, said it has raised $6.5M in a seed funding round from Superlayer, Avalaunch, GoGoPool, Daybreak Digital and Linda Kreitzman (TB)

• SecondLane has listed an equity interest in memecoin protocol Pumpfun at a fully diluted valuation of $1.5B, according to its platform (CT)

• Japanese investment firm Metaplanet plans to raise over $62M through a stock acquisition plan to purchase more Bitcoin for its treasury (CT)

Regulation

• Hong Kong to waive tax on crypto gains for sophisticated investors (DC)

• Russia’s upper house greenlights new tax bill for crypto mining and trading (TB)

• The Bank of Uganda says police are launching an investigation into the theft of 62B Ugandan shillings, worth $16.8M (DH)

• South Korea is expected to delay its crypto gains tax for another two years, local news outlets reported on Sunday (TB)

Cybersecurity

• Celsius to distribute $127M to creditors in second bankruptcy payout (TB)

• XT.com crypto exchange loses 1M USDT in hack and suspends withdrawals to secure users’ funds (MS)

Extra Reads

• Ripple announced the launch of its USD-denominated stablecoin, RLUSD. Ripple labs partnered with several global exchanges and platforms to distribute the new digital asset - Uphold, Bitstamp, Bitso, MoonPay and many more

  
  There are many possible reasons why XRP has flown in price and one of those reasons might be because of RLUSD and here’s why: Read Here

Chart of the Day

Ripple XRP climbed over 63% in the past 5 days. This is a local high we haven’t seen in years. The all time price of XRP is from Jan 03, 2018 (7 years ago) at $3.84 USD.

Meme Dump

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