Crypto Friday – Why you shouldn’t care about dumps
Dear DEFI WORLD community,
This week was very painful for most crypto holders. The prices were dumped quite heavily and there was not much good news or developments to highlight! However, if you can’t handle dumps you are probably in the wrong industry. Nonetheless, you are reading this article which assumes that you are active on Crypto Twitter and not in Crypto since yesterday; You probably know how this industry works! So, we don’t want to tell you again how undervalued Ethereum is and we don’t want to share five boring news with you either. In this Crypto Friday episode, we want to share only two news with you but much more detailed. We will take a closer look at the market and discuss one of the biggest frauds in the history of the modern financial system: The FinCEN files!
The market
If you haven’t slept during the whole week you will recognize that the prices dumped heavily.
Market on 09/24/2020:
Bitcoin (-4.33%), Ethereum (-11.55%), EOS (-8.47%), Polkadot (-20.62%), Aave (-14.47), Kyber (-20.72%) and
Chainlink (-17.60%) (just to mention a few).
It’s a pity because after the airdrop of $UNI token last week the dump seemed to be over. Well, that was a wrong thought! The market has come back to the old standard and there is nothing much going on right now. However, we are not that kind of newsletter that tells you when the “perfect time” is to buy or sell. We also don't know where the prices will be tomorrow because we can't look into the future. In our opinion, however, some whales this week have been shedding large amounts of Ether and other currencies to buy more in the future. The suspicion for this was already expressed by some users on Crypto Twitter during the dump before, now it seems that the whales are not very willed to buy at the moment. Anyway, who cares? At the end of the day, it is not important how the developments went today or in the last week. The only thing which matters is the long-term development over the last year(s). Just imagine: One Ether had a market price of under $100 in March 2020; now its September and in the meanwhile, Ethereum hit the $400 benchmark. The trend is clear: Prices are going up. In addition to that, it is important to know, that dumps are completely normal in bullruns especially in 2017. Many people think that prices went up only; without any pullbacks. Well, this is not true and there were many dumps in 2017 as well. However, prices recovered again and came back even “stronger”. The Crypto industry is one of the best examples of antifragility because of its behavior. Projects come and go, Scammers fraud one after another, and prices are pumping and dumping. But in the end, the whole ecosystem profits from this kind of volatility because it sorts out weak projects/protocols.
Nothing and nobody is too big to fail in this industry. Neither Bitcoin nor Vitalik Buterin.
FinCEN files
“Bitcoin and all these cryptocurrencies are for Darknet transactions only. This kind of “money” is mainly used by criminals”; This is a sentence which most of us have heard before. It is maybe the most popular cliche that people outside of the industry have in their minds. How wrong and naive this statement is, we have seen this week. Earlier this week the FinCEN files were leaked from BuzzFeed and some other journalists got their hands on them. What happened then resembles a real financial crime thriller, because the dirtiest deals that the banks have been doing for years came out. But what are the FinCEN files anyway? Every bank is obliged to report suspicious transactions to the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The FinCEN files are a collection of more than 2500 documents in which suspicious transactions have been reported. Of course, it is not enough just to report these transactions: As soon as the suspicion of e.g. money laundering is suspected, the bank must stop or not approve any further transaction. Well, many of them have not done that! What investigative journalists from the ICIJ then found out is like a financial crime thriller in which even Jordan Belfort would think: "Man, these guys are ruthless!
Despite knowing that its clients were fraudsters, HSBC continued to move millions. Deutsche Bank continued to support money laundering that served terrorism, illegal drug trafficking, and other criminal organizations. Standard Charted, in turn, has moved funds from a Jordanian bank for more than a decade, even though clients of that bank used the money to finance terrorism. The list seems to be endless, however, for the criminal Bingo, all criteria are given: money laundering, drug trafficking, corruption, and terrorism.
As you can see, today's financial system is broken and hypocritical. Although the banks, as central institutions, have the task of preventing exactly that, they rather prefer to take part in it.
The cliché about cryptocurrencies is much more appropriate for the current system.
But what does all this have to do with my assets and why should I not be so focused on prices?
DeFi – The gamechanger
DeFi not only enables everyone in the world to participate in the financial system but makes central institutions obsolete. The banks that support such transactions will soon be gone as decentralized protocols will replace them. This will make the system less hypocritical and corrupt. Of course, there will always be criminal transactions and not all of them can be stopped. Nevertheless, the traitor will not come out of our own society as this was the case in the FinCEN files scandal.
Conclusion
The banks have once again proven how hypocritical and ruthless people can be. As long as the money flows, they are willed to support money laundering which serves the purpose of killing people. How scornful is it actually when conservative bankers in Europe get upset about the refugees? Because at the end of the day they were supporting those who were responsible for the causes of escape.
This week has shown how important a decentralized financial system is and why you should not always look at the price charts. Of course, we all want and have to make money but this movement is bigger than most people can imagine!
All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.