CNA Weekly Wrap 17.11.23
Solana’s Sensational Surge
Name a better 6 weeks than Solana (SOL)…i’ll wait. The DeFi coin is up over 300% since the start of October and hit a yearly high on Wednesday.
Why has it gone up you ask? Well, aside from the general increased optimism in the broader crypto market, the increase was likely due to a short squeeze as well as growing institutional adoption. Further to this, the ethereum competitor has announced some exciting partnerships with Firedancer, Squads and MonkeDAO as well as growing institutional adoption.
Let’s also not forget that the SEC labelled Solana a security 5 months ago.
Further to this, Lookonchain tweeted that FTX deposited US $13.6 million (AUD $21.94 million) onto Kraken, leaving a small 3,408 SOL left to provide sell pressure.
Whilst some predict Solana may reach $600 in the next bull-run, for all the holders out there, remember that there’s nothing wrong with taking profits!
ATO issues Capital Gains Tax on DeFi and Wrapped Crypto Tokens
So, we know the ATO came out last year and warned Australians that we must report all capital gains and losses for digital assets.
In their updated guidance, our friends at the ATO have provided a bit more of an update, confirming this also extends to DeFi as well as all wrapping and unwrapping of tokens, irrespective of their price at the time.
Further to this, transferring your crypto to an address that you don’t control or that already holds a balance will also be regarded as a taxable CGT event.
It’s fair to say this news hasn’t been received well by Aussies. Michael Bacina, Digital Assets lawyer at Piper Alderman Lawyers said “Being able to wrap tokens is a valuable and necessary cross-chain interoperability tool…to have a purely technological function triggering a tax event and tax payable is not something users would expect when using crypto assets”.
Are NFTs Back?
Remember NFTs? Those things we bought in COVID that we thought were going to take over the world and then they didn’t? Well THEY’RE BACK!
OK well they’re definitely not back, but weekly sales have been increasing week on week for a month now. In fact, blockchain analytics firm Nansen published that sales volume increased from US $56 million in the first week of October to US $129 million in the first week of November.
This coincides with a more positive broader market sentiment with the crypto winter warming up.
The top 3 blockchains by NFT sales were Ethereum, Bitcoin and….you guessed it…Solana.
So, does this mean your Donald Trump digital trading cards are finally going to be worth something? No, probably not. But hey, it’s something. It will be interesting to see what happens in the space in the bull market.
FWIW, we think NFTs have a lot of extremely positive use cases in the real world. Just not the ones that have absolutely zero utility….or are extremely pixelated. What’s with that?