 The drug is gone, said billionaire Mike Novogratz in a Bloomberg interview, referring to the decline in the crypto prices, which turned off enthusiasm of many traders during 2018, after the 2017 speculative media. Novogratz said that today the crypto community has sobered up. He also told his followers to be patient and prepared to catch the next crypto wave. When the wave comes, he said, we'd better be the layered Hamilton of crypto. The Winklevoss twins are following this example and aren't rushing to find a way out of this bear market. They said this week that they feel at home in the crypto winter, so much so that they just announced the release of a new mobile crypto trading app for their Gemini exchange. Also this week, stablecoin transaction Spike, SEC chairman defines ICOs as potentially effective, Mt. Gox CEO faces embezzlement charges and more. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Mike and this is your weekly homeless digest. This week has been a rather calm week for crypto as we continue moving painfully through the crypto winter. After last Sunday's up and down, which saw Bitcoin swing from 3300 to 3600, its value stabilized on Monday and has maintained the 3400 benchmark throughout most of the week. Let's have a look at the latest market updates. Stablecoin adoption is growing, according to a recent Dyer report. The analytical publication noticed an impressive surge of on-chain transactions of stablecoins in the last few months. Four major stablecoins, USDC, TrueUSD, Paxos, and the Gemini Dollar, reached the $2.3 billion benchmark in just a three month period, in particular November registered a 1,032% surge in on-chain transactions in comparison with September. The best performer is Paxos, which has recorded $1.8 billion on the Ethereum blockchain alone in the last three months. Another sign pointing at stablecoin's rising popularity is the increasing adoption by major crypto exchanges, like Bitfinex, which recently started supporting USDC, TUSD, Pax, and GUSD. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, stablecoins are designed to be resistant to volatility, as their value is anchored to other assets, such as flat currencies or gold. According to many, their increasing popularity is partly related to the recent comeback of volatility in the crypto market. We talked to Fadi Abulafa, managing director at Dyer, who gave us more insight into the report. All stablecoin seen has grown dramatically over the past couple of months, especially with a lot of them coming online, and with the fears around Tether, people are beginning to switch to other stablecoins, and exchanges are adopting a lot more stablecoins. You've got Hiobi, who's got four of them now, Binance as well, it's got several. The exchanges are catering to the demand for different stablecoins, and that's picking up a little bit of speed. Tether's dominance has dropped to under 75% when it was closer to 95% at the beginning of the year. What's important about the stablecoins, though, is to try and grow the adoption into cryptocurrencies, and try and bad off this idea of volatility. What we discussed in our recent report was that the on-chain transactions have increased a lot. While that's mostly going to be still exchange volume, so coins moving between exchanges, it's a very big jump. It's a 1,000% jump from September, right? So it's not like from the beginning of the year, it's a 1,000% jump just from two months ago. I'm not sure if the market crash itself has anything to do with it. It might. It might have increased trading volumes in November, which we saw increased trading volumes in November, so a lot of people were moving money around. But there is definitely a shift happening between the stablecoins, and we'll likely continue to see that growing. After essentially calling most ICOs illegal, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton now thinks ICOs can be effective. In a speech this week, he emphasized that securities law must be followed when it comes to DLT and ICOs. Clayton went on to talk about how the commission has spent a lot of time on this area and that this trend will continue in 2019. It is clear that Clayton and the SEC are still very much concerned that ICOs do not offer adequate investor protection, but now at least he admits they have potential. I believe that ICOs can be effective ways for entrepreneurs and others to raise capital. However, the novel technological nature of an ICO does not change the fundamental point that when a security is being offered, our securities laws must be followed. Later in the week, he spoke before a Senate committee where he expressed optimism for DLT, saying that it can help facilitate capital formation, adding that it offers promising investment opportunities to institutional and retail investors alike. Clayton expanded on this optimism and appeared to offer somewhat of an olive branch to the crypto community by outlining various agency initiatives that aim to foster innovation and protect investors as part of a balanced regulatory approach. While it is a good sign that Clayton and the SEC are expressing a less hostile and more open approach to crypto with regards to ICOs, it might not really matter anymore. ICOs, it appears, might be RIP. Mike Novograd certainly seems to think so, and a candidate interviewed for Bloomberg he declared initial coin offerings as dead for now. Telegram and EOS may have raised huge sums, but the harsh truth is that one year after the incredible bull run in ICO feeding frenzy, very few projects have lived up to the hype, and even fewer predicted or even were prepared for a bear market. Despite the billions raised, for example, most decentralized apps that raise money via ICOs have under 100 users. Some don't even have a single one. The reason is simple. The majority of these projects don't have a working product or business model. This, however, might not be such a bad thing. If the bear market is good for one thing, it's good for eliminating the scammers and the weak players. A bear market is a time to get things done and all the hype has died down. New entrants at this point are more likely to be focused and serious. Moving on to 2019. Mark Carpolis, CEO of the now defunct Tokyo-based crypto exchange Mt. Gox, might face over 10 years in prison due to embezzlement charges. According to prosecutors in the Tokyo District Court, Carpolis embezzled 340 million yen, around $3 million, between September and December 2013, and later concealed the missing funds by manipulating Mt. Gox's trading system. Prosecutors claim that Carpolis diverted the funds to such uses as investing in a software development business for personal interest and played a great role in totally destroying the confidence of Bitcoin users. Once the biggest crypto exchange in the world, Mt. Gox shut down in February 2014 after a hacking attack led to the loss of an estimated 850,000 Bitcoins. Carpolis has previously refuted the accusations, insisting that the allegedly embezzled funds were in fact a temporary loan, but was unable to back his statements with the necessary paperwork. Months ago, another lawsuit against Carpolis was filed in the US by Mt. Gox's former clients. Mr. Carpolis objected that a US court has no personal jurisdiction over him and asked for the proceeding to be dismissed. Things are going from bad to worse for miners, with reports that individual miners can no longer make a profit, footage of Chinese miners throwing out their rigs, and now this, according to real-time data, published by Mining Profitability's data site ASICminerValley.com, brand-new crypto mining machines are not making money for their operators. Some ASIC mining machines are showing as little as 58 and 21 cents in daily profits, not particularly attractive when you consider the most profitable machines are priced at about 2 grand. The whole industry is hurting, and last week, Bitmain announced it was pulling the plug on a development center in Israel. But it's okay, because as we all know, Bitcoin is a colossal waste of energy that will soon be no more. Good riddance. Well, this is according to Treehugger.com, which this week released a fud-ridden article rejoicing the supposed demise of crypto. But is this true? Is Bitcoin really a colossal waste of energy? I think the big one, you know, is just finding sustainable energy sources, greener energy sources to run the network. And that's been done to some extent. Companies that have large mining pools, they look for things such as cheap electricity, a cool environment, and good internet connectivity. And so they're naturally migrating towards places with cheaper energy. Sometimes that means it's dirty energy, like a lot of a lot of mining pools are when moved to China, a lot of coal produces the electricity there, but places like Iceland have become pretty popular to mine Bitcoin, and they, you know, run off geothermal energy. So, you know, maybe by nature that will happen. And going green and using renewable energy sources would solve the issue, right? Bitcoin could run as it is currently without making changes to the genesis idea yet not produce all these emissions. It might not be easy to buy a coffee from Starbucks or Bitcoin, but if you live in Calgary, you can now buy coffee with the city's very own digital currency. And that's exactly what Alberta Finance Minister Joe Sesse just did. Using the newly unveiled Calgary Digital Dollars, he bought coffee for his staff in a first for a Canadian city. Calgary Dollars is really a community project aimed at promoting small business and nonprofits within the city, and actually started way back in 1996. Inside my soul, there is an echo of my youth, some pity little saying that contain the grain of truth. If patience is a virtue, persistence is its mark, it's a better line of candle than standard. Residents and business owners can use the innovative digital currency via an app that businesses can opt to participate in. And with it, you can buy dinner or even donate to a nonprofit. People can actually earn Calgary Dollars by advertising any goods or services on the app that they want to sell for digital currency. This is a move we are seeing become more and more common. Recently, Sweden announced that it would release the E-Corona nationwide in 2019, but they will take it one step further by going completely cashless. Calgary and Alberta have long relied on the energy sector as the largest industry, and now energy transition and diversification of the economy is moving quickly. Calgary Dollars fits with that. Calgary Dollars also fits with supporting local businesses. So we all know that local businesses contribute more to the economy in terms of taxes and identity and culture. And so being able to have a tool like Calgary Dollars that can grow in the small business sector to serve as a rewards program and a customer loyalty program and as a cultural identifier for the businesses that really give our city the great culture that it has, as well as for people who are in need, whether they've just been laid off or whether they're looking at getting settled in the city. So it serves similarly for an aging population. It's of interest in the affordable housing community and in the senior serving communities like it is around the world. Dash's CEO was overly brash this week when he claimed KFC Venezuela accepted crypto, but apparently he spoke too soon. KFC denied the claims, crypto and gastronomy, but seems are not a good mix. On Twitter, hotlers have been posting their bear market meals. What are your bear market survival meals that help you get through this long crypto winter? Let us know in the comments below. And as always, like, subscribe and hodl. 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