🟪 Sobriety and circuses

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Happy Sunday, folks! Welcome to another edition of the weekend newsletter, where I hope you’ll excuse another few paragraphs on the often-rowdy intersection of crypto and politics.

To wit: This week saw two historic events, namely a Congressional hearing on decentralized finance and a not-entirely-boring slugfest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

To be honest, I was sort of relieved that Trump and Harris skipped crypto — though I did hold my breath when Harris paid lip service to AI startups. I don’t believe this year is a “crypto election” (in that Americans actually care two figs about crypto policy), though one imagines they’d prefer their investments be taxed as little as possible. Policy is best crafted in a sober, un-circus-like environment, and I think the kind of fair rules that innovators want won’t emerge from whatever the heck transpired Tuesday.

As expected, the DeFi hearing earlier that day featured the usual characters sniping each other from across the room on Capitol Hill. Chalk it up as more of a let’s-say-the-usual-things event than something that might spark meaningful reform.

At this juncture, the crypto industry is betting that its $160 million-plus in campaign donations and PAC spend will do the trick. How much of a return they’ll get is an open question. Remember: Once you become a special interest, you sort of have to just keep paying… and paying. Here’s hoping the coffers stay deep.

As for Trump, well, he’s about to formally debut World Liberty Financial. This is pure speculation, but here’s my guess: They’re going to let you invest or “lend” money to the Trump business empire via their properties and receive some kind of exposure or dividend in return. I guess I’ll have to tune into X later this month and see for myself.

And now, on to the roundup:

— Michael McSweeney

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Avantgarde Finance dives into the DEX aggregator landscape in this latest report. Key takeaways include:

• 1inch has seen market share decline on metrics such as volume

• ParaSwap and CoW look relatively undervalued on market cap to fundamental ratios

• Token utility varies significantly, such as with PSP offering notable staking benefits yielding up to 31%

• New features set to differentiate protocols further and may serve as catalysts to narrow existing valuation gaps

Download our report today to find out more!

Your all-time favorite newsletter author will be IRL at Permissionless chatting with the top liquid token fund managers on how they seek and find alpha in the digital asset space. Don’t miss it!