Solana, Coinbase On The Rise; Grayscale Ethereum Trust Discount Nears 60%

The native cryptocurrency of the Solana
SOL
blockchain is extending its New Year rally, bringing its gains into the double-digit territory, possibly with a boost from the latest dog coin.

The token is up 11% since yesterday’s low of $11.06 to $13.47 after trading below $8.50 last week. The rise may be at least partially attributed to Bonk, a new meme coin that prides itself as the first Solana dog token and is similar to the dogecoin and shiba inu cryptocurrencies. Bonk has soared by more than 2,000% since its December 25 launch thanks to a marketing stunt called airdrop, which involved the distribution of free tokens to holders of Solana’s sol coins.

Dogecoin was created as a joke, but with occasional expressions of support from Tesla founder Elon Musk has become the eighth-most-valued cryptocurrency, at just under $10 billion, according to Nomics. Shiba inu, a takeoff on dogecoin is 18th on the valuation list at $4.7 billion, running neck-and-neck with sol, now worth $5 billion.

Sol has taken a big hit in recent months due to its association with Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of collapsed crypto exchange FTX and an avid supporter. The teams behind Solana-based non-fungible token collections DeGods and Y00ts announced last month that they would soon be moving to rival blockchains Ethereum
ETH
and Polygon
MATIC
.

Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum founder, said this week that the decline may have been overdone. “Some smart people tell me there is an earnest smart developer community in Solana, and now that the awful opportunistic money people have been washed out, the chain has a bright future,” he tweeted. “Hard for me to tell from outside, but I hope the community gets its fair chance to thrive.”

In more troubling news for crypto investors, the Grayscale Ethereum Trust, which offers exposure to the second-most-valuable cryptocurrency, is trading at a discount of nearly 60% to the value of its underlying assets, with shares falling 56% to $4.82 on Tuesday from $10.91 in early November, shortly before FTX’s collapse. Net-asset value has dropped a milder 27%, to $11.85 from $16.20, in the same span.

Grayscale’s parent Digital Currency Group (DCG) is in hot water over its $1.68 billion debt to its lending subsidiary Genesis. On Monday, Cameron Winklevoss, co-founder and president of crypto exchange Gemini, which partnered with Genesis on a lending product Gemini Earn, published an open letter to DCG’s head Barry Silbert, accusing him of the lack of engagement and comingling of Genesis’ funds with those of its corporate parent.

In equity trading, the shares of Coinbase jumped 12.9% Wednesday morning after the New York State Department of Financial Services announced it had reached a $100 million settlement with the crypto exchange. Regulators allege the firm violated anti-money-laundering laws by allowing users to open accounts without conducting sufficient background checks and “failed to keep up with the dramatic and unexpected growth” of its business as the prices of many cryptocurrencies skyrocketed in 2021.

Bitcoin
BTC
miner Stronghold Digital Mining is down 2.3% following a Tuesday announcement of an equity-for-debt swap that would give creditors shares worth $23 million in exchange for $18 million of debt. The company appears to have sold almost all of its bitcoin inventory. As of December 31, the company said it had approximately $12.4 million of cash and approximately 6 Bitcoin.