The WEF’s Plans You Haven’t Seen!

Not content with their winter World Domination Jamboree in Davos every January, our buddies at the World Economic Forum like to convene every summer too. This Annual Meeting of The New Champions (yes, really) doesn’t get much media attention, but it certainly should. That’s because this so-called ‘summer Davos’ is where the next generation of WEF apparatchiks get their chance to shine.

As many of you will know, the WEF is enormously powerful and influential behind the scenes. It uses this power and influence to advance its various agendas, which by-and-large involve enriching and empowering its ‘stakeholders’ (them) at the expense of everyone else (us). These agendas were on full display at this year’s summer Davos, which took place in Dalian, China.

Also on display were some of the issues keeping the WEF’s members awake at night, not least the widening gulf between the US and China. The conference itself was focused on where economic growth is going to come from and, from the talks and panel discussions that took place, it seems some interesting new frontiers are opening up.

In today’s video, we lift the lid on what went down in Dalian and what it means for us plebs. Make no mistake, we may not have any say in the WEF’s agenda, but it’s coming for all of us one way or another.

You can watch that video here.

📈 Crypto Market Forecast 📈 

If you thought last week was volatile, you ain’t seen nothing yet. This Thursday, we’re going to get the CPI print for August. This print, plus last Friday’s unemployment data, will effectively confirm how much the Fed will cut rates the week after next, if at all. Thankfully, how the CPI will affect the markets is more straightforward than unemployment: CPI up is bearish, CPI down is bullish.

On that note, we came across a fascinating macro indicator last week. It appears that Russia’s stock market is in freefall, and has been since May. This is fascinating because May is when oil prices started crashing. FYI, oil has been Russia’s primary source of revenue for funding its war in Ukraine. A crash in stocks could therefore signal that the Kremlin is running low on cash.

And, since oil prices continue to fall, this means Russia may have limited time to take as much territory as it can before trying to pause the fighting.This ties into the main reason why oil prices are falling and that seems to be because there’s reportedly been meaningful progress towards a peace deal in the Middle East. This means all the geopolitical uncertainty could soon take a back seat.

For context, there’s nothing more that investors hate more than uncertainty, so any winding down of these conflicts would likely be bullish for markets across the board. Interestingly enough, these potential trends towards peace come just a couple weeks after the US and China signed a deal to cooperate on ‘financial stability’, which could have included calming these conflicts.

This wouldn’t be surprising considering that we’re only 60 days away from the US election. The wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East have been very unpopular with American voters. Consider a recent poll which found that 40% of Americans believe the US should be less involved in Ukraine and Gaza. Notably, only 25% think the US should get more involved.

This makes perfect sense when you realise that the average American is struggling to keep up financially, much less get ahead. Seeing billions of dollars of aid being sent to foreign countries isn’t the best look for the current administration. On the contrary, resolving these conflicts prior to the election could give Democrats the edge, as it would nullify Republican talking points.

(End the war in Ukraine and Gaza? What wars? The wars are over, didn’t you hear!)

Speaking of which, the fact that we’re so close to the US election likely means that if Kamala Harris is going to position herself as a pro-crypto candidate, she must do it in the next couple of weeks. In case you missed it, a PAC affiliated with the Harris campaign has started accepting crypto payments via Coinbase Commerce. It’s hopefully the start of a bigger pro-crypto shift.

We say hopefully, because the worst thing for crypto would be for it to become politicised to the point that it lives or dies based on whatever Donald Trump does or doesn’t do, like it once did with Elon Musk. As you may have heard, Trump will be debating Harris this Tuesday. It’s probably going to be painful to watch, and it’s likely going to impact the crypto markets.

As expected, degens are already placing their bets on Polymarket about what Trump will say during the debate. Oddly enough, the odds of him mentioning crypto or Bitcoin during the debate are currently just 8%, which seems low given that he’s launching his own DeFi protocol. It’s possible that Harris will use this as an attack vector, forcing Trump to say ‘crypto’ or ‘Bitcoin’.  

But, given how past debates have gone and the levels of acrimony emanating from both campaigns, it will likely just be a bunch of personal insults. Politics: one of the few things that makes crypto look sane by comparison.

🤔 zkTLS: Bringing Retail 🤔

“Retail isn’t here yet.”

That’s the phrase we’ve seen constantly thrown around in the past few months when industry participants are confronted with the question: ‘WhY nO Bull MaRkeT RallY LiKe 2021 Yet ANoN?’ (derp speak intended).

But, for what it’s worth, there’s some truth to that statement.

You see, almost every massive bull market cycle in the past has been kicked into motion by a catalyst of some kind; either financial, technological, or both.

For instance, the 2020/2021 bull market cycle was spurred by a mix of DeFi innovation, combined with excess liquidity coming from stimulus checks handed out during the pandemic. Likewise, the 2016/2017 bull cycle was led by financial speculation opportunities presented by the ICO boom, mixed with smart contract innovation led by Ethereum. In both instances, there was a massive inflow of new people (i.e., retail investors) interested in the industry.

It stands to reason that a similar catalyst is needed for us to see a massive bull market again this cycle. Many of us believed this would be the approval of the spot BTC ETFs in the US that we saw earlier this year. But, as price action has since demonstrated, that just wasn’t enough. The hype around the ETFs only persisted till early April this year. Since then, we’ve gone back to oscillating in a sideways market, with the price of BTC mostly trading in the $60K to $70K range for the past five months.

Granted, a number of macroeconomic factors have played a role in suppressing the price of financial markets and risk assets, such as BTC, during this period. It’s also important to acknowledge that there’s a fundamental indifference to crypto assets this time around. For instance, the approval of the spot Bitcoin ETFs strengthened BTC’s position as a global reserve currency, but to say they’ve changed the way investors perceive the legitimacy of altcoins would be a stretch.

In all previous cycles, retail participation in crypto was fuelled equally by its technological promise as it was by financial speculation. On that note, the only dominant narratives we’ve seen so far this year have been meme coins and AI tokens. The former are degenerate to the core and the latter have become associated with snake-oil salesmen. If you combine this with the rugpull-hardened scepticism of previous cycle participants, it becomes clear why retail participation may just be harder to reach this cycle.

The bar is simply higher. Vapourware promises won’t cut it anymore, there’s a very real need for crypto builders to focus on innovating and building products that can make the adoption of crypto easy (and real) for web2 users. Until now, this has resulted in the proliferation of projects focused on chain and wallet abstraction technology.

However, recently there seems to be a new rising star called ‘zkTLS’. VCs and founders have begun shifting their focus to analysing the potential of ‘zkTLS’ in aiding crypto adoption. They argue it helps existing web3 projects break past adoption bottlenecks. From what we’ve researched, it really does seem promising.

So, what is ‘zkTLS’?

Well, zkTLS stands for "Zero-Knowledge Transport Layer Security." It builds on the TLS protocol – a protocol created in 1994 that protects communication against eavesdropping and tampering. All web pages that have the HTTPS certificate use the TLS protocol as standard security.

The technological nuance goes a bit deeper. To avoid boredom, we’ll be limiting the scope of our discussion to just the basics. To explain it simply, the zkTLS protocol leverages the TLS protocol to create a gateway between private Web2 data and the Web3 ecosystem. In other words, it’s a way to allow users to export data securely from any website and prove their “integrity.”

How is this useful?

Well, it presents potential breakthrough use cases that merge web2 and web3. You see, one of the narratives that presents the most promise for onboarding new retail crypto users has been ‘consumer crypto.’

At its core, consumer crypto is a segment that focuses on driving the adoption of crypto-native infrastructure in everyday consumer applications using token incentive models. Examples of projects building in this segment include Farcaster (decentralised social media); Blackbird (a tokenised loyalty program for restaurants); PuffPaw (Vape-to-earn); Worldcoin (decentralised proof-of-humanity protocol) and SkyTrade (airspace monetisation DePIN).

Despite their apparent innovations and benefits, adoption of consumer crypto has remained relatively low and bottlenecked. This is primarily due to two factors. The first is the difficulty in breaking past the network effects built by their web2 counterparts. For example, the network effects of X are massive enough to hinder the adoption of Farcaster even among crypto-natives.

The second is a slow pace of development due to a lack of cooperation from web2 entities, or other technological barriers. This can be seen in Worldcoin’s proof-of-humanity protocol. The orb technology relied too heavily on cooperation from governments around the world to see any real success.

To break past these barriers, there’s a need for a solution that can help consumer crypto leverage the network effects of incumbents while removing corporate cooperation from the equation.

This is exactly what ‘zkTLS’ technology claims to offer.

By allowing users to import ‘integrity-intact’ data from web2 platforms, web3 native protocols can enhance their onboarding flow or even conduct vampire attacks on their web2 counterparts. For example, a decentralised social media platform using zkTLS can allow users to set up their basic profiles in one click by importing data directly from X or Instagram.

So far, this has been impossible to implement at scale, since access to such data has been limited to APIs that the web2 platform can easily shut off. We’ve already seen this happen before when X (then Twitter) decided to limit API access to third-party applications building on top of it.

However, this is not the case for data accessed via zkTLS, since the access comes from the user. Any web2 company attempting to block access to such data would have to directly impact user experience in order to do so.

In essence, the presence of zkTLS makes the idea of network effects being a defensible moat for incumbent marketplaces obsolete. The decentralised food delivery app Nosh is one example of a web3 consumer app that implements zkTLS to leverage the network effects of its web2 counterparts. It allows drivers and restaurants to sign up by importing their accounts on platforms such as DoorDash.

Another area where zkTLS can add value to onboarding retail to web3 is in the airdrops segment. Specifically, projects can use zkTLS to fetch data and distribute airdrops based on the user’s web2 activity. This also helps web3 projects address sybil attacks.

The costs associated with faking activity on web2 platforms are financially intensive and time-consuming. For example, memecoin projects based on real world communities can use zkTLS to target true fans for airdrops. Imagine a burger memecoin project using data from your Uber Eats account to determine how many burger-themed meme tokens you receive based on your burger orders. In this way, zkTLS allows for the creation of true digital communities based on verifiable shared interests and activities.

The possibilities really are endless. It may just help us kick off the next great wave of crypto adoption.

🔥 Hot Deal of The Week 🔥

We have built the Coin Bureau Club to be the perfect subscription package for anyone serious about crypto.

* Get exclusive small and mid cap altcoin reviews
* Check out the personal portfolios of Coin Bureau team members
* Join our exclusive Discord community
* And more…

Even better, you can try all that for FREE with our 30 day money back guarantee. So, if you don’t think that the Club is for you then you can just get a refund.

We will soon be adding features and raising prices. However, anyone that is subscribed prior to that will not have their subscription price increase. If you want to lock in the current Club price then hurry!

👉 Try the Coin Bureau Club for FREE!

🔮 Video Pipeline 🔮

* Helium Update: Does HNT Have Any Potential?
* FINRA Crypto Regulations: Should we be worried?
* Bitfinex Report: Insights from OG exchange team
* Private Credit: A risk to the financial system & crypto markets?
 
🏆 What's New at CoinBureau.com This Week? 🏆

* What are DApps? The Future of Decentralized Applications in Crypto
* Lido Finance Review: Best Liquid Staking Platform for Ethereum?
* Coinbase Wallet Review: Easy Access to DApps, NFTs and DeFi

📖 Quote of the Week 📖

The first week of “Rektember” is playing out as expected. Low demand, FUD and broader retail apathy. But, those who are able to hold on a few more weeks, could be rewarded with an almighty “Uptober”.

“He conquers who endures.'” - Persius

Team Coin Bureau

Disclosure: Authors may own cryptoassets named in this newsletter. These are unqualified opinions, and a Coin Bureau newsletter, is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult with your investment, tax, or legal advisor.