The Crypto Minute

⤵️ Today’s Agenda:

• The $400K Polymarket Maduro snipe that went dark, and why the timing feels way too clean…

• One of the oldest US banks, BNY, is putting bank deposits onchain, pushing the “always-on” collateral and margin future.

• Ripple lands UK FCA EMI approval. What it really allows, and why RLUSD and $XRP narratives are heating up.

• Will there be a Polymarket airdrop? Prediction markets are going mainstream, with maker rebates and airdrop optionality in the background.

• Creator coin clones on Base and Zora, and how fast YOU turn into exit liquidity.

• And more…

📰 News Recap (Jan 5 to Jan 11)

BNY Turns Bank Deposits Into Tokens 🏦

One of the oldest US banks, BNY, just rolled out tokenized deposits for institutional clients, running on its own permissioned blockchain. 💳

🔎 Mind you, it’s not a new stablecoin, but in essence your bank deposit mirrored onchain. Firms can now move “cash” inside the system without waiting on legacy rails. 

First use case is boring but powerful: collateral and margin, where speed and settlement certainty actually matter. ⚡

It also fits the bigger TradFi push toward always-on markets, since regulators have been openly talking about expanding trading hours and modernizing settlement. 🌙

If banks tokenize the cash leg, tokenized assets get a real settlement rail, and that is how onchain liquidity stops being a demo and starts being scale. 📈 More tokenized assets will surely follow.

Ripple Gets The UK FCA Green Light, Comeback Season? 💭

Ripple just scored a regulatory win in the UK. Its local arm, Ripple Markets UK, got registered as an Electronic Money Institution and also listed under the UK’s anti money laundering rules. 🛡️

👉 That matters because an EMI setup is basically the boring payments plumbing, and it lines up nicely with Ripple pushing RLUSD and playing the “regulated stablecoin” game. 🪙 In that sense, $XRP works more like a “stock” of the whole firm and ecosystem.

There are still limits though. The FCA filing says they cannot touch crypto ATMs, cannot offer certain services to retail, and they need extra approval before expanding into some areas. 🔒

Big picture, the UK is tightening its crypto regime and MLR registered firms will have to apply under the FSMA framework by October 2027, so this is Ripple getting in early. ⏳

After years of being treated like a courtroom relic, Ripple has been quietly stacking wins lately, and this UK approval is another signal that it is back in the game. 🚀

Riot Sells $161M in $BTC, Pivots From Mining to AI Power 🏗️

🏭 Riot Platforms is one of the biggest public Bitcoin miners. It runs massive energy-heavy mining and data center infrastructure. As Bitcoin profitability dumps, new juicy gains are on the horizon. AI! 🤖

📉 In December, Riot sold 1,818 $BTC for about $161.6M at an average price near $88,870, while still producing 460 $BTC and ending the month with 18,005 $BTC on the balance sheet.

🔒 Some of that stack is “restricted” $BTC, meaning it is pledged as collateral and held separately under its debt setup, so it is not fully free liquidity.

🤖 The bigger story is the pivot. Riot says mining is no longer the end goal, they want to monetize their power and data center footprint and even repurpose it toward a proposed 1 GW AI data center campus. 🖱️

📊 They are also ditching monthly mining updates and moving to quarterly reporting, which is a pretty loud signal they want investors to stop valuing them like a pure miner and start valuing them like infra. If AI is indeed in a bubble, this could turn out to be a terrible bet. 💣💥

Riot isn’t alone, miners like Core Scientific, TeraWulf, Cipher Mining, and IREN are also pivoting into AI data centers and HPC hosting.

Alpha Leak 👉 Prediction Markets Go Mainstream

Let’s stick with Polymarket. 👌 Polymarket just landed an exclusive data deal with Dow Jones, so its odds are about to show up across outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch. More eyeballs usually means more volume, tighter spreads, and faster reactions to headlines. 🗞️📈

👉 Here is the tradable angle: Polymarket has taker fees on some fast crypto markets, and those fees fund daily $USDC rebates for market makers. 👀 If you can quote both sides and not get run over, it is basically “get paid to provide liquidity” meta. 

Also, when mainstream media starts printing probabilities, it turns into a feedback loop. The odds become the story, the story moves the odds, and degens show up to trade the swing. 🔁

Why even pick this as our Alpha Leak? Because there are public talks of a Polymarket token and an airdrop after a US relaunch, so being an active user could be a free call option. 🪂🧠

Scam Alert ⚠️ Creator Coin Clones On Base

Base and Zora are pushing “creator coins”, basically tokens tied to a creator profile, and scammers love that because it is easy to copy a name, a pfp, and a vibe. 🧪

🔎 Maybe you heard, but this got extra noisy after Nick Shirley went viral off the Minnesota daycare fraud video drama, then launched a token on Zora that briefly pumped and then dumped. 🧨

The scam pattern is simple: a fake account drops a “new coin” link, you ape into thin liquidity, volume is mostly wash, and you become the exit. 💀

Also, Zora has literally had to hide coins for impersonation and show warning labels in wallets, so treat “looks legit” as a trap. 🕵️

How to spot it?

• Source check: only trust links posted by the creator’s real account or official site. 🔗

• Label check: if the coin is hidden or flagged for impersonation, walk away. 🚫

• Liquidity check: if it is all hype and no depth, you are the liquidity. 🫗

Time check: if it launched 5 minutes ago and everyone is screaming “send it”, that is usually the whole plan. ⏳