Daily Digest 10/5

Insight on the biggest news and charts that provide context for whats going on in the market today.

One thing that is missing from DeFi currently is cross-chain bridges. We have all these chains like ETH, Cardano, and Polkadot but you can’t send or do anything between the chains without swapping or wrapping tokens.
THORChain is one of the projects that is tackling the issue with cross-chaining having just concluded a $3.75 million private investment by IDEO CoLab Ventures with participation from True Ventures, Sanctor Capital, Nine Realms, Proof Group, 0xVentures, Qi Capital, THORChain and others.
THORswap can currently support Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, ETH, Binance Coin and ERC-20 and BEP-20 standard tokens.
“Thorchain has no bridges. It has no wrapping. It is native assets, swapped across chains in a decentralized way, for the first time ever,” said ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees.

Many XRP holders were looking to file “friends of the court” briefs. This would have allowed them to join the case as defendants for Ripple.
The SEC first came after Ripple in November 2020 saying that their XRP token violated securities laws.
Judge Analisa Torres said that allowing XRP holders to join the suite would “compel the SEC to take an enforcement action against them”. She will let them take “Amicus curiae” which means that a party that is not involved in the litigation but is allowed by the court to advise or provide information.
XRP holders also tried to intervene in March because they were claiming that they would lose millions of dollars if the SEC were to win this case.
“[The SEC] may have legit arguments in the cases that are being discussed right now. I don’t believe the SEC is trying to squelch innovation.”

Manifold has been used by top crypto NFT / art creators such as FVCKRENDER and pplpleasr to create some of their most recent works but it was not open to regular creators.
Its newest product, Manifold studio, will allow creators to be able to make NFTs on their platform that gives users “near-total control” over the entire minting process.
Manifold says that they will give the creators full ownership of their creations unlike Opensea which takes a percentage of the transactions.
“The process of minting an NFT, as dramatic and competitive as it might be, is still a tiny part of the ownership experience. Provenance and creativity are what distinguishes a truly special NFT drop, and Manifold has worked thoughtfully to extend tools to artists to make their works stand out from the crowd," said Chris Dixon.

Currently the unemployment rate is about 5.2% and the FED believes that they could be able to get it down to 4.4% or the “natural rate”. There are still close to 2.8 million people collecting unemployment benefits while companies have also reported almost 11 million job openings since July.
“Structural Unemployment” can play a role in the future of the jobs market. A lot of people are moving from factory jobs to tech companies or gig work but some workers may not be able to fine tune their skills for a new job market. They would have to adapt or die.
The unemployment rate is expected to remain around 5.2% this month which would not be ideal for the Federal Reserve as it would show that the labour market is starting to plateau.

Investors will be able to short NFTs with NFTures