First Mover Asia: Dogecoin surges 16% to continue its holiday cheer

The popular meme coin's upswing during U.S. Thanksgiving holiday celebrations, which started Thursday, was an exception in crypto markets as bitcoin and most other major tokens traded sideways.

Good morning. Here’s what’s happening:

Prices: Dogecoin soared more than 16% over the past 24 hours and is up more than 50% since last Tuesday.

Insights: Ethereum Name service selects Karpatkey DAO to manage Its endowment fund.

Dogecoin Surges; Other Cryptos Trade Flat

By James Rubin

On a quiet holiday weekend in cryptocurrency markets, DOGE made some noise.

The popular meme coin soared 16% over the previous 24 hours and was trading at more than 10 cents. DOGE has risen nearly 50% since last Monday with most of its gains occurring during U.S. Thanksgiving holiday celebrations, which started on Thursday. The reasons for the spike were difficult to pinpoint, although social media influencer David Gokhshtein mused to his more than 700,000 Twitter followers on Thursday about the possibility of new Twitter boss Elon Musk and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin working together on DOGE improvement.

"I feel that we’ll all see Vitalik and Elon working together to somehow upgrade $DOGE," Gokhshstein wrote.

Investors fretting another post FTX-related price plunge in crypto markets could otherwise take heart at bitcoin's resilience, although the largest cryptocurrency's ability to hold its perch over $16,000 for yet another few days hardly suggests a more permanent upturn is approaching, a number of analysts have said. BTC was recently trading at about $16,500, roughly flat for the past 24 hours and about where it stood Wednesday when the U.S. began its Thanksgiving holiday celebrations.

"It's trying to stabilize around the $15,500-$17,000 region and weather the storm but I'm not sure it will be that easy," wrote Craig Erlam, senior market analyst for foreign exchange market maker Oanda.

Traditional markets were closed on Thursday and stock trading the following day was light as many businesses closed, including major financial services firms. The calm extended to crypto markets.

Ether, the second largest cryptocurrency in market value, was recently changing hands at about $1,200, roughly flat from Saturday, same time and about where it stood as Thursday dawned. Aside from DOGE, most cryptos in the CoinDesk top 20 also traded sideways, although XLM recently rose more than 3%. The CoinDesk Market Index (CDI), an index measuring cryptos' performance, was up about 1%.

Oanda's Erlam was less than sanguine about crypto markets as the fallout widens from crypto exchange FTX's implosion earlier this month.

"There's likely more to come from the FTX collapse and the contagion effects, not to mention potentially other scandals that could be uncovered," Erlam wrote. "This may continue to make crypto traders very nervous and leave the foundations supporting price extremely shaky."

Biggest Gainers

Asset	Ticker	Returns	DACS Sector
Dogecoin	DOGE	+15.9%	Currency
Shiba Inu	SHIB	+4.4%	Currency
Terra	LUNA	+4.3%	Smart Contract Platform

Biggest Losers

Asset	Ticker	Returns	DACS Sector
Chainlink	LINK	−1.0%	Computing

Insights

Ethereum Name Service Selects Karpatkey DAO to Manage Its Endowment Fund

By Sage D. Young

The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) has chosen a new fund manager to take charge in managing its treasury in the wake of crypto winter.

In a vote that opened Nov. 17 and closed on Nov. 22, community members selected Karpatkey DAO, a decentralized finance (DeFi) fund management organization originally incubated through Gnosis Ltd.

Karpatkey received 1.76 million votes. Notable addresses that picked Karpatkey include ENS co-founder Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth), founder of Rotkiapp Lefteris Karapetsas (lefteris.eth) and ENS steward Griff Green (griff.eth), who altogether had a voting power of 468K ENS.

“None of the above” came in second place with 1.3 million votes.

Now that the community has chosen Karpatkey, the treasury management firm in collaboration with Steakhouse Financial, going forward, will manage the bulk of ENS’s treasury composed mostly of USDC and ETH. With more than two years of experience, Karpatkey boasts over $397 million of non-custodial assets under management, excluding ENS.

The goal of the endowment fund, called ENS Endaoment, is to create a sustainable fund that can fuel continuous development regardless of macroeconomics conditions that may adversely affect revenue stemming from ENS registrations and renewals. Talks of the ENS Endaoment were happening as early as March before the crises related to Terra, Three Arrows Capital, Celsius Network and FTX, according to Nicholas Johnson, one of three directors for the ENS Foundation, and Mona El Isa, CEO and founder of Avantgarde, one of the potential fund managers up for consideration.

Karpatkey said in its proposal, “The funds would be managed transparently and completely on-chain through a non-custodial solution … The core of Karpatkey’s non-custodial solution relies on the most battle-tested tooling to manage DAO treasuries: a proxy Management Safe and the Zodiac Roles Modifier.”

Zodiac, developed by Gnosis Guild, is “a collection of tools built according to an open standard” as said on its Github page, while Safe, securing close to $40 billion in all its Ethereum contracts, is one of the most popular ways to custody digital assets in a decentralized manner.

$52 million is the initial size of Karpatkey’s proposal for the ENS Endaoment and $69 million with a projected return of 5.83% is the final stage of Karpatkey’s proposal. “The strategy would use low-risk, medium complexity DeFi strategies such as providing liquidity to automated market makers.”

In an interview with CoinDesk, Karpatkey’s business development manager who goes by "DeFi Foodie" on Twitter, said, “It’s been a great exchange that has been in the forum, on the diversity of voices, how everybody could just give their opinion openly. And that’s been really healthy for ENS DAO because people can just speak their minds and have civil exchanges. When the forum asks questions [and] challenge[s] points, I think that’s something that is rich for the community and favorable.”

El Isa told CoinDesk that if a fund manager endorses a non-custodial, completely transparent solution, such as Enzyme, Avantgarde's proposal choice for a decentralized asset and treasury management protocol, for the ENS Endaoment, it “would be the first example of something being run completely on-chain”, where a FTX or Bernie Madoff situation “wouldn’t be possible."

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