Congrats to our dear colleagues over at Coinbase for officially receiving approval of New York's regulators to offer crypto-custodial services. This is a massive step towards the integration of crypto-assets into the mainstream financial markets.

The news was especially celebrated by fans of Ripple as the authorization allows them to deal in XRP. The purple circle in the graph below shows the approximate time that the news broke.

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The news couldn't have come at a better time for Ripple. The SWIFT network, which Ripple aims to replace, has recently announced a partnership with Microsoft to improve their international payments network.

Yesterday, I commented on this new partnership and what it might mean for XRP and the fintech industry. You can check that out here.

Today's Highlights

• Miraculous Recovery
• Back to the Buck
• Crypto Healing Itself

Traditional Markets

There are some days that start in a bad way but through hard work and sheer perseverance they somehow end up alright. This is exactly what happened in the financial markets yesterday.

The day started off rather dismally with massive losses in the Asian and European stock markets. By the time Wall Street traders opened their eyes, the futures markets were showing a 400 point plunge in the Dow Jones.

Things continued on moving south well into the trading day, but somehow, in the last few hours of trading, the markets managed to regain composure and ended the day almost flat.

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Today things are a bit more mixed. This is very choppy market activity lately. 

For long-term traders, we might soon see some good options for value investing. For short-term traders, enjoy the extreme volatility.

Dollar Strength

As it tends to, the US Dollar is now enjoying the benefit of doubt. As traders close out other positions they are now holding a larger amount of cash.

Here we can see the relative performance of all the major currencies since the beginning of the month.

Looking at the Dollar Index, it's clear that the Buck is moving to a more dominant position.

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Crypto Self Solution

Even though it's brand new compared to other sectors the crypto industry never ceases to amaze me. I mean, let's be honest, there are a lot of flaws with decentralized money and decentralized computing. Many of which Dr. Doom was kind enough to point out for us recently.

However, as was predicted by Milton Friedman in 1999, the benefits of crypto far outweigh the pitfalls. Lately, what we've been seeing is a large push for the industry to improve on some of the pain points.

For example, let's look at the fallout that we recently saw with Tether. Backstops are now being implemented to ensure that this doesn't happen again. Or at least if it does, the damage is mitigated. More and more stable coins are coming online, with greater degrees of transparency and regulatory oversight.

This has led some to joke...

However, I believe that this is a necessary step forward.

Another indication of self-healing can be found in this headline...

As we know, the SEC has been hesitant to add any sort of bitcoin backed ETF due to concerns that there might be manipulation happening in the crypto market. 

VanEck has now stated...

Of course, it's up to the SEC to weigh these arguments. If all goes well, we could very well be on track to see a proper bitcoin backed ETF early next year.