U.S. CPI: +2.9% YEAR-OVER-YEAR (EST. +2.9%); U.S. CORE CPI: +3.2% YEAR-OVER-YEAR (EST. +3.3%)

Dec. 18: Robinhood to List LDO Spot Trading, Official Announcement Confirms

On Dec. 18, U.S. initial jobless claims for the week ended Dec. 13 came in at 224,000—slightly below the expected 225,000, per FXStreet.

On December 18, the U.S. non-seasonally adjusted (NSA) November Consumer Price Index (CPI) year-over-year rate came in at 2.7%—well below the market expectation of 3.1%. (FX Street)

On December 18, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) said during a year-end Q&A: “From what I’m seeing now, there’s a lot of talk about tokenizing real-world assets (RWA)—and these are serious conversations at the national level. Some senior officials I’ve spoken with are actively discussing tokenizing state-owned assets, and that makes sense. Take the U.S. in the past: it had plenty of oil, but extracting it was super hard. Luckily, the U.S. has a robust capital market—oil companies raised big funds via IPOs to invest in tech, and finally cracked extracting those hard-to-reach resources. I think this model works at the national level, too. A lot of countries have valuable resources but struggle to turn them into cash effectively or build up related industries. Tokenization lets them attract seed capital or pool resources to develop those industries better—it could be a killer launch mechanism and financing tool. Here’s the thing: you don’t have to sell the actual resources—

December 18 — LookOnChain monitoring data reveals a whale address starting with 0x03b5 — dormant for 9 years and potentially linked to early Bitcoin evangelist Erik Voorhees (ShapeShift founder) — has recently swapped Ethereum (ETH) for Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Over the past two weeks, the wallet exchanged 4,619 ETH (valued at roughly $13.42 million) for 24,950 BCH.

On December 18th, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) said during a year-end Q&A session: “I think it’s still too early to tell which features will end up prevailing, and I don’t have that kind of sharp predictive power. But I do believe usability, capital efficiency, fees, security, and to some degree profitability, are all critical for users. That said, this is still a relatively new space. I remember Polymarket saw solid trading volumes during the last election cycle. The next highly anticipated event should be next year’s U.S. presidential election (and midterms, right?); I think the team that can stay on high alert 24/7 and stay unwavering will likely come out on top, at least in the short term. It’s going to be a really interesting phase that demands the team’s full dedication. But real success comes from long-term competition. So, sorry I can’t dive into a more detailed analysis here. At the end of the day, it really boils down to the team’s execution capabilities, plus