Today is a big day for ₹🔥

Good Morning Switchers 🤗

👋Welcome to Switch Daily.

Noticed how the market has been gloriously green over the last two days? In the past week, Bitcoin gained ~3%, and Ethereum gained ~7% despite the fact that another exchange BlockFi filed for bankruptcy. How?

The most recent price increase occurred on the eve of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's highly anticipated speech at the Brookings Institution yesterday. His speech hinted that the Fed might announce a smaller hike in interest rates on Dec 14. This brought back optimism in Wall Street as well.

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Here’s what we’ve got for you:

• Market pulse

• Terra returns

• News that makes noise

• Meme Mania

Market pulse 📈

The market is as steady as a stick 🏑

The crypto market ended the last day of the month on a positive note as Fed chair Powell said the pace of rate hikes could moderate from December, sending the Nasdaq up 4.4%.

BTC has broken above the $17K level, improving market sentiment. MATIC is up by 6.73% over the last 24 hours, gaining the most among the top 10 coins. US inflation data, due later today, will provide direction to the market.

🇮🇳India’s leap into Blockchain Tech🪙

Cheers! We’re closer to the blockchain era than ever before. 🎉

Starting today, India will test run its Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)—e-Rupee for retail users in four cities—New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Bhubaneshwar via four banks, namely:

• State Bank of India (SBI)

• ICICI Bank

• Yes Bank

• IDFC Bank

In October this year, our Finance Minister, Smt. Nirmala Sitaraman announced that India has plans to explore CBDCs as a mode of payment. That means the government is pro towards using blockchain technology to promote a digital economy.

Wait, don’t we have UPI for that? 👀

Well, CBDCs are different. It is the digital form of a nation’s fiat currency built on blockchain technology. It is issued by the central government, in our case, by the Reserve Bank of India. CBDCs' primary goal is to provide privacy, transferability, convenience, accessibility, and financial security to businesses and consumers. You can transact CBDC without a bank account.

On the other hand, UPI is just a digital transfer of physical cash. To use UPI, you first need to have money in your bank account. It is just another mode of payment and not digital currency itself.

How to use CBDC?

Since this is the pilot run, the RBI will only issue invites to a selected number of people based to use the e-Rupee. If you are one of those users, the bank will provide you with a separate wallet to store CBDC, and you can transfer this money from one wallet to another.

Will it affect crypto?

We don’t think so. CBDCs are centralized digital currencies, whereas crypto is decentralized. Contrary to what we think, nearly 90% of crypto assets cannot be used as a form of payment, whereas the primary function of CBDC is to be used to make payments. On the other hand, cryptos are a way to access public blockchains, or for retail users like us, its another investment tool.

CBDCs and cryptos share blockchain and smart contract capabilities as their underlying technology. The two can co-exist and even thrive in the future, given their technological underpinnings and scope for subsequent collaborative innovations.

Many other countries are also exploring the possibility of using blockchain technology for payments. For example

• France and Luxembourg have settled a bond worth 100 million euros (US$104 million) using an experimental central bank digital currency (CBDC), the latest in a series of trials in tokenized financial markets.

• The National Bank of Ukraine is considering creating an electronic version of the Ukrainian hryvnia to facilitate the exchange and issuance of virtual assets, among other things.

• Dominica recently announced plans to roll out a national token, DMC (which is different from CBDC), on the Tron network.

The point is launching CBDCs is a huge technological leap for us. If it succeeds, we may even see quick adoption of blockchain and Web3 technologies soon.

Community Spotlight 💡

More power to Women who BUIDL! 💪

The Phoenix guild is a group of women and non binary folks who have come together to create a diverse and inclusive web3 ecosystem and want to help other women in tech and non-tech roles empower and educate themselves to utilize the opportunities in WEB3.

So, if you are a woman and want to transition to Web3, you know where to look.

What else is brewing? ☕

✉️Telegram wants to make decentralized tools

Telegram, the messaging platform, is developing a collection of decentralized tools, such as noncustodial wallets and decentralized exchanges. The move comes after FTX collapse and as a response to combat abuse of power.

🦄Uniswap launched an NFT platform

Uniswap, a decentralized exchange (DEX), announced that nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, can now be traded on its native protocol. This could help users save upwards of 15% on gas fees.

🔐Bitcoin Security Firm Casa extends services to Ethereum

According to a company statement, Casa, which provides user-friendly security infrastructure for maintaining self-custodial crypto wallets, will make Ethereum compatibility available to members in January.

Meme of the day!

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See you tomorrow, folks. 👋

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