Merry Christmas and Happy holidays! 🎄 Even though Santa forgot to bring us a bounceback over $8000 (yet), the community mood is positively festive today, as evident by our top 10 trending words on crypto social media:

And while the holiday spirit is high, a few mini storylines also creeped onto our emerging trends list on this merry day:

1. Reddit debates overdraft fees

‘banks bad, bitcoin good’ is the quintessential crypto narrative. Every now and again, though, someone makes a bank-bashing argument outlandish enough even for crypto reddit.

Such was the case with today’s most popular thread on r/cryptocurrency, in which OP lamented the fact that banks made $34 billion in overdraft fees (in 2017), claiming this is exactly why the poor need crypto:

If you’re not familiar with the banking sector, overdraft fees are charged when you don't have enough cash in your account to cover a payment you've made, and as part of an overdraft protection service, the bank covers the difference for you.

The thread amassed more than 250 comments so far, and put ‘overdraft’ at #3 on our list of top emerging trends on crypto social media:

The OP’s argument sounded a bit off for some, as crypto doesn’t have a system that allows for overdraft in the first place:

Others pointed out that the overdraft essentially acts like a loan so it makes sense that it comes with a fee attached, and blamed it on poor money management, rather than banks being greedy:

Part of the discussion also centered on whether or not the overdraft protection is truly ‘opt-in’, and how a non-overdraft account can still be charged:

None was really the wiser in the end, as is usually the case with these ‘bank vs bitcoin’ flame wars. The only thing that’s for sure - we’re due for a dozen or so more of these threads in 2020. Ho ho ho!

2. Torus lets people send ETH to a reddit or gmail account

Funded by Multicoin Capital, Coinbase Ventures and Binance Labs, Torus wants to simplify dapp onboarding and abstract crypto transactions for mainstream audiences.

Instead of asking you to copy-paste long address strings, Torus applies a “name resolver” that lets users send ETH transactions to a google email address or reddit username.

In today’s most popular thread on r/ethereum, the project is giving away small amounts of ETH for users to test their new non-custodial wallet and send coins to a social or gmail account:

Unsurprisingly, the promise of free ETH (on Christmas, no less!) proved enough to put Torus on our list of top emerging words for the day, based on our social data:

The project also stuck around the thread to answer questions about the wallet, and their future roadmap:

It seems that the thread might still be ‘live’ at the moment, so if you all you want for Christmas is a few free coins, check out the original post.

And once again - Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! 🎅