23rd January 2025 > > El Salvador & pension funds.

tl;dr

Salvation is upon us. Pension funds are ramping up their crypto involvement.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

With Trump keeping schtum on the subject of cryptos, some speculative inflows have reversed course, possibly setting us up to breach $100k to the downside, just temporarily of course.

Curious Cryptos’ meme corner

I have been telling y’all since 2017, but I suspect that one or two of you have not been paying enough attention.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – El Salvador & the IMF

El Salvador (loosely translated as “salvation for everyone”) has long been at the forefront of crypto adoption, which can be publicly tracked here:

https://bitcoin.gob.sv/

That first spike in the graph of BTC owned by the government of El Salvador came just one day after it had secured $1.4n of financing from the IMF. Hilariously, the loan was predicated on a material reduction in El Salvador’s BTC ambitions, a restriction that was immediately ignored.

The bigwigs at the IMF intuitively know that cryptos pose an existential threat to their tax-free full fat salaries and platinum-plated pensions that are funded by us as taxpayers. The concept of a bunch of technocrats sitting around making unelected decisions that affect real peoples’ lives – always to the downside – is not only really scary, it is the heart and soul of the IMF. Never, in the field of human endeavour, has so much been received by so few, from so many.

Moving on, that second spike shown on the graph is El Salvador once more putting two fingers up at the IMF.

Hats off to Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador, on the narrow topic of cryptos.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Pension funds

A report from Standard Chartered about crypto prospects for 2025 makes for cheering reading.

The bank predicts that institutional flows into BTC and ETH will continue to increase during the year, especially from pension funds. This claim is not made in hope – it is informed by conversations with the bank’s clients:

“The dominance of institutional inflows to ETFs is likely to support BTC and ETH performance; we see their prices reaching the $200,000 and $10,000 levels by end-2025, respectively.”

Pension funds globally manage $55 TRILLION of assets. If we assume that 3% to 5% will flow into cryptos that’s $1.5 to $2.5 TRILLION of new money which is unlikely to go anywhere but mostly BTC, and a little bit of ETH. This won’t happen quickly, but we have already seen the first signs that the process has begun with the Jersey City pension fund allocating 2% of its holdings to crypto, the Houston Firefighters Pension Fund buying $25mm worth of $BTC and $ETH, and the 1st and 3rd largest national pension funds (Norway & South Korea) allocating to MicroStrategy (a crypto proxy asset).

But if you don’t believe Standard Chartered (or me), even the Financial Times has admitted (through gritted teeth) that pension funds are investing in BTC.