26th March 2025 > > The Crypto Task Force & GameStop.

tl;dr

The Crypto Task Force sets out its roadmap. GameStop adopts BTC as a reserve treasury asset.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Just the other day I naively commented that we had more or less got to the end of announcements about Trump’s Tariff Wars, only for him to extend them further. This time he placed additional tariffs on those who trade with Venezuela. One cannot argue with the moral imperative of removing dictators and thieves such as Maduro from positions of power. Rightly or wrongly, and only time will tell on that point, Trump has decided this is his way of doing so. For now, perhaps a long boring period of consolidation for BTC is the best we can hope for.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – The Crypto Task Force

On Monday we looked at the first crypto roundtable hosted by Hester Pierce in her new role as head of the Crypto Task Force and charged with the responsibility to define the future of crypto regulation in the US. Hester explains her thinking:

“The Crypto Task Force roundtables are an opportunity for us to hear a lively discussion among experts about what the regulatory issues are and what the Commission can do to solve them.”

Oodles of positive sentiment in that statement, which we do like.

We now know the dates and titles of the next four roundtables, giving us insight into the regulatory priorities of Hester and her team:

April 11, 2025 -- Between a Block and a Hard Place: Tailoring Regulation for Crypto Trading

April 25, 2025 – Know Your Custodian: Key Considerations for Crypto Custody

May 12, 2025 – Tokenization - Moving Assets Onchain: Where TradFi and DeFi Meet

June 6, 2025 – DeFi and the American Spirit

The first three topics tick a lot of boxes – improving the regulatory framework, encouraging TradFi adoption of crypto custody (the lack of which is a key barrier to wholesale adoption of cryptos as an investment class), and clarifying the role of tokenisation which is set to become the single biggest revolution in the finance industry since the invention of limited liability companies. For me, DeFi will probably remain a niche product for a long time, as you need to be a bit nerdy (only a bit? – Ed.) to really take advantage of it, and, in general, it is hard to see how any sovereign regulatory framework can ever be truly effective in a world where KYC and associated identification processes have been rendered redundant.

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By way of correction, Monday’s CCC confused the Crypto Task Force with the Presidential Order to investigate the viability of a BTC Strategic Reserve. That’s what happens when you take time out from work – your brain goes to mush. I promise not to make such a spectacular error again, nor go on holiday.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – GameStop

You may recall that GameStop was the vehicle via which an army of small retail investors ganged up and beat the living daylights out of a bunch of muscular hedge funds that had shorted a large proportion of the free float of the company’s shares.

It was a classic example of how leverage hurts mostly everyone – the hedge funds on the way up, and almost all those small investors on the way down once the shorts had been closed. One or two players made out like bandits, but they were few in number.

GameStop has become the latest corporate to potentially add BTC to its balance sheet:

https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1326380/000162828025014731/gme-20250201.htm

I don’t recommend trying to trawl through that document. It is a prime example of how even well-meaning regulation gets so out of hand, that any value in the additional information provided is lost to anyone except the large teams of specialists working in M&A or PE. It is certainly of no value to any retail investor, which is surely the key point of securities regulation.

For our purposes, GameStop has nearly $5bn in cash or cash-like instruments and has not capped the size of any future BTC investment.