30th October 2024 > > So close to a new ATH.

tl;dr

It’s the institutions, innit.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

That $870mm of inflows to the spot BTC ETFs in just one day yesterday, brought us so close to a new all-time high. In the absence of macro events that negatively impact all risk assets, there is no reason why these inflows shouldn’t just continue.

I am looking forward to the day when speculation about the first time BTC reaches six figures becomes rife.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – BTC adoption

If you are surprised that we are now suddenly seeing the start of that institutional wall of money piling into the spot BTC ETFs then, like me, you probably had an unrealistic expectation of the speed with which some investment decisions are taken.

We saw yesterday that the first of the US university endowment funds has made a small investment in BTC and Coinbase. That has taken nearly a year to go through the internal approval process. All pools of investment money operate at different levels of urgency, and to date only a small number have got themselves to the point of buying BTC. Increasingly, they will be joined by others.

Today we have another example where that approval process has hardly even begun, for it involves the state pension fund for Florida. But it is instructive, nonetheless.

Jimmy Patronis, Chief Financial Officer for Florida, has written to the State Board of Administration as “…  a request to the SBA to provide a report on the feasibility, risk, and potential benefits of directing a portion of state retirement system monies into digital asset classes”:

https://myfloridacfo.com/docs-sf/cfo-news-libraries/news-documents/2024/cfo-sba-letter.pdf?sfvrsn=cf808a4e_1

Jimmy points out that Wisconsin and Michigan have already gone down this route. He also specifically calls out Trump’s support of “… a national ‘stockpile’ of bitcoin using cryptocurrency the U.S. government currently holds”. And that is a nuance of this proposal that had not yet occurred to me – such a stockpile will confer legitimacy over BTC that simply does not yet exist today. It is easy to imagine most US states would be happy to follow in the US government’s footsteps, as will other sovereign nations.

As more and more see the direction of travel for what it is, more and more will join in.