6th April 2024 > > Opportunity, TradFi, & goats.

tl;dr

Ridiculously risky opportunities that are best ignored. TradFi embraces cryptos. And who’s up for donating a goat?

Market Snap

Market Wrap

It’s a choppy world out there for cryptos currently with a directionless market leaving investors perplexed.

The Solana blockchain is suffering from congestion hurting one of 2024’s strongest narratives.

BCH (the first notable hard fork of BTC on 1st August 2017 which was a very exciting day at the time) recently had its own halving, and that worked out well for holders with a near-doubling in price over the last three weeks. Be nice if that happened to BTC.

The leveraged children are tucked up firmly in their beds, which is no bad thing.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – h/t Alex@2036

https://www.2036.io/subscribe?ref=o5CmCFhBAK

Alongside his useful newsletter, Alex also offers some potentially interesting early opportunities for those who are prepared to risk losing their entire investment. None of them are scams as far as I am aware, just very high-risk plays. Not for most people, and not a recommendation by any means.

Also, for the record, I am not affiliated in any way, though the CC Treasury has some small capital in one or more of the investments that have already closed. Just letting you know in case some of you may be interested.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – ETF update

Whilst we wait for Morgan Stanley and UBS to onboard clients with nearly $10 TRILLION of assets to allow them access to spot BTC ETFs (you did read yesterday’s CCC right?), there is some other good news as well.

BlackRock et al, as the ETF providers, buy and sell ETFs in exchange for BTC. They don’t do this with end investors but with those who are known as APs – “authorised participants”. APs are TradFi firms with historically strong client relationships. This ability to leverage off those client relationships and other administrative processes (especially compliance) is one of the key factors making BlackRock singularly successful in no time at all. Which is even more remarkable given the almost non-existent balance sheet it needs to declare for capital adequacy rules. Larry Fink is a genius.

The APs – the ones with the client relationships and the balance sheet – buy and sell the ETFs, and hedge themselves continually with spot, futures, options, and so on. The APs are the actual market-makers, demolishing the lie you often see in ill-informed crypto chats that BlackRock is manipulating markets for its own benefit.

When BlackRock launched its spot BTC ETF it had Jane Street Capital and J.P. Morgan as its APs. Reports at the time suggested that there was an unwillingness from other firms to be involved, probably due to concerns around reputational risk, though this interpretation is mere speculation on my part.

Rather happily all of that has now changed.

BlackRock’s list of APs now includes some new counterparties such as ABN, Citadel, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Macquarie, UBS, and Virtu.

The TradFi stampede to get a piece of the crypto action is just ramping up.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – You gotta love crypto

The whole WLD (World Coin) and Orb thing that Sam Altman was pushing was all a touch weird and intrusive, though if the declared motivation behind it was truthful, then I guess it was worth a try. Just not in that way, if you know what I mean.

Despite its obvious failings, some people did benefit. Richard Opany (https://twitter.com/OpanyRichard) posted that he had bought a goat for $50 from his WLD airdrop and called it Sam.

On hearing this news, a random party sent another $100 for Dicky to buy two goats, with the request they be named “Higher” and “Base”. Whether these were crypto references, or related to drugs, we shall probably never know. But Dicky doesn’t care. His goat portfolio had trebled in no time.

For the very first time in the CCC, and almost certainly the last, here is a gratuitous pic of a goat called Base:

Another four orders for goat naming were quickly and gratefully received by Richard, including a request for one to be called Goaty McGoatFace, a reference familiar to anyone hailing from these fair isles.

As at the time or writing, the net pool for Dicky’s goat buying stands at $2,304, though there have been many transactions out of the account, some of which perhaps may not have gone to goat sellers:

https://debank.com/profile/0xd075caa6e58702e028d0e43cb796b73d23ab3ea5/history

As Milk Road put it, “Never change cryptos. Never change.”

…

But let’s leave the last word to Richard:

“Goodnight my crypto family love u all tomorrow ill post my projects and goats and there name am abit tired walking around the market places and ensuring the goats are fine”