All Been Crypto — Week 8 Nov 2024
We got a new ATH as soon as Trump was confirmed president with BTC breaching through 75k, ETH now close to breaking 3k and SOL at 200. Was a green week across the board BTC +10% ETH/SOL +17% and MEMEs did even better DOGE/PEPE +20% some of the smaller ones even more. Clearly animal spirits are starting to come back with ATH and expectation that the now crypto friendly US president will boost the industry. News cycle was heavily around US election and implications with but we also saw more instos adopting. THe first UK pension fund announced a 3% allocation to physical BTC and UBS entered the tokenized money market fund arena. Enjoy your gains and of course reading!
Bat Tai Chi — btc21@mail.com
HEADLINES:
US elections was a win for Crypto
Trump secured his second term but not only that it was a clean sweep for the republicans. The red wave brought in many pro-crypto candidates so much that major donors calling it the most pro-crypto set up in history. Certainly the big money that went into campaign financing has helped. The Fairshake super PAC spending totaled 130mm in this cycle certainly made an impact with more than 30 of its 58 favored candidates winning their races. Now the question will be on how much of his campaign promises Trump keeps and how friendly his cabinet picks will be. There’s still time till he takes office on the 20th Jan but expect over the next few weeks to hear more about his personnel choices. One key low hanging fruit is the overturn of the SEC leadership. Clearly market pricing that in already with UNI for example jumping 30% on election night as we’d expect a less hostile regulatory environment. And then of course we have the big question on BTC as strategic reserve, this will take longer to implement and I expect it to be less flashy announced since there is some game theory behind not boasting you going to buy an asset so that everyone can frontrun you. And of course the whole election unwarp would be incomplete without mentioning polymarket where a total of 3bn has been wagered on the winner with Trump always being at much better odds than in polling. Many suggested that the market forces in prediction markets have been a much better indicator of ‘true’ probabilities’ vs polling but a caveat here is that even Polymarket had very low odds for Trump winning the popular vote so taking it with a grain of salt. It’s true however that polymarket was first to move when we had updated info on voting count in key swing states and Trumps odds rose >90% way before any of the major news outlets were willing to call him in favor. Will be interesting to see how polymarket now continues to drive user engagement — they got quite some headwinds now with the big event US elections falling away and some European Govs looking to restrict access.
First UK pension fund investing in BTC
The small 60mm pension fund has allocated 3% of their assets into BTC. That’s significant not just coz the size is much larger than previous US peers which was only like 0.1% but also because it was not done via ETFs but rather direct ownership of BTC. The investment was made after extensive consultations addressing ESG concerns, investment rationale, and security, with the private key secured among five independent institutions. Showing that there’s a path for even the most established institutions to own BTC.
UBS launches tokenized money market fund
Following the models of Templeton, and Blackrock now UBS has also issued their tokenzed money market fund. Now Templeton has years of experience with this but still has the vast maturity of their 400mm AUM on Stella (close to 95%) so basically inaccessible for DeFi, they launched on Arbiturm and Polygon too but with 20mm and 2mm respectively. Blackrock on the other hand teamed up with Securitize and went all in on ETH with >500mm of BUIDL on mainnet and it looks like that’s been the deciding factor. UBS also announced they gona launch on ETH mainnet indicating that institutions are adopting the ETH decentralized leger narrative.
QUOTES:
Binance charged us $0. Coinbase has asked us for; $300m, $50m, $30m, and more recently $60m. Lots of respect. But this is simply not true.
Andre Cronje — Sonic Labs Founder
WE ARE GOING TO BUILD A STRATEGIC BITCOIN RESERVE
US Senator — Cynthia Lummis
TLDR: I dropped the EigenLayer advisorship, left the ultra sound team, and made other changes to double down on neutrality and focus on L1 research and coordination. In September I let go of the EigenFoundation advisorship. I want to apologise to the Ethereum community and EF colleagues for the drama I caused. In hindsight it was a bad move for me to make.
Justin Drake — Ethereum Core Dev
All Been Crypto — Week 8 Nov 2024 was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.