🌊 Tuesday Bitcoin Flows

• BlackRock’s Head of Thematic ETFs Jay Jacobs posted a video explaining Ethereum to investors, ahead of today’s ETF launch. He describes the network as a platform for “decentralized applications” with a “wide range of use cases.” What are these applications and use cases? Good question! I’ll let you know when anyone offers an answer.

• Fidelity’s Digital Assets team released their ‘Q2 Signals Report’ — a quarterly breakdown of key market metrics and sentiment.

• CNBC Discussed Donald Trumps’ upcoming appearance at Bitcoin 2024, and whether or not (and how) the United States could adopt Bitcoin as a Treasury reverse asset.

• Balaji Srinivasan writes that “No election can pay off America's $175T in debt”, and outlines the chronology of Uncle Sam’s fiscal meltdown from 2008 to today.

• Polymarket predicts there is a 16% chance that Joe Biden is removed via the 25th amendment before the election.

• Sarah Miller, an economist and researcher, published a paper which shows that cash transfers to low income people have minimal lasting effects on health and wellbeing.

• The Digital Chamber has written a letter to presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris, urging her to adopt a “forward-looking approach on digital assets.”

• National Australia Bank, Australia’s second largest bank, says that “Bitcoin is the cleanest ‘Trump trade’ on show".”

Some early signs of appetite from the Whales, who’ve been quiet for a while.

This also also reflected on the chart below, which shows the ‘accumulation score’ for Whales turning strongly positive for the first time since April.

And you know who’s not selling? Very-long term hodlers (3+ years), according to Ki Young Ju.

The chart below shows the ‘realized capital’ of these cohorts. Realized capital measures the value of Bitcoin (technically, individual UTXOs), at the last price they were transacted.

What that means in this case: the shaded hump on the right of the chart shows that more and more bitcoin is ‘aging into’ these older cohorts i.e. it is being held, and not transacted.

TL;DR: They’re not selling.

Almost everyone was up yesterday, except MARA. MSTR broke $1800, which they hadn’t seen since hitting their all time high (~$1919) in late March.

🥇BlackRock

You might want to sit down for this one. BlackRock bought 7759 BTC yesterday ($523m). Their single biggest day since March. Also, IBIT has now passed QQQ for net inflows, year-to-date.

🥈 Fidelity

Fidelity was a distant second, but still pulled in a healthy 350 BTC ($23m).

🧮 Total

Massive day, thanks largely to IBIT. Net inflows of 7.9k BTC ($533m) — and that’s not including Ark’s likely inflows (they’re late to report). The only loser on the day was Van Eck, who were an outlier with -570 BTC, erasing their big Friday from last week.

Most of the time in Western democracies, there’s a peaceful and orderly transfer of power.

As we learned this weekend, sometimes minor hiccups occur. Nothing to worry about — just some procedural irregularities.

Like for example the US President being quarantined with Covid and strongarmed by Nancy Pelosi into dropping out of the election and then ‘the President’ announces their resignation via a digitally signed letter posted to social media without a press conferences or speech.

Like I said: just a little speed bump.

Anyway, in politics and life there are winners and losers.

There are obvious names on the wrong side of the equation in this affair, and you know them already.

But please, save some sympathy for the most downtrodden of all: the Jeo Boden investors.

What was only a few short months ago shaping up to be generational wealth, is now a sad reminder, forever etched into the Solana blockchain, of what could have been. For their bags, and for the nation.

Those are the Flows this Tuesday.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

— Julian