🌊 Thursday Bitcoin Flows

• Santa Monica approved the adoption of a ‘Bitcoin Office’, thanks to the advocacy of several Los Angeleno Bitcoiners.

• Bitcoin Magazine announced that Donald Trump will be speaking at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville this month.

• The SEC’s Director of Enforcement, Gurbir Grewal, gave a speech recounting his greatest hits, and detailing the various types of enforcement the regulator has taken against “straight rips, ponzi schemes, affinity frauds, and other scams.”

• Cathie Wood wrote a letter to Ark investors, telling them that “many stocks associated with truly disruptive innovation have settled into rare, deep value territory.”

• Paradigm conducted a poll of Republican ‘Crypto Voters’. There were several takeaways, including that Trump’s pro-crypto platform may help persuade ‘Never Trump’ Republicans to vote for him after all.

• CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam said that courts have conclusively determined Bitcoin and Ethereum to be commodities, but that 70-80% of everything else is a security.

• Congressman Ro Khanna’s Washington DC Crypto Roundtable happened today. Industry leaders met with Khanna and other government representatives, including Biden adviser Anita Dunn - to whom one attendee said “You guys suck on crypto.”

Everyone feasted at the Whales’ expense yesterday.

But let’s do some quick age-discrimination (just a little). Ki Young Ju spotted some wise old Whales - the ‘permanent holders’ who never sell anything - and noted that these greedy goliaths gobbled up 85k BTC over the past 30 days.

It was a mixed day on Wall Street with no major standouts. However, Bernstein published a research note about the new trend of Bitcoin miners providing AI infrastructure, and set price targets of $26 for IREN, and $17 for CORZ.

And speaking of Core Scientific, they announced that they’ll be the first customer to buy Block’s new mining chip.

🥇Fidelity

Fidelity kept on powering yesterday. Inflows of 1019 BTC ($57.8m). That brings them to more than 5k inflows just this week.

🥈Franklin Templeton

Franklin Templeton off the top rope! Seemingly out of nowhere, they emerged with their third best daily haul yet, bringing in 550 BTC ($31.7m)

🥉BlackRock

Poor old BlackRock was bumped down to third place on the podium yesterday. They brought in just 387 BTC ($22m).

But speaking of IBIT, Eric Balchunas provided a mind-blowing stat: three quarters of ALL ETFs launched last year still have less than $121m in assets, which was IBIT’s inflow just on Tuesday.

🧮 Total

Another strong day overall, with net inflows of 2240 BTC ($127m). Honorable mention also goes to Ark ($5.7m), Bitwise ($4.7M), and Invesco ($9.5m) for all chipping in well.

One thing that’s under appreciated about late-stage fiat money debasement, is just how genuinely weird things can get.

On one hand, the price of everything becomes more meaningful. In a mundane, practical sense. You start asking questions like, “Why are my groceries twice as expensive as last year?”, and “How enraged should I be by this $6 latte?”

On the other hand, prices can become totally meaningless. Completely unmoored from the cost of production and/or labor, or anything resembling a functioning market signal.

That’s when you really start pondering how long the whole game has left. You think: is there even such a thing as intrinsic value after all?

I’m in one of those moods today. And the culprit? Trash.

Exhibit A: the fine folks at the US Department of Defense decided that Boeing should be paid fifty-two thousand American taxpayer dollars for one trash can.

Exhibit B: The leadership of New York City — allegedly the greatest the city on earth — triumphantly announced they were joining the rest of us in the 19th century by finally getting around to the use of trash cans. Hold your applause.

Yes, the news that they’d found a better solution than the status quo of piling up garbage on the street, was worthy of a press conference.

Of course, no government could responsibly foist a disruptive change like this on its citizens without first getting expert advice.

So you’ll be please to know that the big brains running the Big Apple consulted the world-leading experts on the production of industrial quantities of human waste: McKinsey & Company.

In fact, the city paid McKinsey $4m for a no-doubt immensely helpful 42-slide deck with such pearls of wisdom as:

“Cointainerization refers to the storage of waste in sealed, rodent-proof receptacles rather than in plastic bags.”

Mmm, I love the smell of democracy in the morning.

Those are the Flows this Thursday.

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

— Julian