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• The Congressional Budget Office has updated its estimate of the US budget deficit for 2024 to total $2T. That’s trillion with a T.

• Travis Kling assessed the state of the market, and concludes that “the gap between BTC/ETH and everything else is wide and likely going to get wider this year.”

• Miles Deutscher identifies a “major flaw” in crypto: the supply of new currencies (1 million alone since April), is completely saturating the market.

• Donald Trump vowed to “end Joe Biden’s war on crypto” at a campaign stop in Wisconsin.

• Imo Babics, CMO at Relai, has some pointers on how to market Bitcoin to Gen Z.

• The SEC has dropped its case against Consensys, indicating that perhaps the controversy of ETH possibly being a security could be coming to an end.

The Whales woke up yesterday. Perhaps the dip stirred them from their slumber.

Mostly down day across the board. Though in case you weren’t aware, the miners have done pretty well lately.

🇺🇸 United States

🔻Fidelity

Alright, let’s rip the bandaid off.

Fidelity got smashed again. FBTC sent out 1280 BTC ($83m). They’ve lost 5500 BTC over the past four trading days.

🔻Grayscale

GBTC got smoked again too. 960 BTC gone ($62.3m).

🧮 Total

Another stinger yesterday overall. No inflows, and the outflow bill came to 2350 BTC ($152m). Other individuals of note were Bitwise selling off 110 BTC, and BlackRock who managed to stay flat again. Larry Fink avoiding IBIT outflows like Neo dodging bullets in The Matrix.

It’s easy to make fun of NFTs when it’s degens, wash traders, and money launders trading pictures of cartoon penguins.

But would you change your tune if the Pope himself was getting into the game?

Well, he’s not far off. The Vatican Library is partnering with an Italian company who has plans to “put the cultural institution in contact with its supporters through Web3 technology.”

Donators to the project will apparently receive NFTs of certain manuscripts from the Library.

Before you scoff, I’ll remind you firstly that there is a long tradition of rare Church relics collected and worshipped as the amongst the most valuable treasures in the world.

And secondly, that the Church has battled the problem of verifying the ‘scarcity’ of these relics for hundreds of years.

For instance there are more than 700 officially recognized thorns allegedly taken from the Crown of Thorns worn by Jesus Christ himself, and many hundreds of pieces of the ‘True Cross’.

You can see where this is going, right?

Religious relics on the blockchain: the frontier of Real World Assets

Wow. Six VCs sent me a term sheet before I even finished that sentence.

That’s the state of bitcoin flows for this Wednesday.

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

— Julian