Monthly Update || March 2023

Opening Remarks

Greetings from Ikigai Asset Management¹ headquarters. We welcome the opportunity to bring to you our fifty-fourth Monthly Update and hope these are helpful in better understanding some of what we’re doing and what we’re seeing. We have the privilege of deploying capital on behalf of our investors into a new technology and asset class that already has and will continue to fundamentally change the world – continuing to create trillions of dollars of value in the process.

We believe we are obligated to be shepherds of this technology – to help the world better understand the powerful potential of DLT and crypto assets, and to fund and be an ambassador for DLT projects that will change our lives forever.

To that end, the crypto ecosystem was on the receiving end of “Operation Chokepoint 2.0” in February. By most accounts, it was the most coordinated, multifaceted crackdown in a single month in the history of crypto. Just read the Monthly Highlights below. February was a full-blown blitzkrieg. There’s likely more to come on this front throughout this year.

Somewhat surprisingly, crypto prices were about flat in February despite the brutal regulatory and enforcement backdrop. Monthly trading volumes were some of the lowest of the last two years and the indecision of the market was palpable throughout the month. There doesn’t seem to be a ton of sellers down here, but the lack of immediate demand in the face of consistent negative headlines and an uncertain macro backdrop is apparent.

Bitcoin’s correlation to traditional asset classes subsided throughout the month of February, but that didn’t keep crypto from continuing to be closely intertwined with the winds of macro. The macro environment in February was characterized by a repricing of the Fed’s interest rate path in 2H-23 and 2024. On the back of 1) strong inflation data; 2) strong labor data; and 3) relatively hawkish commentary from the Fed, the Fed Funds futures market backed out the rates cuts that were priced in to late 2023 and every asset class followed suit.

Shown below, the Fed Funds futures market for September 2023 moved from 4.78 to 5.41 in February.

January’s strongly positive price action in macro was driven by 1) offsides positioning; 2) the hope of a soft landing in the US economy; and 3) relatively dovish messaging from the Fed. February macro price action was driven by the realization that the Fed will likely be forced to hike higher and stay up there longer than previously expected.

So, as it relates to crypto prices (it’s still All One Trade in my book, the negative idiosyncratic crypto headlines notwithstanding), the big question is-

Assuming a backdrop of the Fed raising rates to 6% between now and September. And while that's happening, the market's expectation shifts to rates staying at 6% for months or quarters thereafter. And while that's happening, inflation goes from 6% to 3.5% or 3%. And while that’s happening, the labor market starts to loosen up some and the economy is slowing… Given all that, what’s the NASDAQ going to do?

You can probably boil the answer to that question down to the exact glide path of decelerating inflation. Inflation is already projected to decline a ton in the next six months, to sub-3%. If the trend for inflation indeed ends up that pleasant, it’s easy for me to imagine Fed messaging as relatively dovish and the market pricing in rate cuts in 2024. This is a backdrop that I think would be supportive for QQQ. NASDAQ is +10% YTD and with that backdrop, I could imagine it up 20% for 2023. If inflation proves stickier than current projections, perhaps reaching 3.5% and stalling, the Fed would be forced into a standoff of sorts against the labor market and overall economic activity. They can’t cut rates with inflation stuck at 3.5%. All they can do is continue to squeeze the economy in hopes of bringing down inflation to their 2% mandate. This standoff scenario would not be supportive to QQQ, and I could imagine the index giving back most or all of its YTD gains.

Seeing as it’s All One Trade, it’s my base case assumption crypto prices will more or less act as levered beta to tech stocks. If NASDAQ is up 20% in 2023, BTC will probably be a double and ETH a little better. If NASDAQ is flat in 2023, BTC could easily end the year around current levels of $24k. If NASDAQ is down 5% in 2023, I would guess BTC will give back most of its YTD gains. More discussion of this later on here.

As we’ve been discussing for several months, at some point the dust will settle in crypto from all the knock-on effects of damage done in 2022. In case you couldn’t tell by this month’s events, we’re not there yet. Yeah, there were some positive catalysts for crypto in February. ETH L2’s are a solid narrative. Hong Kong welcoming crypto activity is nice. But neither of those are any match for the torrential downpour of Operation Chokepoint 2.0. We need more time to pass.

Eventually we’ll get there. Later this year or the next, we’ll get there. New narratives will form that will have a meaningfully positive impact on sentiment, and the macro backdrop will be supportive enough to allow the market to price in newfound bullishness. The rest of this year will likely be a waiting game to see when exactly those stars align.

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February Highlights

• US Regulators and Enforcement Agencies Execute “Operation Chokepoint 2.0”, Pushing to De-bank The Crypto Industry in the US

• Kraken Charged by SEC For Selling Unregistered Securities Via Staking Service, Forced to Shut Down Staking for US Retail and Pay $30mm Fine

• SEC Files Securities Fraud Lawsuit Against Terraform Labs and Do Kwon

• NYDFS Investigating Paxos Over BUSD Stablecoin

• SEC Plans to Sue Paxos Over BUSD Stablecoin, Ordered to Stop Issuing BUSD

• CZ Announces an Orderly Wind Down of BUSD Trading Over Time

• Coinbase to Suspend BUSD Trading March 13th

• Binance Australia Closes Derivatives Trading on Some Accounts

• Binance US Found with Unexplained $400mm Transfer to CZ-controlled Entity

• Binance Loses Banking Partner, Suspends USD Bank Transfers

• Binance Instructs Indian Crypto Exchange Partner WazirX to Withdraw Customer Assets

• PayPal Suspends Stablecoin Development Amid Regulatory Scrutiny

• SEC and NYDFS Object to Binance US’ $1bn Acquisition of Bankrupt Voyager Digital

• Caitlin Long’s Banking Startup Custodia Denied Oversight by Federal Reserve, Citing Crypto Risks

• DoJ Indicts Founders of $340mm DeFi Ponzi Scheme “Forsage”

• LocalBitcoins To Shut Down Operations

• Dapper Labs Denied Motion to Dismiss Against SEC, Judge Says Selling NBA Topshots Could Be a Securities Offering

• Self-hosted Wallet Ban Avoided in New Draft of EU’s Anti-money Laundering Bill

• Hester Peirce Authors Dissenting Opinion on Kraken Staking Enforcement Action

• Coinbase To Launch Ethereum L2 Chain Called “Base”, No Token to Be Issued

• Hong Kong Shifts Stance to Be More Friendly Towards Crypto, with Support from China

• Bitcoin Blockchain Sees Spike in Activity Around “Ordinals” and “Inscription” NFT Minting

• Genesis and DCG Reach Initial Agreement with Main Creditors on Bankruptcy Process

• LBRY Settles with SEC, Establishes Selling of LBC Tokens on Secondary Market Not a Security

• Silvergate Faces DoJ Probe Over FTX and Alameda Dealings

• Galois Capital to Wind Down After Half of Fund Assets Are Stuck on FTX

• Co-CIO Joey Krug Steps Down from Pantera

• RobinHood Board Approves Plan to Buy Back $578mm of RH Stock Purchased by SBF and Gary Wang

• FTX Negotiates Return of $400mm from Modulo Capital

• Bankruptcy Court Approves Sale of Certain FTX Investments, Tokens and Equity Shares

• SBF Charges with Conspiracy to Make Unlawful Political Contributions and Defraud the Federal Elections Commission

• Judge Denies Request for Independent Examiner in FTX Bankruptcy

• FTX Japan Resumes Withdrawals

• Alameda Insider Nashad Singh Reportedly Cooperating with Authorities Against SBF

• CFTC and SEC Cases Against SBF Delayed Until After Criminal Case

• Jump Crypto Counter Exploits the Wormhole Hacker, Recovers $140mm of Stolen Funds

Source: TradingView. As of 2/28/23.

The Contortion of Truth

"History is a set of lies that people have agreed upon" - Napoleon

This month’s Main Section is going to be a little more “out there”, but a few things have caught my attention lately that bring up topics we’ve discussed here over the years, which I believe are relevant to crypto and decentralization.

That was all from February. These occurrences set off alarm bells in my head because they’re examples of topics I’ve mentioned here numerous times previously.

“We are in the midst of a Trust Revolution. The very words “Trust” and “Truth” are being contorted in today’s society.” – Oct 2019 Monthly Update

“Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has the potential to be the platform on which to drive societal change for the good. At its core, DLT removes the requirement for trust. If the world were more trustworthy, removing the requirement for trust would be less necessary. That is not where we find ourselves today. This is the thesis for what we broadly refer to as the Trust Revolution.” – Oct 2020 Monthly Update

“The pace of technological innovation is increasing at an increasing rate. As technological innovation moves increasingly more digital, the pace of innovation speeds up. Innovation becomes increasingly less governed by the linear limitations of the analog world, and more governed by the super linear limitations of a digital world (i.e., an abstraction of Moore’s Law). Humanity can do different things to accelerate or decelerate this trend, but it is a fundamentally super linear rate.” – Mar 2022 Monthly Update

“The opposite of scarcity is abundance. The coming decades will bring abundance driven by technological innovation. Hunger and malnourishment will be solved by technology. Cancer. Heart disease. Neonatal conditions. Dangerous work. These will be solved by technology, highly likely in this century and it might even be the first half. Life is set to get much better for humans because of technology.” – Mar 2022 Monthly Update

“Misinformation is going to be a defining challenge in the coming years and decades – What is the actual truth? We can’t trust what people say is the truth. People are already feeling this to an increasing degree. Younger generations feel this more acutely than older generations. Younger generations know Fox News and CNN are both equally full of shit. That’s why they listen to Rogan. Digital information moves instantaneously via internet and social media. Everyone has a video camera in their pocket. How will Truth without Trust be obtained? I believe decentralization can play a pivotal part.” – Mar 2022 Monthly Update

“Humanity is becoming increasingly more intertwined with technology. You’d be a fool to think otherwise. We have every indication to think that humans are going to adopt technology as fast as new, captivating things come out. A very safe, compelling Neuralink for everyday use may not be available for 30 years. But when it is, I’d strongly bet it will be rapidly adopted. Humans YEARN for progress. It’s deep in our DNA. Take ChatGPT. The world is blown away by it and it’s experiencing record-breaking adoption. The adoption of ChatGPT will propel humanity further into reliance on technology. You can imagine how rapidly (50-100 years?) this journey will unfold, because that adoption is increasing at an increasing rate. With ChatGPT, OpenAI claims that GPT-4 will have 100 trillion parameters, as opposed to the 175 billion parameters that GPT-3 is currently trained on. That’s increasing at an increasing rate. What will THAT be like? Run THAT out for 100 years. The coming decades/century are going to get WEIRD. Ask yourself, how do you feel about that power being centralized in the hands of a few opaque, profit-driven organizations?” – Feb 2023 Monthly Update

ChatGPT
ChatGPT certainly had its fair share of detractors emerge over the last couple months. Many experts proclaimed that ChatGPT is not all that impressive. That it doesn’t have actual cognitive capabilities, it’s just good at pretending like it does in some instances. Plenty of domain experts have been mostly dismissive of ChatGPT. And maybe they’re right. They certainly know a lot more about it than I do. But to me, the emergence of ChatGPT (and there are more, likely better Large Language Models coming down the pipe) changes my assumptions about what the next couple decades will look like for AI and humanity. Or even the next five years.

That’s what doesn’t make sense to me with these naysayers – they seem to be ignoring the apparent trajectory of this technology. It feels ignorantly dismissive to me to write off ChatGPT as “not Artificial General Intelligence, just good at pretending like it is sometimes”. Because of COURSE that’s what it’s going to look like at the onset. But there’s every reason to believe the pace of advancement of this technology is going to be aggressive. So over the next five years, it gets better and better at “pretending to have cognitive capabilities” and the line gets blurrier and blurrier. There’s every reason to think humanity will absolutely flock to adopt this technology. Look at this-

Is the search engine becoming antiquated? ChatGPT is evidence this is the case. We’re already seeing a movement away from search engines in general. 40% of Gen Z uses TikTok and Instagram search over Google. Why is that? The answer is likely multifaceted, but seeking trusted opinions presented in a visually pleasing manner is a big part of it. Where might AI fit into that?

Well, it would take about a week to slap together a Siri or an app with a computer-generated avatar that would speak the ChatGPT answers to you. I’m sure that’s in the works already. What about the trustworthiness of the content? That’s a great question. The manner and degree to which LLM information will be trusted will be a function of humanity’s assessment of the quality of that information. But there’s every reason to think the technology will become increasingly MORE trustworthy across an increasingly larger number of concepts…But. It will depend on whether these LLMs are going to “lean” in one direction or another with the types of information they present. People will sniff that out. It’s why young people are using social media for news.

US DOE Covid Lab Leak

As it relates to the US Department of Energy’s conclusion and admission that Covid likely resulted from a lab leak, the writing is on the wall. The free exchange of ideas is being pressured right now on multiple fronts. People were “cancelled” and deplatformed for suggesting such an idea just a couple years ago. People’s freedom of speech (on an app ran by a corporation) is being impaired. The President of the United States was deplatformed after being charged in the “court of social media executive opinion” with inciting a riot at the Capital. These are the days of our lives.

This 180° reversal from the US government on the origins of Covid is a case study for one of the greatest challenges of our time – the intersection of a 1) declining trust in institutions; 2) muffling of free speech on social media; and 3) the concept of truth. It’s a difficult spot to be in but we mustn’t pretend like we aren’t sitting at that intersection.

Roald Dahl

The Roald Dahl deal hit particularly close to home because I’ve read nearly everything he’s ever written and read many of his books multiple times. Roald Dahl was my favorite author as a kid. So when I saw the news that they were changing Dahl’s original text to more “mild” wording, including apparently automatically changing the digital text on Kindles, it struck a chord.

This is a complicated topic and there’s no way for me to do it justice in the context of this Monthly Update. However, retroactively applying a moral code, only held by some people, on a historical work of art strikes me as an incredibly slippery slope. And we’re barreling towards these issues.

It’s not that this sort of thing hasn’t come up previously. Think about the removal of Confederate Civil War statues and memorabilia in the deep south. Same sort of deal. I think that removal was a good thing, but we could argue about it. The way the process is supposed to work, society collectively decides what we think about an issue through discourse and then the conclusion of that discourse is enacted through the process of government. Admittedly, that process is usually painstakingly slow. But the process exists, and it’s been running ok for a couple hundred years.

There are always nuances to major issues like these. Pros and cons. It’s true for Confederate statues in Alabama and it’s true for changing Roald Dahl’s work (after he died) to not call Augustus Gloop fat. And these nuances and pros and cons get weighed and considered and society changes over time and sets new standards for what is considered appropriate. But with the addition of technology and social media, this process fundamentally changes. There is no democratic process around freedom of speech on social media, yet social media is the “town square” now. How will society deal with such substantial power to limit free speech through technology?

So What?
I won’t pretend to have all the answers. Not even close and that’s not the point here.

AI ethics.
Freedom of speech in social media.
Using technology to rewrite history and retroactively enforce a non-consensus moral code.

These issues are right in our face. This month. The need for urgency is apparent. Boomers are woefully unprepared to deal with these issues because they involve technology that hasn’t existed for very long, yet is poised to consume humanity. These are issues for Millennials and Gen Z. The problems that arise from these issues are the problems of the future, but it’s not a distant future at all. Like I said, these things are knocking on our doorstep.

Over the course of recorded human history, conveying the truth has never been a particularly high priority for those writing the history. “History is written by the victors”, as the saying goes. As a species, we’ve never had widespread access to a historically accurate truth. And so, humanity ebbs and flows through the last ~5,000 years with varying degrees of access to a historically accurate truth. And all the “fake truth” that gets peddled by the victors is kept at a relatively small scale, globally speaking.

Technology changed that. Now we have worldwide instant information dissemination, with all kinds of toll roads surrounding it. Humans have never had access to the SCOPE of authoring history that we do now. If you’re on the second page of a Google Search, do you even exist? If you get deplatformed for saying something that later turns out to be true, have your civil liberties been violated? What does the truth even mean?

Decentralization can help here. Public key cryptography can provide assurances of truth unlike any tool humanity has ever seen. It would be deeply beneficial to humanity, and I get the sense we’re longing for that more reliable truth. Millennials and Gen Z are searching for avenues to get “better” truth. Its why young people are using TikTok instead of Google.

There is enormous centralization risk for technology companies that gain large market share in social media and AI platforms. Decentralization and crypto at least have a chance of alleviating these fast-approaching issues. I don’t see anything else on the horizon that has a better chance. But crypto isn’t ready yet. We need to stop tripping over ourselves first. And there needs to be a better market structure around the evaluation of major projects and companies. Said differently, if the world woke up tomorrow and collectively decided they needed a lot more decentralization, crypto would be woefully unprepared to deliver it to them.

I welcome feedback and discussion on this.

Market Update – Liquid Crypto Asset Investing

Source: CoinMarketCap. As of 2/28/23. BCH includes SV. Aggregate DeFi from Coingecko.

Crypto prices were about flat in February after an exceptionally strong January. Bitcoin closed February at the top end of its nine-month range (shown in yellow below) after a failed breakout attempt mid-month.

With the benefit of a couple months of hindsight, I believe it is accurate to characterize the price action from November and December as an inefficiency. The magnitude of the FTX collapse alongside Genesis was so enormous, price entered a zone (in purple above) that it never would have otherwise. Price lingered there for a period of time during the peak of forced selling and overall fear in the market and then rocketed higher with help from macro in January. It would not be my base case that BTC will enter this zone again this cycle, but never say never. With this regulatory environment and headline risk, anything could happen.

If BTC were to break convincingly through $25k, I believe price could quickly teleport to the major resistance level around $28.5k (in white above). Should that occur, what happens from $28.5k will likely have a lot to do with macro. In a vacuum, historically BTC price has had a tendency around major support/resistance levels to either front run it or blow right through it. Which is to say, BTC might fail hard at $27.5k or do a $3k candle straight from $28k to $31k – front run or blow right through it.

As always, we look to clues from macro to try and ascertain which direction crypto may be heading. At the moment, there appears to be a gap between the correlation of BTC and NASDAQ (shown in purple below).

Both BTC and NASDAQ have declined ~7% from their recent YTD highs. Except that BTC was +40% in Jan with NASDAQ +10%. Which is say BTC moved with a large beta to Q’s in the Jan pump but not on the recent pullback. Is that sustainable?

My gut says no, if Q’s pull back any further in March. If Q’s are down a few % in March, my guess is BTC will be down double that. So where might Q’s be heading?

At the moment, the bearish view is Q’s appear to have put in a fourth consecutive lower high (red arrows above), going back to the top of the market in November 2021. But not all hope is lost. Q’s have flipped many major Moving Averages, and price is currently sitting directly above them. March will be a showdown between the lower high resistance and the Moving Average support. My base case is BTC will break in the same direction.

Continuing down the All One Trade lane, next up is DXY. After running incredibly hard through the first nine months of 2022 on the back of a record tightening campaign from the Fed and the Ukraine conflict, the DXY collapsed into YE and Jan 2023. The collapse was halted directly at 50% Fibonacci retracement level (white below), which coincided with March 2020 support.

The ensuing Feb rally in the DXY from deeply oversold levels took price back to a prior level of support (now resistance). My gut feeling is DXY heads higher in the near-term. I don’t expect a retest of the highs from October 2022, but at least somewhat higher in the coming months makes sense to me before eventually breaking down lower, likely in 2024. The 2-year US Treasury is currently 4.8%. Germany is 2.6%. Japan is 0.5%. These rate differentials will likely drive flows into dollars to scoop up that juicy yield.

If you’ve been reading these for a while, you know my general thoughts about generic on-chain metrics for BTC valuation. If you haven’t, the TLDR is a I don’t put a ton of weight in them. For any given metric, I can give you a detailed explanation for why that signal is likely distorted in the current market environment and why cycle-over-cycle analysis is inappropriate given the incomparability of the time periods. Nevertheless, I believe these generic on-chain metrics likely have at least some amount of predictive power to help us understand where we are with Bitcoin’s price relative to the past. So let’s look at a few.

Bitcoin is currently trying to break resistance of the 200 Week moving average, after dipping below it for the first time ever. Unless something is very wrong with Bitcoin, now is a good time to buy.

The MVRV Z-score is an on-chain metric that helps identify cycle tops and bottoms. It looks good here (orange below).

The NUPL is another on-chain metric in a similar vein as the MVRV. You can see how low it was during the aftermath of the FTX collapse and the subsequent bounce up. BTC price has never acted in this manner and it NOT been a cyclical bottom (blue below).

Reserve Risk is a metric created by Ikigai’s own Hans Hauge. It takes into account how long BTC that moves has been sitting idle prior to its last move. The general thesis behind this metric is that “old” Bitcoin sells when price is high and “new” Bitcoin sells when price is low. This metric (red below) indicates now is an attractive time to be buying.

Finally, RHODL Waves separates BTC on-chain movements by age of the coins since last movement. Specifically here, we are looking at coins moving that are six months to two years old since their last movement. You can observe the specific cyclical movements that peak after large price declines and then pull back. The peaking and pullback of this metric (yellow below) has consistently served as an attractive entry point.

So What?

Near-term, it’s probably going to be Macro’s call. My gut says we pull back or at least consolidate over the next month or two. From there remains to be seen. Depends on how that glide path we talked about earlier plays out. Over a longer timeframe, now is likely a very attractive time to be accumulating BTC. The Fed will cease its tightening campaign soon enough. The market will then set its sights on the impending easing cycle. This is the backdrop where capital flows to crypto. Don’t get me wrong, the space is beat to hell at the moment and it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. But I think it would be a mistake to throw your hands up at crypto now and walk away. For as rough as this regulatory crackdown is, I don’t think it will permanently, significantly impair the value proposition for crypto.

Closing Remarks

It would have been naïve to think that after the last year’s worth of damage done, we wouldn’t get a significant regulatory crackdown.

The guy that gave all the politicians all the money committed Madoff-level fraud. The money he GAVE was fraudulent. Just ponder on that for a second. What did you think regulators were going to do?

As discussed here previously, the US crypto regulatory environment has long been entangled with politics. So politics are heavily involved in this Operation Chokepoint 2.0 we have today. Prior to the last year’s damage, crypto had a lot of friends in high places in Washington, and even some of the naysayers were starting to move towards a more neutral stance. Crypto had “protection” from heavy-handed regulatory action. Fast forward to today, and that protection is mostly gone. There’s no political willpower to stand up against the barrage of “regulation by enforcement” we’ve seen in crypto the last few months. Read the Monthly Highlights this month and last. How many of those regulatory/enforcement actions would have occurred if the FTX collapse never happened? My guess is much less.

The enforcement actions brought since the FTX collapse will have their own unique timelines and turning points. Many will drag on for years. The outcomes of these enforcement actions will serve to shape the overall US crypto regulatory landscape for the remainder of this decade. It will be a slow, arduous process. Depending on how various issues play out in settlements and courtrooms, the crypto ecosystem may be better and safer for it all or it might be significantly impaired by it. It’s way too early to call right now.

At some point along the way, Congress may pass crypto legislation that would blanket many of these enforcement actions. That is unlikely to happen before 2024 elections, so realistically we’re talking 2025+. And it will depend on how the elections shake out. A red wave would make near-term crypto legislation more likely. In the meantime, the more of these enforcement actions get settled, the more “case law” piles up. And that will shape how the industry evolves in the coming years.

Crypto honestly needs regulatory help. Look at the mess we’ve got ourselves in. But much of what regulators have been doing recently is not helpful. The CFTC seems to have a good handle on things, but Gensler’s SEC has been damaging. The OCC and Treasury are so closely intertwined with traditional finance, they’re always going to be on their side. And so you can’t help but be nervous about how beneficial these regulatory actions will actually end up being.

In the meantime, crypto can change on its own. Self-regulation in this context is just a social structure. It exists on Twitter and in Telegram and on podcasts and at conferences. What does this ecosystem collectively think about the last few years - the bull and the bear? Are we happy with the progress? Disappointed? What, if anything, do we want to collectively do differently going forward? I welcome more discussion on these topics.

“If dust piles up, it will become a mountain.”

– Japanese Proverb

Travis Kling

Founder & Chief Investment Officer

Ikigai Asset Management

P.S.

Included below is an incomplete list of memorable tweets from the last month. Twitter is not investment advice and my views could easily be wrong. That being said, like it or not, Twitter matters for crypto. I have no interest in being a talking head for a living and babbling about on Twitter is a long way away from being a good steward of investor capital. However, this is a community with open-source software in its DNA, and participants want to crowd-source the truth. We are shepherds of this technology. Answers to fundamental questions about this asset class are not currently clear, so having a public platform to share your views with the community is important. After all, you’re helping shape the future :)

1. Ikigai Asset Management is the trade name for a collection of advisory and consulting businesses operated by Travis Kling, Anthony Emtman, and their team.

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