October 2021 - Monthly Market Update
/Monthly Update || October 2021
“The most dangerous thing is to buy something at the peak of its popularity. At that point, all favorable facts and opinions are already factored into its price and no new buyers are left to emerge.”
Opening Remarks
Greetings from Ikigai Asset Management¹ headquarters. We welcome the opportunity to bring to you our thirty-seventh 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 we believe will fundamentally change the world and 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 old adage “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” appears to be advancing significantly through third base right now, even as the inevitability of the last step becomes increasingly clear. The fighting is occurring on multiple fronts and while this has been true for the entirety of Bitcoin and crypto’s existence, the shift in the nature of that fighting is noteworthy. In particular, the US regulatory stance towards crypto continues to be a dynamic and crucially important landscape.
As governments tend to do, the US regulatory stance towards crypto has been badly mishandled. It’s been the perfect microcosm of the general ineptitude our mostly C-team elected and appointed officials bring to the table here in the US. They tried for as long as possible to ignore and laugh, even in the face of increasing evidence that crypto was not going away and only growing stronger. For years there was an evolving mix of ignoring, laughing and fighting. Over time, as the asset class reached nearly $1tn of market value, pulled back deeply and then broke $1tn and then $2tn, governments begrudgingly began to realize this is not going away at all. So they started fighting harder.
Source: Coinmarketcap and Ikigai. As of 9/30/21.
But as governments do, the fighting has been disjointed and entirely ineffective at stemming the flood of capital coming into crypto. On the China side, they attempted the largest state-level attack ever on Bitcoin in May and June of this year, but as soon as they let up, price immediately jumped 50%. Then they came back again in September and tried to do more, but price didn’t care much this time. As it currently sits, China’s punching power in crypto has been significantly diminished relative to six months ago. It’s not that they can’t still punch – they can and they are and they may punch even harder and it may make price go down temporarily. But at that point they will have lost essentially all major influence over crypto markets (they’ve already lost a lot), and Bitcoin’s “antifragility rejection process” for China will be complete. It’s a beautiful thing.
On the US side, much is still up in the air. Regulators are tripping over one another to see who gets to preside over this booming asset class. The SEC wants it. The CFTC wants it. FinCEN wants it. Treasury wants it. OCC wants it. They all jawbone about how crypto needs more regulation – unregistered securities, exchange surveillance, stablecoins, lending platforms, AML/KYC, custody. Yet very little progress has actually been made. The lack of regularity clarity is undoubtedly stifling innovation and the fear of heavy-handed regulatory action from the US is causing talent to go offshore to any number of more welcoming jurisdictions. It’s a mess right now.
We very well may be getting some clarity pretty soon though. Specifically on the stablecoin side, I wouldn’t be surprised if we get something this year. There’s risk it could be damaging to the use cases of stablecoins, but I don’t think it will be massively damaging. On the unregistered securities side, Gensler has been doing plenty of jawboning, but the fines levied to-date have been entirely slaps on the wrist for any meaningful company. The only heavy-handed actions have come against egregiously illegal actions from companies hardly anyone’s ever heard of. The big kahuna here will be what happens with the SEC’s case against Ripple. That rabbit hole goes super deep and I won’t get into details here, but in my opinion if you look at the totality of the evidence – circumstantial or otherwise – it looks like Ripple is going to eventually settle with the SEC for an amount that will be insignificant to them relative to the billions of dollars raised through the sale of XRP, and they will be allowed to continue operating more or less as they have been. That is my medium conviction base case.
Should that end up as the outcome, it will likely serve to embolden other crypto projects that are currently sitting in regulatory purgatory, trying to get guidance from the SEC or CFTC but receiving none. BlockFi has already felt emboldened. They’re not backing down from the state level cease and desist orders. We thought Coinbase was going to be emboldened as well too, but appears they have backed down, at least for now. It seems like pockets of the industry are beginning to grow impatient with regulators, while simultaneously lowering the probability assigned to regulators bringing such heavy-handed actions so as to kill a project or an entire sector. That sets up for an exciting year-end and 2022.
The last thing I’ll leave you with on this topic is a factor I’ve discussed in part before but want to reiterate here again in this context. Capital is flooding into this space in every which way possible – and it’s coming from high quality investors with deep pockets and powerful networks. These investors now have a vested interest in seeing the crypto industry succeed and thus serve as a buffer against heavy-handed regulatory action. This in itself is an aspect of Bitcoin’s antifragility - its mechanism design incentivizes people to buy it and then protect it.
From February 2021-
“The government is made up of actual human beings. Americans with constituencies, personal networks and career histories. While it’s easy to forget, these are elected officials who were put into office by American voters, or they are appointed by elected officials who were put into office by American voters. As we all know in America, those who have the power and the money have the ear of elected officials – this is how our democracy works in America right now.”
You can’t overstate how much additional well-connected capital has come into crypto in the last 18 months. From that perspective, the coming years look like one massive green light for crypto, and we’ll sort the regs out just fine along the way.
Invest
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We accept new investors on the 1ˢᵗ and 15ᵗʰ of every month.
Contact us to see if you qualify.
September Highlights
Twitter Releases “Tip Jar” Feature to Allow In-App Tipping of Bitcoin with Lightning Network
Interactive Brokers Introduces Crypto Trading Through Paxos
MicroStrategy Purchases $243mm Bitcoin at $48k Average Price
Chinese Government Declares All Crypto-Related Transactions Illegal, Takes Incremental Steps to Discourage Crypto Usage in China
Huobi and Binance Suspend Registration of All New Users in China
Multiple ETH Mining Pools Cease Services in Mainland China
Gensler Hosts Discussion with Financial Times and Reiterates Prior Hawkish Comments on Crypto Unregistered Securities, While Favoring Bitcoin
AngelList Enables USDC Funding
Kraken Pays $1.25mm Fine in Settlement with CFTC
Ripple Announces $250mm Fund for NFTs on XRP
Paul Tudor Jones to Launch Digital Disruption Hedge Fund
Algorand Launches $330mm Ecosystem Fund
Polychain and Three Arrows Lead $230mm Token Sale in Avalanche
Jump Capital Launches $350mm Crypto-Focused Fund
Sorare Receives $680mm Investment Led by SoftBank
Dapper Labs Raises Another $250mm
Crypto Growth Equity Fund 10T Holdings Announces $750mm Raise
MasterCard Acquires Crypto Analytics Firm CypherTrace
Amberdata Raises $15mm Series A Led By Citi
Crypto Fintech Company Zero Hash Raises $35mm Series C Led by Point72 Ventures
Coinbase Launches $1.5bn Debt Deal, Upsizes to $2bn at ~3.5% Rate
Coinbase Files with the NFA to register as a Futures Commission Merchant
Audius Receives Investment from Katy Perry, Nas, Steve Aoki, Chainsmokers and Other
FTX Signs Ambassador Partnership with Steph Curry
FTX Signs Partnership with F1 Team Mercedes-AMG Petronas and Driver Lewis Hamilton
FTX Moves Headquarters to Bahamas
Texas Files Cease and Desist Against Celsius
SEC Probing Uniswap and Crypto Lending Platforms
US Treasury Sanctions Russia OTC Desk for Money Laundering
Binance.US Hires Former Ant and Uber China Exec as President
Robinhood Begins Early Testing on Crypto Wallets
Dutch Football Team PSV Hold Bitcoin on Balance Sheet
| Asset Class | September | August | July | Q3-21 | Q2-21 | Q1-21 | YTD | 2020 | Instrument |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | -7% | 13% | 19% | 25% | -41% | 103% | 51% | 303% | BTC |
| NASDAQ | -6% | 4% | 3% | 1% | 11% | 2% | 14% | 48% | QQQ |
| S&P 500 | -5% | 3% | 2% | 0% | 8% | 6% | 15% | 16% | SPX |
| Total World Equities | -4% | 2% | 1% | -2% | 6% | 6% | 10% | 14% | VT |
| Emerging Market Equity | -4% | 2% | -6% | -9% | 3% | 4% | -2% | 15% | EEM |
| Gold | -3% | 0% | 3% | -1% | 3% | -10% | -8% | 25% | GLD |
| High Yield | -1% | 0% | 0% | -1% | 1% | 0% | 0% | -1% | HYG |
| Emerging Market Debt | -3% | 1% | 0% | -2% | 3% | -6% | -5% | 1% | EMB |
| Bank Debt | 0% | 0% | -1% | 0% | 0% | -1% | -1% | -2% | BKLN |
| Industrial Materials | -1% | 0% | 3% | 2% | 8% | 8% | 20% | 16% | DBB |
| USD | 2% | 1% | 0% | 2% |
-1% | 4% | 5% | -7% | DXY |
| Volatility Index | 40% | -10% | 15% | 46% |
-18% | -15% | 2% | 66% | VIX |
| Oil | 9% | -5% | 2% | 5% | 23% | 23% | 59% | -68% | USO |
Source: TradingView. As of 9/30/21.
A Cursory Glance At The Metaverse
To be fair I’m such a boomer when it comes to crypto that I’m barely qualified to write anything about Metaverse. I haven’t done enough work yet, not even close. But TBH I didn’t know what else to write about for the main section this month. I couldn’t do China again. I just talked about regs up there. Evergrande is prob already over. Macro is too uncertain short-term. Last month we covered The Multichain World. So here we are at Metaverse.
That’s not to say Metaverse isn’t interesting. It DEF is interesting. There’s just a lot of other folks more qualified to speak on it than I am. But we are spending real time on the sector at Ikigai. Our current fund exposure to Metaverse rounds down to zero but that could change quickly. And like I said, we think it’s really interesting.
The primary reason we find it so interesting is this:
Source: Forbes.
And more specifically, this:
Source: Coindesk. As of August 26, 2021.
At Ikigai we’re on board for that. Full stop. If there are people getting pulled out of poverty in third world countries by playing a game that’s based on blockchain technology, we’re all for that. We’re trying to fund and be ambassadors for that. That’s good for the world.
It is my reasonably high conviction base case that we are firmly moving in the direction of a Ready Player One world, in the sense that more and more time will be spent in the digital world relative to the analog world. It looks to me like that trend is inexorable. Betting against that would be like knowing everything you know now about our relationship to smart phones, then going back to the beginning of smart phones and saying, “nah those aren’t going to be a big deal”. Think about it. We’re obsessed with these things. Why shouldn’t we be? When we live our analog lives, all we have access to are the people, places and things in our immediate physical vicinity. In that 6x3 inch square there, you have immediate access to just about every single anything, that’s ever been, at any point. Of course you’re obsessed with it! So what do you honestly think will happen when we get a couple more generations down the road with VR goggles? Do you REALLY think that technology won’t end up ubiquitous?
Whether the dystopian portion of Ready Player One comes about I’m less sure about, but I know there is a significant possibility it turns out that way. Look at the direction of wealth inequality in the world – if that continues linearly for the next three decades it will likely look exactly like Ready Player One. There’s also a significant chance it goes a much happier way. But that’s not set in stone at all. Whether or not this DLT and crypto assets deliver on all of, a portion of, or none of their potential to make the world a better place will in the end be a function of the individuals working on pushing all this in the right direction. That’s what we’re here for. That’s why we named it Ikigai.
Then you couple that with what’s going on with the concept of “work” in general. Which is where this whole conversation gets a little bit weirder. Before I get into that though I’d like to take a step back and make a broader point. Prior to jumping full-time into crypto I was not the sort of person that thought deeply about the specifics of the way the world might turn out at a broad level in the future. I might have thought about my individual future – getting married, having kids, career etc. But I didn’t spend a ton of time thinking about, say “the role of technological innovation in the context of societal evolution”. I now have the pleasure of thinking about those sorts of things a lot. It’s one of the best things about this job relative to the one I used to have - you get to spend time thinking about really interesting things like that. A bet on Bitcoin can be as quick as you want, but you can easily think about it as a 10-year, 20-year or longer bet. If you’re making a big bet on something with that long of a timeline, you think a lot about the future.
Back to the concept of “work”. It looks like “the machines” are going to keep taking more and more of our jobs. Over a long enough time horizon, machines will start doing the vast majority of the work for us. Historically, technological innovation has created more jobs than it’s destroyed, but there’s reason to believe that may be coming to an end relatively soon. That reason would be because of this trend:
Source: Angus Maddison’s “World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1-2003 AD”
Inflation-adjusted GDP per capita rose slowly until we invented the steam engine, which brought a step-change in broad output capacity relative to what was achievable by the backs of humans or animals. Then we REALLY took off once electricity was widely available. Then by the time we invented computer chips, it was over. GDP per capita growth is now increasing at a superlinear rate. That means we probably can’t keep creating more human jobs than we’re taking away with technological innovation. Covid has greatly accelerated this trend. Look at the chart below. Every single one of these jobs is experiencing technological disruption to some degree, and that is set to accelerate.
Source: Bureau of Labor Stastics.
What is the world going to look like as we move further down this path? It’s my high conviction base case that UBI will be a central aspect of American life in the years to come for this exact reason. It essentially is right now already, and that probably won’t go away but instead will accelerate. At some point along this path of innovation-driven abundance, the foundational building blocks of economics start to break down as machines take more and more work away from humans, and the energy to power those machines becomes increasingly cheaper - eventually approaching free.
The relationship between time, cost and output starts to disintegrate. Over a multidecade horizon (and I do believe we’re talking decades not centuries), an increasingly larger portion of the population will find themselves unable to obtain gainful employment, as there are less and less jobs for humans to go around. In that world, UBI will cover all your basic essentials but still leave an increasingly larger portion of the population with no work to do and thus no means to earn a wage beyond what is provided under UBI. What will fill all that time? How will extra spending money be earned?
New worlds will be built digitally. In those worlds, new parameters can be set to define the concept of “work” (think Captcha). Acquiring and deploying the resources necessary to execute on this “work” at a large scale will be an integral component of success under the rules of this new digital world. Sound familiar? Yeah, me too. The more time I spend thinking about all this, the higher the likelihood I place on the dimension we’re all experiencing right now being a simulation. But whether that’s true or not, the role of humans as “productive entities within the confines of their existence” will continue to evolve into the metaverse.
A couple more points I want to make while we’re out here in Lala Land. First- we are entering an age of innovation-driven abundance, the pace of that abundance is accelerating, that abundance will create distortions in all sorts of aspects of life, and those distortions will lead to social unrest. It’s already happening, and it will accelerate. Second- there’s a mental exercise I do sometimes where I imagine the Fed is definitely right in their actions. They have information asymmetry and perfect decision-making skills and the decisions they are making with monetary policy (along with Congress and fiscal policy) are the correct ones. How would that end up being the case? The conclusion I arrive to in this mental exercise is that they know the deflationary forces we face are so fierce as the result of technological innovation, that it will take more money printing than imaginable just to stay in the same place and not collapse into a deflationary spiral, which they’re terrified of. In that way, extraordinarily loose monetary and fiscal policy serves as a sort of bridge to ease into a world of innovation-driven abundance and perpetual deflation as more and more of the analog world gives way to the Metaverse.
So. That was all pretty far out there, I know. But let’s just assume we agree it looks like it’s all heading in that general direction. What’s the beginning of all that going to look like? And when will the beginning, begin? Well, in some ways, it’s been beginning for well over a decade. Video game farming is not new. Then if you frame it in the context of how many of us already do “digital work” for a living, we’re already there. Only now, DLT and crypto assets provide new technology and incentive and organizational structures to take the entire concept of “work” in a virtual world to the next level.
If you’ve been reading these for a while you’ve heard me talk about the four questions many times. When evaluating uses cases for DLT, we ask ourselves:
How ready is the tech for the world?
How ready is the world for the tech?
What do you need decentralization for?
How decentralized is decentralized enough?
The captivating thing about Metaverse is that it answers those four questions pretty well. The tech could be better but it’s way better than it was a couple years ago, and it’s getting better quickly. A post-Covid, stay-inside world is a world primed for Metaverse. Decentralization removes platform risk. Decentralized enough is “sufficiently far away from Facebook-level centralization”. It’s pretty good product/market fit.
We don’t think Metaverse is going away. The market caps of the names in the sector can boom and bust with the whims of fear and greed, but capital will not stop pouring into this sector, and humans will not stop being interested in the experience. There’s a good chance the projects that exist today in the space end up being Ask Jeeves and AltaVista, but the innovation will continue and the product will improve. Metaverse will likely have a Google or a few Googles.
What does the Metaverse sector look like at the moment?
Source: Coingecko. As of September 30, 2021.
Coingecko lists 10 projects over $25mm market cap in their “Play To Earn” subsector, although they’re missing a few like ATLAS, POLIS, STARL, ALICE, SAND, WANA that fall under Gaming or DAOs. Which brings up the point that just defining Metaverse in the context of an investment landscape is somewhat difficult, because it encompasses P2E, gaming, NFTs, DAOs, governance projects and prob some other stuff I haven’t thought of.
Axie Infinity is the lead horse right now, and its numbers are staggering.
Source: activeplayer.io. As of September 30, 2021.
Seriously staggering.
Source: Token Terminal. As of September 30, 2021.
As in, much bigger than OpenSea and more than double the revenue of Uniswap over the last 90 days.
Source: Token Terminal. As of September 30, 2021.
I don’t want to come off here like I think all this is the best thing since sliced bread. There’s real risk to investing money into Metaverse and convincing others to do the same. The largest risk I’m worried about is causing other people to lose money taking risks they don’t understand. Axie Infinity is helping impoverished Filipinos out of poverty. Having that end up as impoverished Filipinos losing their life savings is not an acceptable outcome. I am particularly worried about this aspect because a significant portion of the P2E concept is driven by ponzinomics. That’s a topic I’m not fully prepared to discuss today but will discuss in the future. Ponzinomics in itself are not necessarily bad – after all it’s just mechanism design with a derogatory connotation. Ponzinomics are present everywhere we look, including the US dollar, but even more present in crypto because of the relationship between financial utility and application utility. For the second month in a row, I include the following chart:
Source: Chris Dixon.
It’s all fun and games when the risks for potential financial utility are taken by sophisticated market participants who can or at least should be able to evaluate ponzinomics and the like when considering deploying capital. It’s a different thing entirely when someone in a third world country is trying to pull themselves up through whatever opportunity is available and gets the rug pulled out from underneath them. We can’t have that. So what happens when the Fed tapers to zero and then hikes twice and every risk asset on the planet rolls over, BTC gets cut in half, ETHBTC underperforms, the vast majority of Alts underperform ETH and Metaverse is down 80% from the top because the ponzinomics make the reflexivity cut both ways?
You know I’m a big fan of Bitcoin. The majority of our investing efforts at Ikigai over the last couple years have been focused on outperforming holding BTC by trading BTC. I sing Bitcoin’s praises loudly and often. I can shill BTC in good conscience because I’ve done thousands of hours of work on it and I believe in it. It’s EASY for me to tell ANYONE to put 2-5% of their portfolio into Bitcoin and never sell it. I’d put my mother into that (I did). Yeah, it could fail but the risk/reward is compelling. If Ikigai is going to have the same enthusiasm around Metaverse, it needs to have a comparable profile of not screwing anyone over, especially those least able to bear it. We’re doing more work, because it’s going to be a big deal. To some, it already is.
Market Update – Liquid Crypto Asset Investing
| Symbol | September | August | July | Q3-21 | Q2-21 | Q1-21 | YTD | 2020 | 2019 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BTC | -7% | 13% | 19% | 25% | -41% | 103% | 51% | 303% | 92% |
| ETH | -13% | 35% | 12% | 32% | 19% | 160% | 307% | 469% | -3% |
| XRP | -22% | 59% | 6% | 31% | 23% | 161% | 320% | 14% | -45% |
| BCH* | -21% | 16% | 2% | -6% | -11% | 45% | 21% | 71% | 30% |
| EOS | -22% | 23% | -1% | -5% | -14% | 85% | 51% | 1% | 0% |
| BNB | -17% | 39% | 10% | 28% | 0% | 708% | 936% | 172% | 123% |
| XTZ | 18% | 70% | 0% | 100% | -37% | 142% | 202% | 49% | 192% |
| XLM | -18% | 19% | 1% | -1% | -31% | 220% | 117% | 184% | -60% |
| LTC | -11% | 18% | 1% | 6% | -27% | 58% | 23% | 202% | 36% |
| TRX | 1% | 39% | -6% | 31% | -26% | 244% | 234% | 101% | -29% |
| Aggregate Mkt Cap | -8% | 27% | 14% | 33% | -23% | 146% | 152% | 301% | 51% |
| Aggregate DeFi* | -9% | 37% | 32% | 64% | -27% | 339% | 430% | 1177% | 77% |
| Aggr Alts Mkt Cap | -9% | 40% | 9% | 40% | 1% | 246% | 388% | 274% | -1% |
Source: CoinMarketCap. As of 9/30/21. BCH includes SV. Aggregate DeFi from Coingecko.
Bitcoin got off to a fast start at the beginning of September before macro, China FUD and quarter-end rebalancing took hold to drive price down more than 15% from its September 6th high of $52.7k to close the month down 7%. However, it’s worth mentioning that at time of writing, BTC has jumped 10% to start October and is now above where it was at the beginning of September.
ETH underperformed BTC in September, down 13%, and most Alts underperformed ETH. Alts in general continue to act as a type of levered beta to Bitcoin. That’s not to downplay the truly massive outperformance of Alts broadly vs BTC. Look at that YTD column. BTC has been crushed. But Alts need BTC going up or at least flattish and out of danger in order to continue going up. The DeFi index topped out the day BTC topped out September. ETHBTC topped out two days before BTC topped. SOL topped out three days after. You don’t have to love it, but BTC is still the bellwether risk barometer for crypto. There’s a chance that may change one day, but I don’t think that’s right now.
The below chart is BTC (orange) vs SPX (red) vs VIX (purple, inverted) since mid-August. The trend is clear - when macro volatility spikes, crypto’s correlation to traditional usually tightens.
Source: TradingView. As of 9/30/21.
Macro volatility picked up in early September because of Evergrande and then taper fears and then debt ceiling fears and finally Fed President’s “quitting” over insider trading and Lizzy Warren coming out against Jay Powell. SPX closed September out down 5% with the VIX up 40%. Overall, BTC down 7% isn’t too bad all things considering. The worst of the Evergrande situation is likely now over. The debt ceiling will be raised. The two outgoing Fed Presidents will be replaced by people more dovish than them. The future of Jay Powell and tapering are a bit more up in the air. Powell probably has the support needed to receive reconfirmation next year, but anything could happen in the swamp. At the FOMC press conference in September, Jay said the conditions to begin tapering in November were currently “all but met” but stopped short of saying tapering would definitely begin in November. Evaluating whether the Fed would start slowing the pace of QE in November WAS primarily going to be a function of the job reports between now and then, and that is already looking shaky-
Source: Marketnew.com. As of 9/30/21.
But now you have the added complication of Fed Presidents Rosengren and Kaplan being forced to resign due to insider trading activities and a fight brewing amongst Democrats over whether to reappoint Powell next year. Those two factors add additional complication to assessing the likelihood that tapering starts in November. So we’ll just need to watch closely to see how things progress. To be sure, if the headline above is even ballpark correct, there will be no taper in November.
In the meantime, BTC lost some technical levels in September, including a weekly close below the 200D moving average and a point of control that had previously been flipped as support. But with the pump we’ve already had on the 1st, the chart is already looking better and is very close to looking awesome.
Source: TradingView. As of 10/1/21.
It should not be ignored that Bitcoin had FUD thrown at it while testing the range lows while also dealing with bad macro, and it looks like it held and just sent higher. There’s resistance at $49k and then at $53k. But if we get through that it’s a lot of green grass until prior ATH, which may not serve as much resistance given the 6+ month pullback, consolidation and retest.
With just a day of hindsight, it looks like ~$41k was aggressively tested multiple times and held firm. Accumulation may very well now be complete, and we just began the markup phase. Reminds me of the battle for $10k last September. We all know what happened next.
Source: TradingView. As of 10/1/21.
It is my base case that we will close out Q4 at a higher price than the $43.8k we just started with. How much higher has a broad range of potential outcomes (and lower is certainly an option as well, just not my base case). The speculation around whether a BTC CME Futures ETF will be approved in October has now reached a fever-pitch. I’m not sure what likelihood the market is currently pricing in, but if it gets approved this month, we are highly likely to see a significant initial pop in price.
How much follow-through that pop has will likely be a function of how strong the initial inflows into the newly approved ETF products are. I’m not sure what to expect there. Honestly it makes sense to me that inflows would be weak initially. Like the first few weeks or month. They can’t even market the product until it gets approved by SEC. So I’m setting my initial expectations low. Current BTC CME Open Interest is $1.7bn. If these ETFs got 10% of that in the first month I would consider that a win. So that’s $170mm in month one. Then you’d just like to see solid month/month growth. If that ends up being the case, price should trade well into year-end (barring any macro meltdown).
The big way these products win is if the most liquid options market forms around them. There’s very good reason to think that could happen. If that were the case, these will be extremely important instruments to BTC price discovery and the impact from capital inflows will translate to a BTC price multiples higher than where we are now.
Say what you want about Stock-To-Flow. It’s been spot-on so far.
Source: Lookintobitcoin.com. As of 10/1/21.
Hashrate is good to go. No problems at all, courtesy of Texas.
Source: Blockchain.com. As of 10/1/21.
Global spot BTC volumes are bouncing around not far from their 12-month range lows. I’ve marked prior instances where spot volumes got this low. 3 out of 5 times were buys, 2 were sells.
Source: TradingView. As of 10/1/21.
The weekly chart has gone from not good to great in a hurry. If we close this week at $47.8k or higher, it’s a good bet to expect additional expansion.
Source: TradingView. As of 10/1/21.
ETHBTC still looks good. You would start getting worried if it dipped back into the accumulation cylinder, but for now it’s just flagging and holding support.
Source: TradingView. As of 10/1/21.
The fate of ETHBTC over the next 12 months will likely be a function of US regulations on DeFi. Should they be “less bad than feared”, ETHBTC should outperform. Whether ETH price performance will keep up with other Layer 1’s is a different question and a lower likelihood IMO.
Source: TradingView. As of 10/1/21.
Off the low on July 20th, competitor Layer 1’s have been in a different stratosphere than ETH, which is outperforming only BTC and BNB. Check out the relative market caps of those names below-
Source: Coingecko. As of 10/1/21.
It’s just a LOT easier to pump a $8bn market cap to $40bn in six weeks (Solana) than to pump ETH even half that. In turn, it’s even easier to pump AVAX from $2bn to $15bn in six weeks. It’s certainly highly speculative stuff, no doubt. The market is assigning a TON of financial utility on top of limited current application utility. But don’t forget, this is a multichain world. Sure, global macro liquidity conditions and broad risk appetite will have a strong influence over the prices of these things in the short-term, but the trend of the flow of capital to fund innovation on these Layer 1’s is clear. The world is making a massive bet that these Layer 1’s are going to bring new technology to billions of people’s lives, Metaverse and otherwise.
Closing Remarks
Metaverse. Play-to-earn. Pulling people out of poverty. Digital lives eating analog. Ready Player One. Machines taking our jobs. Innovation-driven abundance. Economics falls apart. Simulation theory. What if the Fed is right. UBI. The disintegration and reimagination of “work”.
Pretty heady stuff sure, but it’s not like I’m the only one thinking the world may end up this way. Many of the most well-respected technology investors in the world are plowing capital into betting on this generally outcome. I think there’s a very real chance it’s broadly how things play out. I’ve been thinking about these sorts of things for a long time but haven’t talked out loud much about them because I am still very much formulating my thoughts and will continue to do so.
In the meantime, we find ourselves with a crypto ecosystem that has never had more eyes on it than it does right now. The amount of capital that is mentally committed but not yet actually deployed into crypto is at an all-time high. That may very well be the single most defining feature to shape the crypto market in the coming months. It’s not to say prices can’t go down a lot in the short-term, they can and probably will. But there will be buyers in real size willing to step in at discounted prices. They’re waiting for their chance. Additionally, much of that capital will come in committed form- equity capital into infrastructure projects or locked-up token sales that fund ecosystem development. The magnitude and permanence of that capital will be the springboard for the innovation that carries crypto into 2025 and beyond.
We have only just started to scratch the surface of all the things this technology and asset class can do to transform the world. Web 3 is still defining itself. We want to be purposeful about the direction we’re driving the bus. The entire underlying purpose of decentralization is to empower humanity. Those of us that make up the ecosystem cannot lose sight of that. But the opportunity is right in front us.
“Raise the sail with your stronger hand.”
– 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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