September 2023 - Monthly Market Update
/Monthly Update || September 2023
“The best time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.”
Opening Remarks
Greetings from Ikigai Asset Management¹ headquarters. We welcome the opportunity to bring to you our sixtieth 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, we come to the sixtieth consecutive month I’ve been writing these Monthly Updates. I suppose there’s a fine line between persistence and insanity! Five years is a long time and it’s worthy of a bit of reflection. I’ve written some 230,000 words here over the past five years…I could probably chop all that up into a book and sell at least a couple dozen copies!
When I wrote the first one of these Monthly Updates, the price of Bitcoin was $6,400. The price of ETH was $225. The aggregate crypto market cap was $220bn. Those amounts are now 4x, 7.3x and 4.5x higher. Aggregate stablecoin market cap was $3bn five years ago – it’s $124bn today. The term “DeFi” was invented exactly five years ago. Five years ago, there were a handful of NFT collections and no one cared about any of them. A few million Americans had ever touched crypto five years ago - today it’s 50mm+.
So however you want to slice it, crypto is a lot BIGGER now than it was the first time I wrote a Monthly Update. And it has made a meaningful impact on humanity – crypto has touched the lives of many, many millions in some form. The track record of that impact is, unfortunately, quite mixed. As I’ve discussed here previously, crypto has done a lot of good in the world but it’s done a lot of damage too. Millions of people have been helped in various ways by crypto, but crypto has also facilitated a lot of bad actors doing all sorts of bad things. That’s true over the entire 13 years of this ecosystem and it’s true over the last five that I’ve been writing about it.
At this point, I don’t find a particularly compelling reason to be PROUD of what this ecosystem has accomplished over the last five years. The good netted against the bad looks like about a wash to me. Perhaps others feel differently, and I welcome feedback on this topic. Do we really feel like we have all that much to show for ourselves for the last five years? The returns themselves – 4x on BTC, 7.3x on ETH, 4.5x on total market cap – those are in the ballpark of what I would have expected. And they’re pretty good. Maybe a little light but in the ballpark, and I think we’re likely heading higher in the next couple years, so the returns have been about as good as I would have expected.
But what about the positive impact? Five years ago if I told you BTC was going to be $26k, ETH was $1650, whole space was a trillion, stablecoins $124bn, and then I asked you – what positive impact has crypto made at those prices, what would you have answered? Has reality been disappointing relative to those expectations? To me the answer is yes. The whole thing is worth a trillion bucks and prob heading higher and yet we still can’t stop tripping over ourselves. We need to be honest with ourselves about the progress that’s been made over the last five years. We need to take stock of where we stand today. And we need to gameplan for the next five years (and beyond) so I’m not sitting here writing the 120th one of these letters and it’s all worth $5 trillion and we still haven’t made a big net positive impact on the world. Let’s do better.
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August Highlights
Court Rules In Favor of Grayscale vs SEC, Orders Grayscale’s Petition for Review Be Granted, SEC Has Until October 14th to Respond
BlackRock, Bitwise, VanEck, Wisdomtree, Invesco, Fidelity and Valkyrie Spot BTC ETF Approval Delayed by SEC Until October
PayPal Launches PYUSD Stablecoin, Receives Little Initial Interest
US Federal Reserve Launches “Novel Activities Supervision Program”, Granting Special Oversight Powers for Crypto
Sam Bankman-Fried’s Bail Revoked, Sent to Jail Until October Trial for Leaking Caroline Ellison’s Personal Diaries to the NYT
Prime Trust Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, Top 50 Creditors Owed $145mm
Two Tornado Cash Developers Charged by DOJ with Money Laundering and Sanctions Violations, One Arrested
SEC Files 37 Submissions “Under Seal” in Case vs Binance, Concealing the Submissions from Public Record
Binance Shuts Down Crypto Payments Business
Mastercard Ends Card Partnership with Binance
Binance’s Credit Card Processor Checkout.com Ends Services with Binance Due to AML Compliance Concerns
WSJ Claims Binance Is Committing Massive US Sanctions Violations with Russian Banks
Binance Head of APAC Quits
Coinbase and Circle End USDC Consortium, Coinbase Buys Stake in Circle
Revolut Shutting Down US Crypto Business Due to Regulatory Uncertainty
SEC Delays Ark Spot Bitcoin ETF Filing, Solicits 21-Day Comment Period
Coinbase Canada Suspends USDT Trading
Coinbase Files Motion to Dismiss Case From SEC
The CFTC Approves Coinbase as a Registered Commission Merchant, Allowing for Futures Contracts on BTC and ETH to Eligible US Customers
FTX Bankruptcy Hires Galaxy to Sell, Stake and Hedge Liquid Crypto Assets
FTX Administrator Experiences Data Breach, Leaks Thousands of Customers’ Information
DOJ Files Campaign Finance Fraud Charges Against Sam Bankman-Fried
RobinHood and Jump Trading End Crypto Partnership
Israeli Police Accuse Moshe Hogeg of $290mm Crypto Scam
Dubai Fines Su Zhu and Kyle Davies’ New Trading Platform OPNX $2.7mm for Failure to Pay a Prior Fine
Six Securities Law Professors Write Amicus Brief in Support of Coinbase vs SEC
NFT Platform Impact Theory Settles with SEC on Unregistered Offering of NFTs as Securities
Genesis and DCG Reach In-Principle Agreement with Creditors
CoinDesk Lays Off 45% of Editorial Staff
IRS Rules Crypto Staking Rewards as Taxable Income
L1 Digital Raises $152mm Crypto Venture Fund
BitGo Raises $100mm Series C at $1.75bn Valuation
SEC Files Appeal in Ripple Ruling
Ripple vs SEC Jury Trial Scheduled for Q2-24
Crypto Ecosystem Experiences Rampant SIM-Swap Hacks, Including Blockchain Capital Founder Bart Stephens for $6.3mm
| Asset Class | August | July | Q2-23 | Q1-23 | YTD | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | Instrument |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | -11% | -4% | 7% | 72% | 57% | -64% | 60% | 303% | BTC |
| NASDAQ | -1% | 4% | 15% | 21% | 42% | -33% | 27% | 48% | QQQ |
| S&P 500 | -2% | 3% | 8% | 7% | 17% | -19% | 27% | 16% | SPX |
| Total World Equities | -3% | 4% | 5% | 7% | 13% | -20% | 16% | 14% | VT |
| Emerging Market Equity | -7% | 6% | 0% | 4% | 3% | -22% | -5% | 15% | EEM |
| Gold | -1% | 2% | -3% | 8% | 6% | -1% | -4% | 25% | GLD |
| High Yield | 0% | 1% | -1% | 3% | 2% | -15% | 0% | -1% | HYG |
| Emerging Market Debt | -2% | 1% | 0% | 2% | 1% | -22% | -6% | 1% | EMB |
| Bank Debt | 0% | 0% | 1% | 1% | 3% | -7% | -1% | -2% | BKLN |
| Industrial Materials | -4% | 7% | -11% | 4% | -5% | -13% | 29% | 16% | DBB |
| USD | 2% | -1% | 0% | 0% | 1% | 8% | 6% | -7% | DXY |
| Volatility Index | 0% | 0% | -27% | -14% | -37% | 26% | -24% | 66% | VIX |
| Oil | 3% | 15% | -4% | -5% | 7% | 29% | 65% | -68% | USO |
Source: TradingView. As of 8/31/23.
Bartender Says, “Why The Long Face?”
A couple days ago I ran across these two tweets –
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I don’t know if one or both of these guys have been reading my Monthly Updates, but their sentiment shared in those tweets (X’s??) is certainly in-line with what I’ve been talking about here consistently since FTX collapsed. The main section of last month’s Monthly Update is probably a Top 10 all-time favorite for me. If you didn’t read it, I invite you to do so here. This month will be somewhat of a continuation of the concepts discussed there. At the end of last month’s letter, I said –
“I suspect there aren’t that many truly bad actors reading this. I would guess there’s a fair amount of passively good actors and indifferent actors reading this. I invite you to take this Monthly Update as an opportunity for self-reflection. Why am I reading this Monthly Update? Why am I involved in crypto at all? To stack as much money in your bank account as possible? OK…to what end, though? And how much longer do you think that’s going to work? Yeah we’ll probably get another bull cycle in the next two years. If you trade it well, you can make a lot of money. But if that bull cycle isn’t built on firmer, more sustainable foundations, it will implode just like 2013 and 2017 and 2021. More people will get hurt. More users will be turned off from the space forever. If crypto implodes even more spectacularly this next cycle than the previous cycle, what are the chances we won’t get another shot at delivering on this technology’s potential to make the world a better place? Crypto has burned successively more people in each cycle. How much longer can we keep that up before we run out of new ecosystem participants to burn?”
I want to expand on that paragraph here today, in light of the two tweets above. The kneejerk reaction to these tweets from Multicycle Crypto Veterans is usually something like “Yup! Bottom talk bro! That’s what everyone always says at this point in the cycle! You just don’t get it! Have fun staying poor!”. In light of the last 18 months, I’d say that type of response is unhelpful and disingenuous. Let’s break down each of those tweets a bit.
Joe Weisenthal, who is a thoughtful guy, is voicing a feeling many of us currently feel – crypto feels dead, outside of spot Bitcoin ETFs (maybe?) and pump & dumps. Certainly, part of that is the summertime lull. After all, what better time than now to step away from crypto for a month or two and feel confident you’re not going to miss too much? So some of that feeling that crypto is in a winter is literally because it’s summer. Some of that will dissipate here soon in the fall just by nature of more people being in front of the screens again. But that doesn’t explain ALL of the feeling that Joe expresses and many agree with. Crypto does feel, in a way, dead. Crypto OG’s would say “it was like this in 2019” but I don’t know about that. I just went back and read the Monthly Updates from July, August and September 2019 and they were WAY more exciting than how it feels now. My tone back then was WAY more confident and enthusiastic. There’s a lack of viable narratives for Alts right now in a bad way. Joe’s tweet shines a light on that.
“Don Alt” is a cartoon duck crypto trader with 500k followers, so do with that as you may, but his comment is worthy of examination regardless. His thesis is – the likelihood that crypto will succeed in gaining mass adoption has likely already peaked, and while it is still likely crypto will succeed, that likelihood will decrease, not increase in the future. I think I mostly agree with that thesis, but with caveats.
First off, I would separate Bitcoin from everything else and I don’t think Don Alt’s chart is accurate for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is in its own world with a unique set of factors that aren’t in place for any other crypto asset. Bitcoin’s use case is more proven than any other crypto asset. Bitcoin works now for its intended use case – Bitcoin is a non-sovereign, hard-capped supply, global, immutable, decentralized, digital, store of value. It is an insurance policy against monetary and fiscal policy irresponsibility from central banks and governments globally. I believe Bitcoin is purpose-built to capture an outsized share of M2 money supply growth and central bank balance sheet growth. If you’re bullish on those two factors, BTC is a good risk-adjusted way to play that.
The above thesis for buying BTC could be compared to a long NASDAQ position, or a levered NASDAQ long. And that’s a totally fair comparison that should be examined. Because I think Q’s will also capture an outsized share of M2 money supply growth and central bank balance sheet growth. I think the returns overall for Q’s will be lower than BTC, but the risks will certainly be lower as well.
Below is a chart of BTC vs NASDAQ over the last four years. Q’s are a double and BTC is +171%.
Source: TradingView. As of 8/31/23.
So if you ran a 2x levered Q’s position, you outperformed BTC over the last four years and you took a lot less risk. Obviously at the peak of the crypto market, the disparity between BTC and Q’s was very wide, and I would guess it’s going to open back up again in the coming years. That said, I would argue that a Bitcoin position is quite comparable to a levered Q’s position but with some nice kickers – potentially the next world reserve currency; sovereign adoption; un-confiscatable. You don’t get any of that with levered Q’s. But you also take all kinds of risks with a Bitcoin position that you don’t have with NASDAQ, so there’s a give and a take.
Outside of Bitcoin, no other crypto asset has that sort of relationship with macro factors right now. ETH or other stuff might have that relationship in the future, but not now. Both the blessing and the curse for ETH (and other L1 smart contract platforms) is that they need actual activity for number to go up. ETH is supposed to enable various use cases that entail blockchain activity. A lack of activity indicates a lack of use cases which in turn makes that blockchain less valuable. Same is true for Solana and Avalanche and Aptos and whichever other 20 L1’s – if you don’t have high levels of legitimate blockchain activity, the market cap of the L1 is in danger of collapsing. In years past, the market has been willing to assign very large market caps to projects with incredibly low levels of legitimate activity (looking at you ADA, EOS, DOT, XRP) – sell the dream, if you will. I get the sense that naivety will not be present to nearly the same degree going forward. After this many years and this many cycles and this many billions in VC funding, I would imagine the market will be more in “show me” mode this cycle than any time in the past. We should want and encourage this more sober approach. Collectively, we should demand more “show me”. It will help us increase the likelihood of not blowing up in even more spectacular fashion than the prior two cyclical blowups. This is a good thing.
Another aspect I want to bring up as it relates to “when do we run out of new ecosystem participants to burn” is the market cap of crypto that we’re starting this cycle with. You can argue when a “new cycle” begins. Is it the day a bear market ends? If that’s the case, then this cycle started after the FTX collapse, and the last cycle started in December 2018 after the BCH Hash War collapse. The December 2018 low for BTC was $3,100. ETH was $80. Aggregate market cap was $110bn. The November 2022 FTX collapse low was $15,500 for BTC, $1070 for ETH and $780bn for aggregate market cap. So we’re talking about a cycle starting position of 5x higher for BTC, 13.4x for ETH and 7x for aggregate market cap than in 2018. It’s going to take VERY significant inflows to pump the crypto market similar multiples as last cycle from these current levels. You will need the appetite for speculation to come back in a MAJOR way. It’s hard to imagine speculation returning with that kind of fervor without some major project innovations. Pepe, FriendTech and RollBit are unlikely to be sufficient. Up until this point, many crypto market participants have treated crypto like the horse track. Many believed it was the best horse track around. If that sentiment changes, a big rally where Alts broadly do multiples is challenging to imagine.
Over the last cycle, we saw tens of millions, potentially 100 million or more people come to crypto for the first time, so the increase in new crypto participants approximately matched the increases in market cap. But then look at the last 18 months. Luna. FTX. Celsius. BlockFi. Voyager. Babel. Gemini Earn. Genesis. Prime Trust. Dozens of project rugs. Dozens of hacks. Hundreds of vaporware projects. Let’s say the 2018-2022 cycle brought in 100mm new users to crypto in some capacity. What percent of those had a positive experience? What percent lost money overall? What percent were burned so bad they’ll never touch crypto again? How many took their own lives due to financial losses in crypto?
Regarding use cases with real traction stablecoins are undeniable. In 2022, stablecoins settled $11 trillion in value. Visa processed $11.6 trillion. PayPal processed $1.4 trillion. MasterCard $6.6 trillion. Some very meaningful portion of those stablecoin transactions were basically for speculation in crypto – moving stables to and from CEX’s and DEX’s and DeFi for trading and staking and lending. But even if you assumed 80% of stablecoin dollar volume was for this “meta use case” of crypto speculation, that still leaves a couple trillion dollars’ worth of stablecoin transactions in 2022 for various other sorts of economic activity. That’s a massive use case. However, it is worth considering this use case in the context of regulators. In the US, stablecoin regulations have been tightening and are set to tighten further still. The value proposition of a KYC-free global Venmo with no transaction limits is undoubtedly attractive, but is it actually sustainable? Will regulators allow it? My guess is no, and in the coming years we’ll see stablecoins fall increasingly more in-line with traditional banking rails and their requisite AML/KYC procedures.
It’s not just a lack of compelling narratives within crypto –the “micro” if you will. The macro is also challenged. Crypto has never existed in a high rates environment. We have no playbook for how this asset class will act with Fed Funds at 5%+. And the macro landscape is continuing to digest that the Fed is not going to cut early. We could easily be 12 months out from a rate cut today, and perhaps even longer. Can crypto rally with that backdrop? Once the Fed starts cutting rates from levels not seen since 2007, will the rate of change be sufficient to pump crypto? Or will you need lower absolute levels of rates? Does crypto just not work unless Fed Funds is sub-3?
So What?
Two random guys on Crypto Twitter tweeted out messages that were in alignment with topics I’ve been writing about here. The tweets can be summarized as – “Crypto feels like it’s in a winter. There’s nothing exciting going on other than maybe spot ETFs and pump & dumps. Enthusiasm has waned. Crypto is still likely to succeed, but it’s less likely than it was 18 months ago, and it will continue to be less likely to be successful in the future.”
I generally agree with that sentiment, and it leads me to believe that there is a significant chance this coming “cycle” may be crypto’s last legitimate chance to “screw it up”. We screwed up pretty hard last cycle and if we screw up that hard again, we may run out of people willing to get screwed over – crypto could slip into relative obscurity. Fighting against this outcome is a multipronged effort – I laid out some of those vectors of improvement in last month’s letter, but there are numerous others. We need to take these efforts seriously. I’m not being hyperbolic and it’s not just “bear market talk” when I say the crypto industry is potentially facing a do-or-die scenario in the coming years. Let’s act accordingly.
Market Update – Liquid Crypto Asset Investing
| Symbol | Aug | July | Q2-23 | Q1-23 | YTD | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BTC | -11% | -4% | 12% | 72% | 57% | -64% | 60% | 303% |
| ETH | -11% | -4% | 3% | 52% | 38% | -67% | 399% | 469% |
| XRP | -27% | 47% | -8% | 58% | 50% | -59% | 278% | 14% |
| BCH* | -17% | -17% | 138% | 16% | 73% | -75% | 6% | 71% |
| EOS | -21% | -1% | -16% | 38% | -32% | -72% | 17% | 1% |
| BNB | -10% | 0% | -22% | 29% | -12% | -52% | 1269% | 172% |
| XTZ | -17% | 2% | -11% | 56% | -4% | -84% | 116% | 49% |
| XLM | -24% | 36% | 20% | 55% | 62% | -73% | 108% | 184% |
| LTC | -31% | -15% | 19% | 28% | -9% | -52% | 17% | 202% |
| TRX | -2% | 2% | 5% | 10% | 41% | -28% | 181% | 101% |
| Aggregate Mkt Cap | -10% | -3% | 5% | 49% | 32% | -64% | 186% | 301% |
| Aggregate DeFi* | -12% | 0% | 1% | 50% | 26% | -77% | 581% | 1177% |
| Aggr Alts Mkt Cap | -10% | 0% | -2% | 33% | 13% | -64% | 479% | 274% |
Source: CoinMarketCap. As of 8/31/23. BCH includes SV. Aggregate DeFi from Coingecko.
On the morning of August 29th, the long-awaited ruling in Grayscale vs SEC came back strongly favorable for Grayscale. BTC price immediately pumped 8% in response, but within a couple hours of the announcement price was already looking a bit shaky. There wasn’t nearly as much force to the kneejerk up move as you would have expected, given the news meaningfully increased the likelihood of a spot ETF approval coming soon. Sure enough, there was no follow-through to the initial pop and eight hours later price was already retracing. The next day, price action remained quite weak and by the time the SEC released a string of delays in the applications of the spot ETFs, price had walked back the entire pump plus a little bit.
Judging solely based on price action, the market is not buying that we’re about to get spot BTC ETFs. If you want to read more about the Grayscale decision, this and this are good threads from domain experts. We have been talking about the path to a spot BTC ETF for months here, and we now have a critical additional event that should significantly increase the likelihood of a spot BTC ETF being approved. But at time of writing, that is still far from set in stone. The SEC now must decide how it wants to respond to the court’s decision and in turn what it wants to do about converting GBTC into an ETF. If the SEC wants to drag this on for months, they have avenues to do that. If they decide to give up the fight and approve GBTC’s conversion into an ETF, it will likely approve all the other ETFs more or less at the same time. That outcome could occur in September but probably more likely in October, if it happens. At this point I don’t know how to weight the likelihood the SEC converts GBTC and approves the other spot ETFs in the next 30-60 days. Maybe 50/50? Maybe a little better? It’s hard to get a read on this SEC. They are openly hostile towards crypto and seem to be willing to bend the rules to express that hostility. But at the same time, Gensler seems to be running out of room to continue acting in a way that clearly goes against the law. Gensler has been politicized since he got the SEC job, and his political support may be wearing thin.
There is a path where the SEC pushes out the GBTC conversion and spot ETF approvals out several months, potentially into Q1 of next year. This timeline may unfold while the market is receiving incremental conviction that the SEC will indeed be allowing spot ETFs soon. That incremental conviction could take any number of forms, and we should know more in the first half of September.
A market that strongly believes a spot ETF is coming within six months (and is correct in that belief) is likely a market that trades pretty well. It’s hard for me to imagine BTC revisits $20k any time soon unless we get a full rug pull on this spot ETF via the SEC. Perhaps a very bad outcome with Binance (e.g., collapses FTX-style) could send us that low, but even if that were to occur, so long as a spot ETF was on the near-term horizon, I would expect BTC to remain relatively bid.
The below chart is how I’m seeing the range of outcomes for the coming months –
Source: TradingView. As of 8/29/23.
Below I have major points of support and resistance at the white blocks. The ETF approval window is shown in orange, the halving in green, and the window for the Fed to potentially start cutting rates in blue. I have two approximate price levels at approximate dates marked out with yellow X’s.
Source: TradingView. As of 8/29/23.
Said differently, spot BTC ETF approvals (should they occur) should get us to $40k, which sets us up for the halving which should then drive prices higher. By the time we get to the Fed cutting rates in 2H-24, I think there’s a good chance BTC could be hovering not too far under prior all-time highs. That would be about a double from current prices in the next year or so. That’d be a great outcome and I think there’s a real shot that happens.
One very real risk to this positive outcome would be a bad event at Binance. I’ve beat that one to death at this point so we can take a month off from Binance this time, but it remains a very slow train wreck that gets worse every month. It’s the single biggest risk to the market right now. Another significant risk is the big stack of BTC that the government holds at the moment and stated they would sell between now and year-end. Big to the tune of 31,174 total BTC (potentially as much as 40k, it’s a little fuzzy whether they actually already sold one tranche). 31k BTC is ~$850mm at current prices. If they sold all that between now and year-end, it’s ~$212mm/month. Not a crushing amount but certainly not nothing. All else equal, it should have at least somewhat of a dampening effect on prices if the government actually sells it all in the next four months.
It’s not worth spending any time on Alts charts. Alts are dead. Many projects have had significant recent unlocks or have unlocks coming up. There’s not a bid to catch these unlocks. The outlook is grim. I’ll sum the whole Alts universe up with the chart below -
Source: TradingView. As of 8/29/23.
The above chart is Total Market Cap, excluding BTC, ETH, USDT and USDC. So basically Aggregate Alts Market Cap. It’s been in this range (red) since the Luna collapse. The path forward out of this range will be a function of the factors I listed on the chart. One or more of these factors will break towards a given path in the coming quarters and that will decide the direction of price. My best guess is this range will break down before heading higher. I could imagine a scenario where BTC does well in 2024 and sucks market cap out of Alts.
We can end with a few charts on macro. Macro matters less for crypto right now than at a lot of points in the last few years, but it still matters. And it will likely matter more in 2024 as crypto heals from its idiosyncratic, self-inflicted wounds and tries to reemerge on the global stage.
The SPX is +17% YTD and that’s in the top decile ever through eight months. Very few pundits predicted this type of performance for equities at the beginning of this year. The strength has caught most everyone by surprise. When looking at prior years of comparable YTD strength, the following performance through year-end is undeniable. We should expect strongly higher stock prices between now and 12/31.
NASDAQ will likely finish the year within a few % of all-time highs.
Source: TradingView. As of 8/29/23.
The US 30-year Fixed Mortgage Rate is 7.2%, the highest it’s been since 2001. The housing market has slowed drastically.
The Fed’s balance sheet was a 10 bagger over the last 20 years.
The labor market is cooling but is still strong.
Closing Remarks
A couple days ago we had what could end up being one of the most significant events in Bitcoin history – a spot BTC ETF. It’s not set in stone and since the news hit the tape it hasn’t been trading like it’s actually going to happen. Maybe it ends up being a false alarm or maybe it’s still six months away. We’ll know more in the next few weeks about how to handicap the likelihood and timeline of ETF approvals.
If we do get a spot BTC ETF approved, that will be a Bitcoin-specific catalyst. It may open the door for a spot ETH ETF later down the road, but unlikely in the near term. So the Alts universe is stuck here today without too much to get excited about, even while a path to much higher Bitcoin prices over the next year is emerging. Crypto natives are searching near and far for the innovation in the broad Alts ecosystem that can drive a new bull market. This would be akin to searching for DeFi in summer 2019. DeFi WAS around in 2019. It was tiny and clunkier than ever, but it was there. Where is this cycle’s DeFi today? And can the price action prove to be more sustainable than the flash in the pan of DeFi names from last cycle?
These are questions the market is collectively pondering right now and the answers simply aren’t clear. The fate of Alts in the next few years will be significantly impacted by what happens with Binance and what happens with US regulators and what new compelling narratives emerge - and there’s plenty of uncertainty on all three of those fronts.
Beneath those important factors lies the foundation of the crypto ecosystem. That foundation is made up of people. Millions of people. Some more influential than others. And all these people have different motivations for their actions within this ecosystem. Some people want to help the world. Some people want to get rich. Some people want to get rich and help the world. Some people want to get rich by literally any means possible regardless of ethics or legality. Some are in it for the tech, others for the horse track. Hundreds of different motivational factors floating around, driving millions of people’s actions in crypto.
When looking towards the years to come, what will be the sum total of the actions of all those people with their varying motivations? It’s a topic we’ve been discussing here for months and years and it remains an open question today. When looking at years past, what has been the sum total of the actions of all those people with their varying motivations to date? At this point, it’s really just a whole lot of potential.
“Even in hard times, keep laughing.””
– 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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