Welcome to the Beluga Brief, where we deliver data-driven insights to your inbox every week, spending our time in the crypto trenches and combing through thousands of crypto news feeds so you don’t have to.

As the Beluga Brief grows we’ll try out new content sections and schedules to find what is best for our readers — since Memecoins are all the rage these days, we’ll be adding a section to cover all the craziness in the market from Marc Andreessen-funded AI memecoins to the most profitable traders turning $100 into millions. If you have other suggestions for things you’d like us to cover, feel free to leave a reply on our Twitter!

What happened today?

Now sitting a week from the launch of Trump’s World Liberty Financial ICO and it still has not picked up the steam they had hoped for with $13.8M in sales completed of the total $300M ask. We haven’t had an official statement from Donald Trump himself on how poorly the raise has gone but you have to believe this is the last thing he needed on top of all the pressures of the campaign. On the other hand his odds on Polymarket continue to grow with a 22% gap between he and Kamala Harris at time of writing — the alleged manipulation pushing the gap to be this wide has renewed calls for further regulation on platforms like Polymarket, as the influence they can have on elections can be significant especially compared to the cost.

Bitcoin is still wrestling with $68,000 and this pause has led to some uncertainty throughout the market. Everyone always wants to time the top perfectly, and given we haven’t yet broken out of this multi-month structure traders are looking at this price range as a continuation of the channel — in other words, the expectation is that BTC falls back down. The good news here is that traders on Crypto Twitter are rarely correct and when negative sentiment builds up, it can become fuel for a pump when/if those positions are liquidated.

Biggest Headlines

The Beluga intern has been hard at work gathering all the most important crypto news stories so you have them in one place!

The Majors

• Bitcoin pulls back below $67k; is another crypto rally failing?

• Bitcoin’s $2bn in ETF inflows kick off big week — here’s what else is driving the price

Alt Coins

• OKX Publishes ‘Learn Aptos’ guide

• Chainlink partners with major financial players to improve corporate actions data reporting using AI and blockchain

Regulatory

• CFTC Chari Behnam presses Congress to act on crypto and election betting legislation

• Crypto ETFs look unlikely to expand beyond Bitcoin, Ether under Kamala Harris, experts say

New Launches

• Trump-linked World Liberty Financial would have ‘raised $1 billion’ as a 2017 ICO, Infinex’s Kain Warwick says

Miscellaneous

• Vitalik shares part 3 of his vision for Ethereum’s future

Memecoin Corner

If you’ve been watching the memecoin space over the last week or so you’ve seen this insane AI meta that has popped up, all started by the $GOAT token. The brief background here is that Marc Andreessen (of a16z) gave a $50,000 grant to a developer over the summer, which resulted in the Truth Terminal AI model that people have been interacting with on Twitter. This AI then decided to promote the $GOAT coin claiming it as its own, taking the valuation from near 0 to over $400M in a matter of days.

Any time we get a runner like this it spawns countless copycats which never perform as well as the original, which is exactly what has happened so far. However, it’s my opinion that interactive LLM models designed specifically for the crypto world are pretty exciting. Imagine a world where your favorite memecoin dev never runs out of content to keep market attention, pushing and pulling social levers based on data-driven decisions. This would certainly be more reliable than your average memecoin team looking to make a quick buck. I’m not sure where the trade is yet here as anything with the word AI in it has been pumped already, however the attention that the Truth Terminal model has garnered is enough to attract real teams to seize the opportunity. It’s clear with the rise in valuation of $GOAT that there is significant demand for this class of coins, and therefore there is significant opportunity for the team and traders that get it right.

On the drama side of things, influencer Jaypeg was exposed in a weird series of events for taking a KOL allocation for a $100k market cap memecoin then dumping it, before pretending that he had never received the tokens in the first place. You’d think at this point in the market with Bitcoin nearly at ATH that these influencers wouldn’t need to scam at that level, but maybe it’s just part of their nature.

The content on this site is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. While Beluga strives to ensure the accuracy and timeliness of information, there may be discrepancies when comparing our data to that of financial institutions, service providers, or specific product websites. Always consult with a professional before making any financial decisions.

Will McKinnon is the Head of Content for Beluga and has spent every day for many years trading coins. For that reason there are too many to name, however his largest holdings by a significant margin are Ethereum and Bitcoin. NFA DYOR