Exciting news! Starting today, we have added a daily edition to the Weekly Whale newsletter, and to go along with this we’ll be rebranding to “The Beluga Brief”. This means we’ll be able to deliver data-driven insights to your inbox every day of the week, spending our time in the crypto trenches and combing through thousands of crypto news feeds so you don’t have to.

What happened today?

Americans woke up to a decent bounce on Bitcoin sending it back above $60,000 after a sharp drop off from $65,000 earlier in the week. Alt coins continue to show weakness across the board with only a 3% bounce off the lows as compared to Bitcoin’s 5% so far. One of the biggest losers on the alt coin side this week has been TON, which is a token originally created by Telegram but is now run and developed by a separate entity. In a series of unfortunate events, first the Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France, and then an increase in network activity (unrelated to the arrest) caused TON to stop producing blocks for several hours. This has led to a -20% drop in price this week, in addition to more uncertainty around whether the blockchain will really be able to handle the user load it claims it can.

Aside from TON, price action in general has been pretty boring and BTC still remains stuck in this range, unable to decide which side of $60,000 it wants to stay on. However, one interesting event from this week was Donald Trump not only announcing the Twitter and Telegram for his DeFi protocol “World Liberty” but also pinning a tweet from World Liberty on his personal account. Rather than choose something like a campaign-focused post considering he is currently in a very tight election race, he chose his DeFi protocol. To me this is just the start of crypto being thrust into the public eye, and whatever your thoughts are on Trump or the series of crypto projects he has produced, it’s very cool to see crypto on center stage like this after years of bear market.

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

• El Salvador’s Bukele Says “Bitcoin Hasn’t Had the Widespread Adoption We Hoped For”

• Australia Leads the World in Bitcoin ATM Growth as Sales Pour In

Regulatory

• Trump Says He Will Make the US the “Crypto Capital”

• Crypto Leaders Decry SEC Attack on OpenSea

DeFi

• MakerDAO Announces Controversial Rebrand to Sky

• Trump’s New Crypto Business to Offer “High Yield” Investments

New Launches

• Time.Fun Announces $3M Seed Round Led by Brevan Howard

• Peregrin Exploration Raises $3.6M from Polychain, Dragonfly

Miscellaneous

• Binance Announces “BNSOL” Token

• Telegram Founder’s Bail Set at $5.56M as Investigation Continues

Tweet of the Day

Soccer legend Kylian Mbappé was hacked earlier today, with the hacker posting a link to a memecoin he launched. Seems like a trader out there got a bit too excited that his favorite player had launched a coin and ended up losing almost $1M in only 2 hours… The big lessons here are: 1) Don’t buy celebrity tokens and 2) Never FOMO into a new coin launch.

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