🐳 Daily Edition: LTH Supply Indicates 4 Year Cycle is Over

Aside from a sharp selloff-into-recovery during Asia hours, crypto markets were relatively quiet today with Bitcoin ending the day near the $90k mark. Something to keep an eye on is the trend of longer-term Bitcoin holders (LTH) (defined as wallets that have held for more than 6 months) slowly offloading their BTC over time. This may look bearish at first glance, but when comparing with previous cycles it presents a more interesting story: past cycle tops have coincided with a single major drop off in LTH, but this time we are seeing multiple distinct supply zones. This isn’t enough to fully conclude the market and cycle structures have changed (though personally I think they have), but it’s a potentially powerful datapoint as we all try to decide whether or not “the top is in”.

Two people who certainly don’t believe the top is in are Michael Saylor and Tom Lee, both of whom continued their crypto buying sprees today with purchases of $1B in BTC and $435M in ETH respectively. They seem to be the only two DATs (Digital Asset Treasury) with enough dry powder to keep going at this point despite the hundreds that have popped up this year. At the end of the day though, it’s really not that surprising to see treasury success concentrated at the top considering how reliant they are on maintaining a steady premium to their holdings. In a world where ETFs exist for all the major tokens, it’s hard to argue for why a given DAT should trade for higher than their NAV (Native Asset Value) aside from speculative hype.

Crypto Twitter debates whether the platform where you bet on things based on a guess is a gambling platform or not

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

• CFTC to pilot tokenized colalteral in derivatives markets starting with Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDC

• Strategy drops nearly $1 billion on Bitcoin, marking largest BTC buy in months

Alt Coins and Stocks

• Tom Lee’s BitMine Immersion ramps up Ether acquistion, adding $435M of ETH to treasury

• Ondo Finance says Biden-era SEC investigation closed with no charges

• Robinhood expands crypto offerings with futures, staking, and stock tokens

New Launches

• Tether-backed payments startup Oobit expands into US

• Stable, a Bitfinex-backed Layer 1 using Tether’s USDT for gas, launches mainnet and native token

Interesting Reads

• Paradigm researcher publishes report indicating Polymarket volumes have been double-counted

• 22-year-old pleads guilty to money laundering for $263 million crypto syndicate

• Wall Street hedged big crypto bet in $500 million Ripple deal