🐳 Weekly Edition: Circle IPO up +300% in Second Day Trading

The Crypto x TradFi bull run appears to have begun as Circle’s stock ends its second day trading on the Nasdaq at over $100, representing a market cap of more than $20B. IPO investors at the $31 mark are now up multiples of their investment in a matter of days, which is sure to cause a buzz among the other crypto stocks who were weighing the potential of an IPO. In fact, headlines indicate American crypto exchange Gemini is actively looking to IPO, along with continued rumors that Kraken will launch their IPO soon.

Especially considering Circle’s lackluster economics (involving a profit share deal with Coinbase), it’s incredible to see this level of capital thrown into CRCL. It shows just how big the market is betting on stablecoins, as this valuation is certainly not fair if evaluated using traditional metrics. To put it into perspective, Tether would be a multi-trillion dollar company if valued at Circle’s current price-to-earnings ratio. And hey, it might be one day, but it’s probably not today. However, when viewed in the context that CRCL is the stock market’s only pure-stablecoin offering, the investor interest starts to make more sense.

We veteran crypto users take the power of stablecoins for granted as it’s what we’ve used to transact for years, however the composability of money is an entirely novel concept to the TradFi market. It’s akin to taking someone who has only used Nokia phones and showing them an iPhone 15. The cat is now out of the bag in this one, and I expect the stablecoin sector to enter hyper-growth for the next couple months. Every bank is offsides here, and now they see the risks stables pose to their businesses. Expect to see lots of banks launching stablecoins, acquiring stablecoin companies, and generally integrating blockchain technology over the next few months.

Well we have officially made the first trade in the Beluga wallet in a several weeks, as our time holding BLAST has come to a close. We originally received all of our Blast tokens for free as an airdrop for engaging with a few dApps on the chain, and so it made sense to hold on to in case they were able to turn things around. Based on recent movements of some of their flagship dApps leaving in favor of other ecosystems, it’s probably time to call it on this one.

In more important trading news, the success of Circle’s IPO is of course big for the industry as a whole, but for stablecoins there could not have been a better litmus test for TradFi’s appetite within this sector. This is great news for our largest non-major holding, $CRV Curve DAO. For anyone unfamiliar, in essence Curve is the backbone behind intra-stablecoin transactions. Founded many years ago with the thesis that the stablecoin market would be fragmented, Curve allows for extremely low fees and deep liquidity on swaps between stablecoins. They’ve been a profitable business for some time, however this renewed focus on stablecoins means that landscape becomes more and more fragmented, generating more and more business for Curve. I’m pretty surprised we didn’t see much of a bounce on it today due to CRCL, however I guess it’s difficult to draw logical conclusions when the richest man in the world is fighting with the President on Twitter.

Huge congratulations to the Polymarket team for landing this partnership, mainstream adoption of crypto is going to happen a lot faster than you might think…

Check out our brand new Beluga Spotlight with Trevor Koverko, co-founder of Sapien.io. From playing hockey in the NHL to finding Bitcoin in 2012, Trevor has done it all.