🐳 Daily Edition: Crypto Pump Pauses as Billion Dollar Whale Gets Hunted

The Bitcoin Vegas conference is now in full swing with some of the biggest names in crypto like Michael Saylor and Justin Sun in attendance. Even JD Vance spoke this afternoon, during which he proclaimed 100 million Americans would soon own Bitcoin and that this industry is just getting started. Despite Vance’s bullish stance we saw most of the market pull back today, including the darling of Crypto Twitter, Hyperliquid, which fell 10% to $32.50 before beginning to mount a recovery. Even with the pullback, sentiment among traders remains quite high. Interestingly, while earlier this week President of Argentina Javier Milei closed the investigation into the LIBRA memecoin scam he supported through which hundreds of millions were extracted, today Circle announced they had frozen $50M of USDC tied to the launch on a court order. It seems that even though Javier seems to think he did nothing wrong, US judges might have a difference of opinion.

If you followed along with the James Wynn $1B long story that we discussed last week, you probably won’t be surprised to hear his account is now officially in the negative (pictured above). Taking positions of that size on 40x leverage is crazy as it is, but doing it in public, onchain where everyone can see and comment is on another level entirely. In my experience, the crypto market loves nothing more than humbling overconfident traders like this. You may ask yourself, why would this guy not just take the $90M and run instead of gambling it more? To that I would say, he probably wouldn’t have made that money in the first place if his psychology wasn’t precisely this way. To generate wealth that significant from memecoins takes a special kind of crazy. At time of writing he’s still actively trading, so we’ll see where this saga ends. Something tells me James isn’t done with his time in the spotlight.

Ok this one isn’t specifically crypto, but I suspect a number of crypto fund managers out there are in this boat

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 a ‘Huge Part of Everything We Do Now’: Donald Trump Jr.

Alt Coins and Stocks

• Corporate BTC leverage for Strategy and Metaplanet is paying off — for now

• BlackRock mulling 10% stake in Circle’s IPO, joining ARK as potential buyer: Bloomberg

Regulatory

• Circle freezes $58 million worth of USDC in Solana wallets tied to Libra scandal

• JD Vance calls crypto market structure bill a ‘priority’ for Trump administration

Random

• GameStop buys 4,710 bitcoin for corporate treasury

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