Bitcoin Hiccups

Forget the victory lap, bitcoin's post-ETF rally hasn’t even begun… partly thanks to an odd double whammy: Grayscale's hefty fees and the ghost of FTX.

Here's the gist…

Grayscale's greed: While everyone else brought cheap spot ETFs to the market (with funds offering promotional rates as low as 0% for the first several months), Grayscale (GBTC) clung to its outdated model, continuing to charge a hefty fee of 1.5%. Investors weren’t having it. Since GBTC converted into an ETF, roughly $4 billion worth of GBTC shares have fled, with a significant chunk traced back to the one and only… FTX. 

Adding fuel to the fire, the undead FTX estate decided to clear out its Grayscale closet, cashing in a whopping 22 million shares worth ~$1 billion. Now, this wasn't exactly a surprise. But the timing (using the ETF launch to dump a massive bag), 14 months after their demise, was enough to raise some eyebrows.

The good news? The FTX fire sale might be nearing its end. With FTX's ghost appeased, selling pressure should (in theory) ease up.

The bad news? Following simple supply and demand dynamics, inflows are still ~$1 billion higher than outflows.

Let’s make that very clear: Inflows thus far have been net POSITIVE. Yet here we are, sitting at $39,000 BTC, down roughly 15% since the SEC approval.

This proves that anyone blaming the GBTC for all of bitcoin’s recent slump is clearly wrong. And that there’s got to be another reason, still lurking beyond mainstream media, that better explains BTCs recent dip.

Is it because the stock market is pumping and getting more attention? Is it because leveraged positions are getting liquidated? Maybe it’s the huge 100k selloff from a whale? Or perhaps, as Arthur Hayes explains, is it because bitcoin anticipates that the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP) will not be renewed?

To anyone who just jumped on the bandwagon – via ETF or not – welcome to crypto. 🙂 

The macroeconomics behind each and every pullback and uptick are only getting more difficult to understand.

At the end of the day, if you zoom out and look at the price of bitcoin you’ll notice that it is still up >75% over the past year.

And while $1 billion in net inflows may not seem like a lot in the face of predictions of $75 billion of inflows… in the context of previous buying pressure, it is huge.

Microstrategy (MSTR), for example, holds ~190k bitcoin. The nine ETFs bought 100k bitcoin in the first 7 days.

We’re Doxxing Ourselves. Here’s Why.

Over the years, we’ve enjoyed writing CoinSnacks anonymously.

It was cool – we never wanted to be the face of anything. We could say whatever we wanted (within reason, of course) and not get criticized too!

It was also easy. Crypto embraced anonymity. Teams were raising hundreds of millions of dollars using a picture of a cat as their avatar.

But we’ve gotten to the point in our lives where… we now figure, screw it.

What do we really have to hide anyway?

We’re not some faceless entity. We’re two friends from Florida… who went to school together… who have worked together ever since. And not just on CoinSnacks, but in random niches such as traditional finance, bartending, longevity biotech, and even psychedelics. We built companies, some did well, some landed with a thud – the full bootstrapped startup rollercoaster.

And while anonymity was comfy, a nagging truth emerged: we built a 60,000+ subscriber strong newsletter, yet nobody knew who we were. When Mark Cuban gave a shout-out to onepagecrypto.com (our new side hustle), he had no idea who to tag.

It was a reality check, a slap in the face of the disconnect.

Anyway, we’re writing this today to simply just introduce ourselves.

Not because it’s trendy (or because we need to up our Twitter game) but because you deserve to know the humans behind the screen, the ones who curate your crypto news and pepper it with original insights, important questions, and the occasional cheesy Editor’s Note.

We know it’s awfully late to do so… but we also know that it’s easier to trust individuals, than it is a company.

With AI on the rise, it’s becoming harder to differentiate between what’s real and what’s fake. And now, an ever-increasing amount of content you read online will be produced by AI (hell, even the email software we use to write to you is pushing us to use AI).

But what you’ll get from us is real – not some coagulated, commingling of thoughts spewed by a dataset. We question everything. We research everything we write. And we do our best to speak to people like us – typical investors who don’t want to be caught in the fray of mainstream bullshit.

Either way, hopefully this makes people realize that we are just humans.

We’ll sometimes make mistakes. We’re always going to try and run a profitable business, so yes – there will still be ads. And we’re not AI robots or employees of some conglomerate.

Say hi to:

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