5 Minute Crypto - Bhutan buys big; Twitter crypto cashtags; DWF big token buys; Crypto tweets and moar

Two Degens (resources, interviews, on all things crypto and some AI)

Hello hello — this is the 5 minute crypto daily update for Monday April 17th
As of this recording
Bitcoin has fallen 2% to $29800
ETH has fallen 2% to $2082
Rocket Pool, an ETH 2 liquid staking derivative, is up 9% in the last 24 hours
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What’s going on in crypto land…
Bhutan, a small country north of Bangladesh and east of Nepal, population 700K, is revealed to be trading crypto!
It’s first known case of a sovereign wealth fund to directly own crypto
This was revealed in bankruptcy filings of both BlockFi and Celsius
It was a combination of loans and direct investments, in amounts in the tens of millions of dollars
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2023/04/15/the-tiny-kingdom-of-bhutan-secretly-held-millions-of-dollars-in-cryptocurrency/
Twitter will integrate Etoro and allow users to trade stocks and crypto directly in the Twitter app
Should go live this Thursday - in 3 days
The way it works is thus:
-any cashtags - hashtags that start with a $ sign, will now show you price information
-you can click a button to take you to eToro to trade that asset
-part of Musk’s mission to turn Twitter into a super app of sorts like China’s WeChat
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/13/twitter-to-let-users-access-stocks-crypto-via-etoro-in-finance-push.html
Recently crypto fund DWF Labs has been making headlines for large dollar investments in public tokens such as Synthetix, Telegram’s TON, and CryptoGPT whatever that is
It’s not a typical VC investment in a project’s equity
DWF is a market making firm
Seems they do a deal with the token treasuries to buy discounted tokens
The projects get more money and more liquidity, and help with exchange listings
DWF wins by getting cheap tokens, and can help market make
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/04/14/market-maker-dwf-labs-more-than-200m-in-deals-blur-what-investing-means/
New stablecoin legislation has been introduced in the US House
https://www.theblock.co/post/226575/new-stablecoins-bill-draft-introduced-house-of-representatives
Fantastic tweet from Ryan Berckmans with takeaways; to quote a few:
- decentralized stables become illegal in the US. DAI, LUSD, RAI etc.
- imo ETH sees significant uptake as a payment method that's both legal and decentralized
- licensed stables, eg. USDC, become huge winners and permitted to access Fed accounts directly
https://twitter.com/ryanberckmans/status/1647421596141756417?s=46
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Crypto twitter is talking about…
Thread from Alex Thorn
-Q1 saw the lowest crypto VC activity in 2 years with $2.4bn invested across 439 deals.
-investment is down, valuations are down, VC fundraises are down
-by deal count, companies building in the web3, NFT, DAO, metaverse, and gaming subsector regained the top spot, followed by trading, exchange, investing, and lending companies.
https://twitter.com/intangiblecoins/status/1645733057347952640
Crypto OG Dovey Wan has a great thread on bitcoin and DeFi in a global context
-Bitcoin, the global, unseizable, immutable money is the first application of Defi, independently of all monetary policymakers. Crypto native land is the ONLY Fed-less land
-All the fiascos that happened in the past 12 months are Cefi problems, not Defi problems
https://twitter.com/DoveyWan/status/1645956049206382593?s=20
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That’s it for today! That was 6 minutes long. All the links are in the show notes. You can follow @twodegenspod on Twitter and please subscribe for more daily updates! I’ll try to do ‘em every day except when it’s rainy and I’m feeling extra sad
Outro is a November 2021 clip from Hillary Clinton talking about bitcoin’s ability to threaten nation-states
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuNhMuEGk0M&t=1719s