Minerva Weekly Newsletter Week 23 2024

Covers 6/2/24-6/8/24

Web 3 News

• U.S. lawmakers have accused Nigeria of taking a Binance executive “hostage” and are urging President Joe Biden to help secure his release, per Bloomberg

• Binance has resumed Mastercard $MA payments for crypto, per CoinDesk

• FTX sold their remaining 15 million shares in the AI startup Anthropic at $30 per share, netting more than $450 million, per The Block

  • FTX made total gain of $1.3 billion on the investment

  • Legal and administrative costs of FTX's bankruptcy have cost them more than $700 million

• FTX reached a settlement with the IRS for a $24 billion tax claim for a fraction of what they owed the IRS, per Bloomberg

  • The IRS will receive $200 million in priority claims and $685 million in lower priority claims

• Coinbase COIN 0.00%↑ has donated $25 million to Fairshake, one of the PACs hoping to drive pro-crypto candidates into Congress this election, per CoinDesk

  • Ripple and a16z have also donated to Fairshake

• Coinbase announced Coinbase Smart Wallets touting features like:

  • Gasless transactions

  • Cross-app portability

  • Coinbase balance support

  • Passkeys instead of seed phrases

• Kraken's Bitcoin reserves have fallen to the lowest level since 2018, and their Ethereum reserves have fallen to the lowest level since early 2016, per CryptoQuant

• Kraken is in talks for a pre-IPO fund raising round, per Bloomberg

• Robinhood HOOD 0.00%↑ to acquire Bitstamp for $200 million

  • Bitstamp has EU market penetration and is one of the longest-running centralized exchanges in the industry

• Thailand's SEC has approved their first spot Bitcoin ETF

• Australia's first spot Bitcoin ETFs were listed on Cboe Australia and began trading this week, per CoinDesk

• BitPanda has announced a partnership with Deutsche Bank (Germany's largest bank) to enable the crypto trading platform to access its international bank account number (IBAN), per CoinTelegraph

• The SEC's Salt Lake City office, known in the crypto world for its failed fraud lawsuit against DEBT Box, will shut down after seeing "significant attrition" among its staff, some of whom were pushed out of the agency over the case, per CoinDesk

• Donald Trump has become the first U.S. presidential candidate to accept Bitcoin Lightning Network payments for campaign donations, per Bitcoin Magazine

• Marquette University professor emeritus David Krause on Wisconsin buying spot Bitcoin ETFs

  • "As a currency with a limited supply, it could serve as an inflation hedge. I don't think many people talk about its potential to remove the volatility of government actions", per PBS

• Spot Bitcoin ETF net flows in the U.S. had the 2nd largest day since trading began this year on 6/4/24, per Bloomberg

• Blackrock's $BLK spot Bitcoin ETF IBIT 0.00%↑ has officially surpassed 300,000 $BTC held

• Bitcoin miner holdings of BTC are at the lowest levels in 14 years, down 50% from the highs, per CryptoQuant

• Bitdeer BTDR 0.00%↑ has announced the acquisition of Desiweminer, a fabless crypto ASIC design company, in an all-stock transaction worth ~$140 million

  • Bitdeer recently received an investment worth $150 million from Tether $USDT

• Riot Platforms RIOT 0.00%↑ has acquired a 12% Stake in Bitfarms Ltd. BITF 0.00%↑

  • Riot increased their stake after expressing concerns about Bitfarms’ corporate governance, and believes that the current board’s performance has not met expectations

• Three Bitcoin mining pools currently control ~69% of Bitcoin's hashrate

  • Foundry 28.9%

  • AntPool 27.1%

  • ViaBTC 13.3%

• It has been more than 85 days since Bitcoin last reached its all-time high

• Indianapolis Colts kicker Spencer Shrader says he is taking his entire signing bonus in Bitcoin

• Semler Scientific SMLR 0.00%↑ has purchased an additional 247 Bitcoin for $17 million

  • As of June 6, Semler holds 828 $BTC

• MicroStrategy MSTR 0.00%↑ and co-founder and former CEO Michael Saylor to pay $40 million to resolve a tax fraud lawsuit filed by Washington DC, per Bloomberg

• SEC Chair Gary Gensler says the next step in the spot Ethereum ETF approvals “will take some time”, per CNBC

• More tokens have been created on the Ethereum blockchain over the last few months, than the entire rest of the history of ETH, per Dune Analytics

• Dapper Labs has reached a $4 million settlement in the NBA Top Shot NFT lawsuit with the SEC, per Decrypt

• BNB officially reached an all-time high of $713 this week (4^th largest coin by market cap)

• Tether's CEO Paolo Ardoino has expressed concerns around the EU’s MiCA regulation saying it “could not only render the job of a stablecoin issuer extremely complex but also make EU-licensed stablecoins extremely vulnerable and riskier to operate”, per The Block

Macroeconomic News

• Globally, governments around the world have accumulated over $100 trillion in total debt, a 40% increase since 2019

• Gold's share of global international reserves increased to 17.6% in 2023, the most in 27 years

  • Gold is now the 2nd largest reserve asset held by Central Banks

  • The largest reserve asset remains the U.S. dollar, but the share has declined to 48% from ~60% in 2017

• Japan to actively manage 100 trillion yen (~$641.3 billion) of public funds, per Nikkei

• The average stock in Europe is now outperforming the average U.S. stock since the start of 2023, per Bloomberg

• The European Central Bank (ECB) has cut interest rates for the first time since 2019 by 25 bps, per CNBC

  • The ECB expects inflation to be 2.5% in 2024, 2.2% in 2025, and 1.9% in 2026

  • GDP growth is expected to be 0.9% in 2024, 1.4% in 2025, and 1.6% in 2026

• The Bank of Canada announced a 25-basis point rate cut, lowering the interest rate to 4.75%

  • Canada's CPI fell to 2.7% in April

  • The Governor of the Bank of Canada said it's reasonable to expect more rate cuts if inflation continues increase at a slower pace

• Home prices in Canada have grown much faster than incomes, per Bloomberg

• The U.S. Dollar is currently used in 48% of global payments (using SWIFT), the highest level in over a decade

• The U.S. bond market has now been in a drawdown for 46 months, the largest in history by a wide margin, per Charlie Bilello

• The FDIC is warning that 63 lenders are on the brink of insolvency with the banks sitting on $517 billion in unrealized losses

• The Fifth Circuit Court has vacated the SEC's private funds rule, holding that the SEC exceeded its statutory authority to regulate private fund advisers

• The Massachusetts securities regulator is probing the trading activities of Roaring Kitty after his recent GameStop GME 0.00%↑ trades and posts on social media

  • The investigation is led by Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin, the state's top securities regulator

• The U.S. economy added 272,000 jobs in May, above expectations of 170,000

  • -625k full-time workers, +286k part-time workers

  • The Government has made up the 2nd largest source of job growth over the last year in the U.S., behind only healthcare

    • Healthcare is a government-dominated sector where many of the jobs are funded by taxpayers to some extent or even fully depending on the role

    • This means the government accounts for ~60% of all job growth over the last year

  

  • The unemployment rate rose to 4.0%, 3.9% was expected

  • There have been 41 straight months of job gains

  • March jobs revised -5k, April -10k

  • The number of U.S. workers that hold multiple jobs is a near-record of ~8.4 million

    • An increase of ~3 million from the 2020 pandemic lows

• The number of foreign-born workers in the U.S. reached a record in March, per Bloomberg

• BlackRock BLK 0.00%↑ and Citadel Securities are funding plans to start a new national stock exchange in Texas to "take on" the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), per WSJ

• The National Basketball Association (NBA) is nearing an historic $76 billion over 11 years TV deal with Amazon AMZN 0.00%↑, NBC CMCSA 0.00%↑, and ESPN DIS 0.00%↑, per WSJ

• Waste Management WM 0.00%↑ is close to a deal to buy medical waste disposal company Stericycle SRCL 0.00%↑ for ~$7 billion including debt, per WSJ

• Costco COST 0.00%↑ is planning to sell customer data to advertisers and build a retail media network, per Marketing Brew

  • Costco is the 3rd largest retailer in the U.S., and has shopping data on ~74.5 million households

  • Walmart WMT 0.00%↑ and Target TGT 0.00%↑ also have ad networks

• Walmart to replace Rob Walton with Chipotle's CMG 0.00%↑ CEO on the Board of Directors

• Spotify SPOT 0.00%↑ announced they are increasing the price of premium subscriptions to $11.99 per month up from $10.99 per month starting in July

• Nvidia NVDA 0.00%↑ has passed Apple AAPL 0.00%↑ to become the 2nd largest company by market cap in the S&P 500 SPY 0.00%↑

• Microsoft MSFT 0.00%↑ to lay off hundreds of employees who work on mixed reality, which includes virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), as well as on its Azure Cloud business, per CNBC

• Federal regulators to proceed with antitrust investigations into Microsoft MSFT 0.00%↑, OpenAI, and Nvidia NVDA 0.00%↑ in the AI industry, per NYT

• Google GOOGL 0.00%↑ to acquire software virtualization company Cameyo, per The Verge

  • Google was already working closely with Cameyo, and now they will bring their key virtualization expertise and technology in-house

• Aluminum producer Novelis is postponing a plan to raise up to $945 million in a an initial public offering (IPO) in the U.S., citing adverse market conditions, per Bloomberg

• Red Lobster to shut down 135 more restaurants after filing for bankruptcy

• Bridgestone to layoff 100+ workers at their Des Moines, IA plant, per a WARN notice

• Nike NKE 0.00%↑ is eliminating another ~2% of their global workforce, or ~2,000 employees

• Danone to lay off ~2% of its workforce in the U.S., impacting over 1,000 employees

• Middle-management positions accounted for ~33% of layoffs in 2023, an increase from ~20% in 2018, per Bloomberg

• A record 48% of Americans have a valid passport, up from 3% in 1990, per Apollo

Disclosures:

I am not a financial advisor, and whatever I post should not be taken as financial advice. It is for education and entertainment purposes only. Anything I post does not constitute an offer to sell or trade, a solicitation to buy, or recommendation for any security, cryptocurrency, digital asset, or related product, nor does it constitute an offer to provide investment advice or other related services by myself or Minerva Digital Asset Education, LLC. I and/or Minerva Digital Asset Education, LLC may have a financial investment with the cryptocurrencies/digital assets discussed.  In preparing the content created, no individual financial or investment needs of the viewer have been considered nor is any financial or investment advice being offered. Any views expressed in the posted content were prepared based upon the information available at the time such views were written.  Changed, new, and/or additional information could cause such views to change.